That was the introduction, an embarra.s.sment that fed the old woman's notion of fun. Milford stammered, and the young woman blushed.

"I did not say I did not want to meet you," she said, with a slight accent, her unidiomatic English learned at school. "I would not say such a thing. Mrs. Stuvic is full of jokes. She makes me laugh." And she did laugh, strange echo from North Sea cliffs, the glow of the midnight in her eyes, a thought that shot through the cowboy's mind as he gazed upon her. Mrs. Stuvic went back, laughing, to the dining-room, having flushed the young woman and turned the dark man red.

"She is a very funny woman," said the "peach," looking far across the meadow toward the lake, her long lashes slowly rising and falling. She was not beautiful; her features were not regular, but there was a marvelous light in her countenance, and her bronze-tinted hair was as rank in growth as the yellowing oats where the soil is rich and damp.

She looked to be just ripe, but was too lithe to be luscious. Mrs.

Blakemore said that her nose was slightly tipped up, a remark more slanderous than true, and when taken to task by an oldish woman who had no cause to be jealous, declared that it was not a matter of taste but a question of observation. At any rate, she had come as a yellow flash, and must soon fade.

Milford continued to gaze at her, wanting to say something, but not knowing what to say. He heard the gruff laughter of the men in the dining-room, joking with Mrs. Stuvic, and the romping of the children coming out.

"I guess that's the best rabbit dog anywhere around here," he said, as a flea-bitten cur trotted past. He had never seen the dog hunt rabbits. He knew nothing about him except that he had been ordered to shoot him for howling, the dreary night when old Lewson died.

"He does not look that he could run very fast," she replied, turning her eyes upon the dog.

"Oh, yes, he runs like a streak. He outran a pack of wolves up in the Wisconsin woods."

"Wolves!" she said, looking at him.

He knew that he was a liar, but he said "wolves." He asked if she had ever seen any wolves. She had seen packs of coyotes on the prairie. "I went to my uncle when I came to this country," she said. "He lived away in the West. I stayed there two years, and then I came with him to Chicago. I did not like it so far off. The wind was always blowing lonesome in the night, and I thought of my old home where the gra.s.s fringed the edge of the cliff."

"Did you speak English before you came to this country?"

"I could read it, and I did read much--old tales of fierce fights on the sea."

"How long do you expect to stay out here?"

"I am with Mrs. Goodwin, and when she says go, I go. She is very kind to me."

Mrs. Goodwin came out, calling "Gunhild." She was tall, with grayish hair, and on the stage might have played the part of a d.u.c.h.ess. Her husband's affairs were prosperous, and she devoted herself to the discovery of genius. She had found a young girl with a marvelous voice, and had educated her into a common-rate singer, put her in opera, and the critics scorched her. The discoverer swallowed a lump of disappointment, and turned about to find another genius. In an obscure corner of a newspaper, she found a gem in verse, the soul-spurt of a young man. She sought him out, and paid for the printing of a volume of verses. The critics scoffed him, and she swallowed another lump. One of her a.s.sistant discoverers brought to her a pencil sketch of a buffalo, and this led to the finding of Gunhild Strand. The girl was modest. She disclaimed genius, but she was sent to the Art Inst.i.tute; she would climb the mountain. But she got no higher than the foot-hills. "I did not have any confidence in myself," the girl declared. "And now I must work for you to pay you for what has been spent." This was surely a proof that she had no genius, but it was an evidence of grat.i.tude, a rarer quality, and Mrs. Goodwin was pleased. "You shall be my companion," she said, "Your society will more than repay me. You must not refuse. I set my heart upon it."

Milford was introduced, and the stately woman threw her searchlight upon him. Here might be another genius.

"They tell me, Mr. Milford, that you are a man of great industry."

"They might have told you, madam, that I am a great fool."

Ha! a gleam of true light. She warmed toward him. She thought of Burns plowing up a mouse. But she was skeptical of poets. They have a contempt for their patrons if their wares do not sell.

"You credit them with too shrewd a discovery," she replied.

"I simply give them credit for ordinary eyesight, madam."

"You prove the contrary." She smiled upon him. "They tell me that you came like a mist, out of the mysterious woods."

"A fog from the marsh," he replied, laughing; and the "peach" laughed, too--more music from the North Sea. He saw the pink of her arm through the gauze of her sleeve. Mrs. Goodwin thought that he knew nothing about women, and she was right, but, as a rule, if rule can be applied, a woman thinks this of a man when, indeed, he has mastered innocent hearts to make wantons of them.

"Where is your field?" the discoverer inquired.

"Over yonder, where the sun is hottest."

"And your house?"

"Over on the hill, yonder, where the wind will blow coldest in winter."

Surely, he had a volume of verse hidden under the old clothes in his trunk. She could have wished that he was even an inventor. She shuddered at the thought of another attempt to set up a shaft to American letters.

The jovial doctor had shaken his fat sides at her. Suddenly she was inspired with forethought. She asked him if he had ever written any verse. He said that once he had been tempted to toss a firebrand into an enemy's wheat-rick, but had never ruined a sheet with measured lines.

She saw that he had caught the spirit of the paragrapher's fling. So this fear was put aside; still, he must be a genius of some sort--an inventor, perhaps. She asked if he had ever invented anything, and he answered, "Yes, a lie." This stimulated her interest in him. He was so frank, so refreshing. She had heard that a laborer could be quaintly entertaining. She contrasted him with the numerous men of her acquaintance, men whose sentences were as dried herbs, the sap and the fragrance gone. She was weary of the doctor's shop-talk, the impoverished blood of conversation, the dislocated joint of utterance.

She would have welcomed track talk with a race-horse starter. And the bluntness of this man from the hillside was invigorating. His words were not dry herbs, but fresh pennyroyal, sharp with scent. Milford smiled at her, wishing that she were locked among her husband's jars of pickled atrocities. He wanted to talk silliness with the girl.

The other boarders came out, George and his wife among them. George handed Milford a cigar, telling him to light it,--that the ladies did not object to smoking.

"You haven't asked them," said his wife.

"Well, I know they don't."

"There, don't you see? Mrs. Dorch is moving off."

George grinned. "Her husband is a great smoker, and she don't want to be reminded of home," he said.

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself," she replied.

"I can't afford it. I'm too much loser."

Mrs. Goodwin asked Gunhild to walk with her. She looked at Milford, but he lost his nerve and did not offer to go with them.

"That was a bid," said George. His wife reprimanded him. "It is a wonder you didn't offer to go," she declared. "But let us take a walk," she added.

"Too soon after eating. Believe I'll go up and take a snooze," he said.

A mother, worn out with hot nights of worrying over the ills of a teething child, sat rocking the little one. Bobbie stood looking on with the critical eye of a boy. "A baby sticks out his tongue when you wipe his face with a wet rag," he said, and George snorted. "What a boy don't see ain't worth seeing," he said. The boy's mother reached out, drew him to her, and attempted to take from his clenched hands a piece of castiron, a rusty key, and a hog's tooth. "Throw those nasty things away."

"Let him keep his tools," said George. "A boy can't work without tools."

He clung to the implements of his trade. She turned him about and set him adrift. "Mr. Milford," she said, "you don't seem to be quite yourself this afternoon. You aren't enjoying yourself."

He appeared surprised that she should think so. If he were not enjoying himself it was news to him, deserving of a big headline. She saw his eye searching the woods; she thought of the young woman who sighed out her breath at a window far away, waiting for him to hoe out a place for her.

The wreath that she had hung upon him began to wither. After all, he was but a man with a shifting soul, and she did not believe that his talk had morally helped her husband. George was nodding. She shook him, and he looked up quickly, as if he expected a railway conductor to tell him that he was to get off there.

"What makes you so stupid?"

"The beastly weather. Well, I'm going up."

She sat there rocking herself, with a knife in her bosom for the man who sat near, the deceitful laborer. He was, after all, nothing but a hired man. What could she have expected of him? She was foolish to believe that there was anything spiritual about him. She would give him a dig.

"The young woman whom you were pleased to call a 'peach'----"

"I didn't call her a 'peach'."

"No matter. The young woman who has been called a 'peach,' with a bouquet of man's promises perfuming her heart, thinks, no doubt, that he is longing to see her again, when, perhaps, he has forgotten her, or remembers her only as a joke. Those foreign girls are so simple." She looked at him with her drooping eyes. Her fancy rewarded her with the belief that there was a sudden mixture of red in the brown of his face.

"Don't you think she's handsome?" she asked, after waiting for him to speak.