"How about Mrs. Alton?" I asked.

"She doesn't come out. We've gone over a couple of times, and she receives us with great friendliness, but when we ask her to return our visit she always makes out that she can't leave the boy. Of course she could bring him with her, so that is only an excuse. For some reason she wants to stick close to her homestead."

"We must get Spoof after her," said Jack. "He'll drag her out. Now that we have real society in our community a beautiful young widow must not be allowed to 'waste her sweetness on the desert air.'"

We spent a whole day conjecturing about the new arrivals, and marvelling over the strange a.s.sortment of humanity out of which it was the business of fate and our lucky stars--no one else seemed to trouble about the matter--to lay in these prairies the foundations of an enduring civilization. Then we settled down to what little work remained to be done. We found our oat crops harvested, and for that we had to thank Spoof and Jake, who had taken that bit of neighbourly service into their own hands. We made the stable snug, banked up the shacks with earth, and lined them inside with brown paper which we had brought from town for that purpose. We cut firewood in our little park by the pond, being careful to destroy nothing but trees which were already dead or were too crowded for growth.

Before we had completed these jobs Spoof paid us another visit. We saw his tall figure looming up across the brown gra.s.s one afternoon early in November. The sun was bright, but swung far to the south, and even its brilliance could not drive a certain chilly nip out of the afternoon air. Spoof walked as one who keeps up his circulation by vigorous exercise. He shook hands with a warm, firm grip. He was brown and rugged, and the prairie winds were leaving their mark on his fine English complexion. In the warmth of his grip, in the sparkle of his eye, in the leisurely confidence of his conversation, there was something about the fellow that was decidedly likable.

"Thought I'd just drop in on you, strangers," he commented. "Have a good autumn's work? I hope you did. I ventured to inquire a few times while you were away, just in case the young ladies might need some help--a man around the place, don't you know? I found them most disconcertingly competent. About the only service I was able to do was to shoot a rabbit for them; one of those big white fellows. Jolly good eating, I should say----"

"How long ago was that?" Jack interrupted, sharply.

"Oh, not so long; in fact, they spoke of saving him for your home-coming."

"Aha! And again, Aha! Come along, you conspirator!"

We seized Spoof by the arms and marched him into the house. Marjorie and Jean were there; although we had two houses the girls were nearly always together in the one on Fourteen. Jean declared that Marjorie was much the better housekeeper of the two, and she came there for lessons.

We thrust the somewhat bewildered Spoof into their presence.

"We have discovered your duplicity," said Jack, sternly, addressing the girls. "We now know the secret of Marjorie's marksmanship."

"Oh, by Jove!" Spoof exclaimed. "I seem to have messed things up. I'm afraid you will think me an awful rotter, Miss Hall. Really"--turning to Jack--"really, it wasn't I that shot the bally hare at all----"

"You're only getting in deeper," said Jack. "'Fess up, and stay for supper."

Spoof did both, and a jolly night we had, playing euchre after the supper dishes were cleared away. But before he left he recalled that an errand of mercy lay at the bottom of his visit.

"I dropped into Brown's the other day," he said. "Mrs. Brown is a bit fed up. Staring out of the window, and all that kind of thing. Poor old Brown is quite useless; worse than I am, if that is possible, but his wife has quality in her that will count, if she doesn't go under first.

She needs you two girls over there now and again, just to put a bit of sunshine in her soul."

"This is a land of sunshine," I said, quite inappropriately.

"Of physical sunshine, yes. But the heart withers up on that alone. You natural born pioneers don't understand. You are the second or third generation at the business, all of you. You glory in the wilderness, you revel in it, you subdue it. The l.u.s.t of these things is born in you. But she--she is a game-keeper's wife. You can't possibly understand. The memory of it all; the hedges and lanes and rose-gardens and the--the _security_ of England; the memory of these is tearing her very heart out."

"They know where we live."

"They have not been introduced."

"Nonsense!"

"I know it's nonsense," Spoof continued. "I've learned that much. They haven't. Do you think they would be guilty of such an unpardonable thing as to call on you first? You can't understand, but over in England we have a saying, 'It isn't done.' When an Englishman says 'It isn't done;'

the argument is ended. After that has been said the thing really isn't done, and everybody understands that it can't possibly be done. Now just hitch up the oxen to-morrow and slip over to section Four and jolly her out of the dumps."

"Well, suppose we do," Jack agreed. "But how about you keeping up your end of the social service? Why wish it all on to us?"

"I don't follow you. I have already been to the Brown's----"

"But not to Mrs. Alton's, so far as we can learn. Mrs. Brown may have no monopoly of loneliness."

Perhaps it was only imagination, but it seemed to me that Spoof's face, usually so frank and open, suddenly became a mask. But he came back quickly and easily.

"I could hardly do that, don't you know? It would not be quite the thing."

"Why not?" said Jean, as ingenious as ever.

"Why, it would hardly be the thing--it's not in accord----"

"You mean it isn't done," I supplied.

"Exactly; or, at least, it's not supposed to be."

"You were flattering yourself a minute ago," said I, with show of severity, "that you had learned that on the prairies one doesn't wait for an introduction. You have some other things to learn. One is that on the prairies there is no such saying as, 'It isn't done.'"

"My word!" said Spoof. "Isn't that rather dangerous? But of course I know I'm a greenhorn yet, even though I am beginning to ripen in spots.

That reminds me, I've had another letter from the Governor. He wants me to shoot him a young chinook."

"A chinook!"

"Yes. When I wrote him a recent treatise ent.i.tled 'An Incident in a Hay Field, or, How about a Cheque for a Hundred Pounds'--you will remember the time--I covered the ragged edge of my purpose with a dissertation upon the prairie climate. I told him that it consisted of a melange of everything from Naples at its best to Norway at its worst--from sleepy kittens purring in the sun to wild she-tigers raging through the jungle.

From climate I moved to gra.s.s by easy stages, and from gra.s.s to hay, and from hay to our little conflagration, and from that to the matter of one hundred pounds. On the way I explained that this part of the country is not really in the chinook belt, although occasionally one came down this far. So now I am commissioned to shoot for the Governor a young chinook.

He thinks the skin would look a bit of all right on the library floor, don't you know?"

"And of course you will shoot one?"

"A request from one's immediate paternal ancestor, accompanied by a draft for a hundred pounds, is not to be lightly disregarded. We may have another fire some day, and the price of wagons may go still higher."

"Let me think," said Jack, and for a few moments we remained silent to give his mind elbow-room.

"I have it!" he suddenly exclaimed. "Has your Governor ever seen a badger?"

"Not likely, except possibly at the Zoo."

"We must take that chance. You must shoot a badger, Spoof, which we will formally christen a chinook, and send it to your Governor in time for Christmas."

"I think it's just wicked to do that," said Jean, whose sympathies were always with the under dog. "No doubt Mr.--Mr. Spoof, senior, is a delightful old gentleman, and it isn't fair. Fancy some one from America visiting him and Mr. Spoof goes showing off the chinook which his son shot on the banks of the Saskatchewan. 'Chinook nothing!' says the visitor. 'That's a badger, as common as rabbits, almost, and I would describe your son as another prairie animal, smaller than a badger, with two stripes down its back.'"

"Oh, listen to Miss Prim!" Marjorie interrupted. "Who would think she had a letter from her mother asking if she was canning any buffalo beans?"

It was not until Spoof's tall form had dissolved out of view in the starlight that it occurred to me how skilfully he had changed the conversation from the subject of Mrs. Alton. It was something to think about.

CHAPTER XIII.

We did as Spoof suggested. Early the next afternoon we hitched Buck and Bright to the wagon and wended our slow way south-westward, Jack and I taking turns in the exclamatory exercises by means of which the oxen were kept in motion. The prairie now was very brown and bare, and only the more hardy gophers remained about to whistle saucily at our carry-all lumbering by. The dazzling sunshine seemed to have lost its force, and there was a presage of coming winter in the air. We dropped into silence save for the noises of our locomotion.