We were soon to learn the cause of Spoof's absence from our threshold for a full three weeks. It seemed that to protect his extensive supply of personal effects Spoof had bought a padlock for his shack, and one frosty morning this padlock fell to the ground. Spoof picked it up, and, wishing to use his hands for some other purpose, thrust the iron link of the lock in his mouth, thinking to hold it there a moment. He had no trouble holding it, but suddenly found to his dismay that he couldn't give it up! The frost in the iron had, with an effect very much like fire, seared his tongue and hung on so tenaciously that when at last he wrenched it out it carried some of the flesh of that tender organ with it.

"I couldn't speak," Spoof explained, in telling of his misfortune, "and there were so many things I needed to say just then."

His predicament had been bad enough. For several days he had been unable to eat. "So I've come over here to make up for it," he added.

After the first outburst over Spoof's arrival had subsided an embarra.s.sing silence yawned across the path of our conversation. There were great things to be said and no one to say them. The girls glanced shyly at each other, and at us, and Jack, by pantomime behind Spoof's back, sought to convey the information that I was elected spokesman. So for lack of preparation I plunged in bodily as one may take a cold dip when he lacks the will power to do it slowly.

"Jack and I have also had a misfortune, of a sort," I said. "We, too, have lost the use of our organs of speech, permanently."

Spoof narrowed his eyebrows quizzically. "Then my ears make up for it,"

he said. "I hear you as usual."

"It isn't in effect yet," I explained. "We are to be married at Christmas. Behold the parties of the first part," and I waved a hand at Jean and Marjorie while I turned a phrase of Jake's to good account.

Spoof sprang to his feet. "Oh, by Jove, how wonderful! What lucky dogs!

Your pardon, ladies, that my first word was to them; I fear my envy out-weighed my good manners--if I have any left. A bachelor's shack is not exactly a school of polite behavior. It is my visits at Fourteen which have saved me from becoming quite a savage. I--I feel that I should make a speech."

He was as good as his word. Mounting a chair he gave us a bantering dissertation on the joys and perils of married life, to which we listened with much seriousness. But underneath, and running through his words, was something which all his banter did not hide. Spoof was playing the game, but I wondered how many little yellow devils were skewering his heart.

The practical part of it was Spoof's ready offer of his help in arranging details. The problems of securing the services of a minister and buying the marriage licenses demanded attention. Even so ethereal a thing as marriage cannot entirely escape the humdrum of the material, but it was a time when we felt strangely incapacitated for the common-place. We were flying too high for earth worms; larks or eagles were our prey.

Jack suggested that we had thought of driving to the nearest railway station, some thirty miles distant, for the ceremony. We understood that a minister was located there and that the young man who ran the pool room was intrusted with the duty of issuing marriage licenses. He carried a small stock of tobacco as an auxiliary to his pool business and a small stock of jewelry as an auxiliary to his tobacco business and a small stock of wedding licenses as an auxiliary to his jewelry business.

"It would take you two days to make that trip with old Buck and Bright,"

Spoof protested. "Perhaps more; they're soft with being stall-fed and may quit altogether on the road, and you may not find a convenient armful of hay with which to _fix_ them. Fancy having to send word, 'Wedding postponed on account of the indisposition of Buck and Bright!'

No, you must leave all these things to me. You boys are too busy with--much more important business--to be worried about details."

Spoof made his plans joyously. If he was not happy at heart over the fact that Jean was to marry me no one could have read it in his face.

He would have a minister, he would have licenses, he would have wedding rings--leave it all to him.

A week later he came puffing across the crusted prairie, not in leggings this time, but in broad-soled Canadian felts.

"Admire my scows," he commanded, as he hove them into view. "Twin schooners of the deep--"

"Travelling in ballast," Jack interrupted.

"Nay, laden with good tidings. Ah, there she breaks out a line of signals," and Spoof started to wig-wag a message which none of us could decipher.

"'I fear thee, Ancient Mariner,'" said Jean, "but what are you driving at?"

"Just this, that the contract is let to one John Locke, minister, the lowest, and, in fact, the only bidder. He will be aided and abetted by an individual called Reddy, for reasons which will be obvious when you see him. Reddy, like Jake, appears to harbor no surname, although no doubt for official purposes he signs something to the marriage license.

They will be out by mid-afternoon Christmas Day, and the ceremony will take place in the main drawing room of my country residence on section Two. Carriages at four-thirty. You see, I lost no time in going to town----"

"You to town, with those 'bullocks' of yours!" Jack exclaimed. "And you libelled Buck and Bright by suggesting----"

"I went to town, but not behind my bullocks. There are _some_ things I will not do, even for so great a friendship as I bear for thee. I had a driver and a spanking team of mules."

"Mules? Whose?"

"Our American friend, Burke, lent his team and himself for the occasion.

The fact is he had misgivings about lending the team without himself, so he came along. He was afraid I would not treat the mules diplomatically.

Nothing, I a.s.sure you, was, or is, further from my intention. But, my word, such language! Driving bullocks is only a beginner's course compared with the demands made upon a muleteer. . . Burke rose very greatly in my estimation."

So we left the details in Spoof's hands, glad enough to be rid of responsibility for them. There was much to do, and Jack and I found ourselves banished to Twenty-two while the girls made use of the shanty on Fourteen for operations concerning which we were permitted to have nothing but curiosity. Their wedding splendor must, we knew, be designed with such skill as Marjorie and Jean possessed from the best of the clothing they had brought with them from the East. Love may laugh at locksmiths, but it has to bow to dollars and cents--when the trousseau is under consideration. Money, as Marjorie once remarked, may be bad for the heart, but it's good for the appearance. But there was no money to be had for this occasion, and Marjorie and Jean cut their cloth accordingly, literally as well as figuratively.

Also, the news had to be broken to those at home. Each of us wrote a letter, although, to save postage, we enclosed them all in one envelope. There had been little correspondence since we came to the homesteads, mainly because we were as yet thirty miles from a post office, and letters might lie for a month without a chance of delivery.

But this was something to be written about. We began with a circ.u.mstantial account of our first season on the prairies, and it was not until we had exhausted all other subjects, like a friend seeking a favor, that we got down to the business in hand. Such news as that would be in the old home down by the mill, with Christmas snowdrifts over the fences and the river running softly under its blanket of white!

I recall that there was moonlight just then, and night on the prairie was a base of ivory cupped with an intangible bowl of blue. Always there was the nip of frost in the air, but it was a nip that was not unpleasant, and by no means did it succeed in confining us within doors.

During these bright nights Jean and I took long, never-to-be-forgotten walks across the snow-piled, moon-swept plains. I could feel her firm little figure swaying with mine in our strong stride across the wind-packed snow, while our shadows--our shadow, I should say--fell in grotesque caricature by our side. There were moments when we were very, very close to the Infinity which bounded us on every hand, and the wonder of that great, white, silent ocean would surge into our hearts and mingle with the wonder of our love. A quarter of a mile from the shanties and we were as isolated from all living things as if we had been let down in the midst of the Polar Sea, or drawn by some mighty spirit into the farthest void of s.p.a.ce. Even the boisterous wind paid attention enough to blur our footprints out behind us and so complete that sense of infinity of isolation. We were so tremendously alone that it seemed the world was full of ourselves and G.o.d.

But a gaunt phantom of doubt and uncertainty stalked us even on those moon-lit walks.

CHAPTER XVI.

That gaunt phantom of doubt gradually closed in upon me. I resolved to fight it, but its very intangibility baffled my efforts to throw it off.

When I struck, it was not there. When I gripped it, my fingers closed on s.p.a.ce. When I challenged Jean's whole-heartedness she burst into tears and asked what proof she could give that she had not given. And it was because she burst into tears that the phantom stalked me all the closer.

Had she laughed and called me a silly boy I would have believed her.

Nothing came of it, however, and the days wore on until one forenoon we saw Spoof's tall figure looming up across the snow-waste that lay between Fourteen and Two. As he came up he threw off a miniature cloud of steam in the cold air, reminding me strikingly of Thomson's speech about the steam engine.

"A steam engine," Thomson had declared, "is the most human of all inventions. In fact, it's a mechanical man, or, if you put it the other way, man is a human steam engine. Each of them consumes food and converts it into energy. You feed a man beef, and he gives you power.

You feed this engine straw, and it gives you power; the same thing, by a slightly different process."

"Slightly!" exclaimed the farmer for whom we were working at the time.

"Slightly! Do you know the difference between the price of beef and the price of straw?"

"Then the engine wins," said Thomson, who would never grant a point in his defense of steam.

For some reason this flitted through my mind as Spoof drew up, trailing behind him a cloud of steam like a comet's tail. Spoof was healthy and strong and his engines were functioning properly.

We made him welcome, but he would not sit down. "Sorry, but I can't stay," he explained. "Jake is in a bit of a mess. Just came over to Two to tell me about it. It seems the cogitation nut on his base burner--you know the big coal stove Jake puts on so many airs about--bless me if I know what a cogitation nut is; rummy old name, don't you think?--but at any rate it has come loose so Jake posted over to borrow a left-hand monkey wrench with which to tighten it. It seems he can't get at it with an ordinary monkey wrench; must have a left-hand one. I hadn't such a thing about the place, and of course I told him so.

"'Danged unfortunate,' says Jake--excuse the adjective, ladies--and he stuck out his chin and ma.s.saged it in a way that showed he was worried more than he admitted.

"'It will be all right, won't it?' said I, trying to buck him up, and really knowing nothing about it.

"'Well, it may be, and it may not be,' said he. 'If we're lucky nothing will come of it.'

"'And in case you're unlucky?' I queried.

"'Then the bottom will fall out of the stove and the shack will burn down--maybe before I get back. We can't leave it without a fire in this weather, you know.'

"So seeing that old Jake was in a bit of a mess I volunteered to come over and borrow the necessary tools from you. It took quite a weight off his mind, I a.s.sure you, for he started off whistling, and shouted to me to give his regards to Sitting Crow."