"After Jack's wedding I gave the whole thing some serious thought. I surmised how the land lay between you and Jean, and what had interrupted your plans. I concluded that the only decent thing to do was to drop out of your lives, for the time being. Well, Jean wouldn't have it. You know--the other day. . . . That was one of the hard things I was thinking about when I spoke of them a moment ago.

"Frank, she lit a thousand old fires of memory that morning. Moving about in my room; sitting at my table; pouring my tea--G.o.d, man, do you understand? It was too much for anybody. . . . I don't know what would have happened. At any rate, I ask you to believe that I was making my fight. . . . . Then you came."

He threw away half of an unsmoked cigarette and rolled another.

"Then I spent some sleepless nights, Frank, old boy. I was glad you had come, and even in my gladness for that sometimes I wished you--We humans are such queer mixtures; beyond a.n.a.lysis. But the more I admitted these things to myself the more I had also to admit that something might be said for Alice. Alice had once been to me all that it now seemed that Jean might be. I wondered if, by some miracle, that might not come again. Wasn't the obstacle, all the obstacle, the only obstacle, right in my own mind? What if I should root it out? What if I should say, 'I'm too big a man to submit to this; I refuse to be tyrannized by a little jealous demon in one corner of my mind?' . . .

"I began to think that perhaps after all Alice's purpose in following me here was quite different from what I had suspected. Women are strange creatures. They keep you guessing, as you say in this country."

"Better that than boredom," I heard my own voice saying.

"Shake!" said Spoof, springing suddenly to his feet and seizing me by the hand. "Shake! By Jove, I didn't know it was in you. If I were a moralist, setting light houses on the reefs about the sea of matrimony, I would set the biggest, blazingest light on Boredom. But n.o.body set a light on it for me . . .

"Besides, I wanted tremendously to see the boy.

"So yesterday I hitched the oxen and broke trail over to 'Widow Alton's.' My afflictions had brought me to a sufficiently humble frame of mind to let Alice say her say. For awhile she couldn't say anything; just wept, you know, and cried my name over and over, and sometimes Gerald's. Mighty uncomfortable for a man standing around and feeling that in some way he's to blame for it all.

"Well, when we got down to facts she had come in the hope of raising money by means of homesteading so that she could educate the boy. Fancy that, and me a.s.sociating her with blackmail! But when she found, through old Jake, that I had located here, she wasn't above following. And yet she was afraid of me; afraid she'd meet me somewhere; afraid I'd come over to her homestead; and all the time hoping I would! Women are strange creatures.

"Well, we talked it all over, and"--and for the first time in his narrative Spoof's face lighted with a gentle smile--"I didn't go back to Two last night at all. We're planning a sort of quinquennial honeymoon progress about the district, and, properly enough, our first call is at Fourteen. And now that that's off my chest, behold a man happy once more. I am amazed at the folly that denied me all these years---- Men, too, are strange creatures.

"There's just one thing--a very insignificant thing compared with Alice's happiness, and mine, and Gerald's, but it's this: In taking up her homestead she had to declare herself a widow. She did it for the boy's sake, and she knows she will have to give up the claim, but will she get into further trouble? Will they let it go at that?"

That was a poser, and I turned it over in my mind for some minutes.

"Better see Jake about that," I suggested. "He'll find a way."

"That's right!" said Spoof. "Jake's the boy. And he owes me something yet on that cogitation nut transaction.

"Just one more thing," Spoof resumed, after a little. "I've told you a great deal more than I propose to tell anyone else. It seemed to me that you--and Jean--had a peculiar right to know."

Almost before we knew it the springtime was upon us. It came suddenly, out of a March sky and a south-west wind, and the hard, illimitable distances of winter softened and mellowed before our eyes. The drifts fell away; brown spots came out on the edge of the gully; little streamlets cataracted over its banks; blue snow-water gathered in its depressions; adventurous early gophers sent their challenge from bank to bank. The waters in the gully gathered and grew; presently they were forcing ahead, into and under and over the drifts that barred their way; their pleasant gurglings came up through the clear, calm, lengthening twilights.

The bare fields came forth; the dark brown clodded earth looked up in a million mimic mountain peaks through a wrinkled blanket of snow; the gra.s.s stirred on the prairies; a flush of green ran down the long shadows of the evening. Once more was the world alive!

They were busy times for us. Every hour of springtime, like the seed sown in the spring, multiplies many fold by autumn; the tale of slothfulness in spring is written big in harvest--or rather, in lack of harvest. As soon as the snow was gone from the plowed fields and the frost was out an inch or two we were at work with our harrows; then, in a few days more, sowing our crops. There was a pleasant neighbourliness, a satisfying community of interest, in casting the eye across our level prairies and noting the slow-moving seeder-shuttles plying up and down across the cool, moist warp of earth.

The skies and clouds of springtime were almost as wonderful as the prairie dawns and sunsets. I suppose it is because of the vast sameness of the prairies themselves that we learned to turn our eyes so often to the heavens. When one's vision is hemmed about by woods and hills he is in danger of missing the greater majesty of the skies. Many a breathing spell had Buck and Bright while I turned in my plow-handles to watch the gentle drift of cloud shadows gliding over the fields, or to plunge my eyes into the blue vacuum of eternal s.p.a.ce.

When Jean would bring my lunch at four in the afternoon we would sit on the gra.s.s in the shade of the wagon at the end of the field and daydream for a moment or two with feathery, fleecy, high-flying clouds of heaven as a background for our fancies. Sometimes great, billowy, boisterous, low-lying ma.s.ses loomed up in our horizon, level along the bottom like islands floating in a sea of s.p.a.ce; heaped and puffed and pinnacled in their upper parts. If these gathered and grew we might expect a dash of rain with a bright sun afterwards and a rainbow in the east.

Jean would throw the remaining crumbs to the gophers and ma.s.sage Buck's forehead between the horns before she left. This was always a popular proceeding for Buck. He acknowledged it by circling his prodigious tongue about his nose, and sometimes embracing Jean's ap.r.o.n in its...o...b..t.

It had been arranged that during the busy season I should take my meals at Jack's, and Jean had volunteered the duty of carrying my afternoon lunches to the field. There was little time now for either poetry or prose, and yet we lived amazingly in the spirit. Between the plow-handles one must think of something, and I recalled and re-recalled those things I had read during the winter. At lunch time, or in the evenings, I would talk of them with Jean, always trying to approach her from some new and unsuspected angle. As, for instance, when a summer shower threatened us, I quoted (I had borrowed a Sh.e.l.ley from Spoof):

"I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers, From the seas and the streams; I bear light shade for the leaves when laid In their noon-day dreams.

From my wings are shaken the dews that waken The sweet buds every one----"

Jean turned her face to mine, and something in her eyes was deeper than the great clouds gathering overhead. "A year ago you would have said, 'Looks like rain,'" was her ample comment.

With springtime came ducks to the pond, and to our table. Jean had so far overcome her reluctance to killing that she would crawl with me for what seemed ages, worming along through the gra.s.s of the slopes on the northern side of the pond, for the chance of sharing with me that moment of ecstasy in which I killed a living thing. The ducks had been much shot at in their flight northward and were careful to avoid the ambush afforded by the grove on the southern side of the pond. Eventually Jean began taking out the gun on her own account, and it was a tremendously proud day when she brought home her first mallard. Usually we did our shooting in the evening, when the banks were in the shadow but there was still light on the water. The sharp whistle of duck wings would be followed by the flash of my gun and the glow of burnt wadding. . . .

Then there was the walk home through the gleaming night.

We had built a bridge of poles in the gully at the road between Fourteen and Twenty-two, as a stream a foot deep was now flowing across the path.

One evening, just as I was unharnessing the oxen, Jean came rushing to me in great excitement.

"Frank, there are fish in the creek! I saw them darting in every direction! What can we catch them with?"

"Suckers, they'll be," said I, "but even a sucker is good in the spring." We hurried to the stable, where we got two hay forks.

"You stand on guard on the bridge, and if any go through, jab 'em," I directed. "I'll go down stream and drive 'em up."

It was not long until I detected half a dozen forms, almost black in the water, and resting in the most innocent stillness except for the constant dilation of mouth and gills. I jabbed at the nearest. But a fish in the water is not exactly where he seems to be, and I missed him.

He and his company dashed at tremendous speed toward the bridge, with me in wild pursuit. After the first step or two I abandoned the bank and plunged into the stream, striking and jabbing recklessly. Suddenly I landed one--pierced through the tail, I must confess--and threw him far up the bank.

"Oh, they're coming, they're coming! I see them!" Jean shouted. She teetered for a moment on the plank; then jumped--or fell--into the stream and was jabbing about, somewhat to the menace of my feet, and her own. Her skirts trailed wetly down the tide, and clung about her limbs.

But she was thinking not a bit of that. In wild triumph she threw out a fish bigger than mine, and jabbed where a fish ought to be jabbed.

One evening Spoof came over, carrying his gun.

"There's good crane shooting out at Reed Lake," he said. "Brown and I were up last night; got four beauties. Jean seems to be shooting rather well; thought you and she might like to go out on a crane hunt, so I brought over my gun."

"But you--you'll come, won't you?"

"No, not this time," said Spoof, sagely. "I've got all I can use for some days."

Jean was enthusiastic, so we quit work early the next afternoon and drove to Reed Lake, about seven or eight miles to the west. The sun was setting across an expanse of marshy water surrounded by low, reedy sh.o.r.es when we unspanned. A single clump of willows offered shelter on the eastern side of the lake, and we made our camp beside it.

Far out in the water were myriads of ducks but they kept well beyond range. We couldn't afford to waste cartridges on the snipe and plover that ran crying along the sh.o.r.e.

Slowly the long northern twilight settled into darkness as we sat in our camp and watched the colors gently dulling on the gla.s.s-like surface of the lake. Darker it grew, until the brighter stars came out. All was silent and still. But when one listened intently to the silence it became alive with noises. The grumbling of wild duck; the cry of a curlew; the blatant bombast of the bullfrog; the myriad industries of the little folk of night filled the air.

The light faded out of the west; the afterglow paled and darkened; a faint arc lay across the northern sky; a million stars winked at two campers sitting by a wagon and a willow bush, and drew their own conclusions.

I had fastened a horse blanket to the side of our wagon, dropping one edge to the ground. In front of it I spread another on the gra.s.s, and here we sat, sheltered from the cool night breezes that came solemnly whispering over the tops of the reeds that bordered the lake. While the light held out I had sat with a book in my hand, but we had not read; we were reading the book of earth and sky, of light and shadow, of wind and water, and perhaps of love.

"It is so dark," Jean said at length. "How can we see to shoot, even if they _do_ come?"

Jean seemed to doubt the efficiency of any method of hunting that consisted in sitting down beside a horse blanket and waiting for the game to come up and be shot. She could understand crawling for a hundred yards, head down and heels down, except as a waving foot might serve to semaph.o.r.e her signals. But to sit and wait. . . . . She was counting stars.

"There they come!" I suddenly breathed, scarce daring to whisper, as a new note came up from the water. "Quietly--quietly."

We rose to our feet and stalked silently to the water's edge. There was nothing to be seen. We were surrounded entirely by reeds higher than our heads. We were sinking slowly in the moist mud; water was trickling through the lace holes in my boots.