"I believe so. I didn't see them, myself; came in by the south and landed first with your neighbour, Spoof. Capital chap; I stayed over night with him, and smoked up nearly all of his English tobacco. At breakfast I finished his last jar of marmalade, so if Spoof is flying a flag of distress when you reach home you will know the cause of it.

Imagine an Englishman without marmalade--breakfast without marmalade!

My dear fellow, I'm English myself, and I--I a.s.sure you it isn't done."

"But the girls?----" I persisted.

"Oh, yes. Spoof has been keeping a neighbourly eye on them. I meant to call on you, of course, but when Spoof told me you were away I stayed with him. He a.s.sured me that everyone is fit at Fourteen and Twenty-two."

This was good news, and a weight off our minds. Besides, it was evidence that in the twinges of my jealousy toward Brook I fell somewhat short of doing him justice. Brook was a decent fellow, and was playing the game.

"Just a suggestion," said the policeman, after a moment. "This is your first autumn on the prairies, and you can't be too careful about fire.

These warm days and frosty nights are the most dangerous time of the year. I found Spoof had no fire guards, so I showed him how to make them, and I took the liberty of hinting that he go over to Fourteen and Twenty-two and see that the buildings are properly protected."

We thanked Brook, and he saluted and rode away, his red tunic slowly fading out of view in the cloud of dust which his horse kicked up from the bone-dry trail.

"Very decent chap, Brook," said Jack, after a while, and I said "Yes."

It was with a strange pounding of the heart that we at last discerned the outlines of the shacks of our little settlement. Mrs. Alton's came first into view, then Spoof's, then, together, the buildings on Fourteen and Twenty-two. A gust of homesickness swept up and took sudden possession of me, and I realized for the first time how much I had become attached to the little square on the thousand-mile fabric of the prairies which I had already learned to think of as home. Gaunt and bare they may be, but the prairies have a way of winding themselves about the heart with bands that are stronger than steel.

If we had been anxious, we were eager, too; eager with the news of our successful season's work; with antic.i.p.ation of the bright faces which would greet the roll of crisp new bank bills that Jack carried in an inside vest pocket; eager to display the load of provisions and supplies which had been bought with part of our earnings.

We must have been fully a mile from the houses when we discerned the first evidences of life. A little figure darted out of the shack on Twenty-two to the edge of the gully; then for a few minutes sank from sight; then reappeared on our side of the stream and rushed into the shack on Fourteen. Almost instantly two figures appeared at the door; paused for a moment, then swooped like wild things down the trail toward us. And we stood up on the top of the wagon and waved our hats and yelled like mad, until even Spoof down on section Two must have heard us. And old Buck and Bright, their phlegmatic souls at last awakened by that strange power that lies at the root of all creation and which is friendship and love and all the shadings of affection which lie between -- or perhaps it was by the smell of the haystack at their own stables--joined in the spirit of the occasion and broke forth in a most surprising gallop, their hoofs click-clacking and their trace-chains lashing the whiffle-trees as they ran.

Soon we came up, and there were the girls, wonderful, lithe, sunburned, radiant, hatless, golden hair streaming in the golden light at the end of day, arms extended, white teeth gleaming, measureless, ineffable, in the beauty and wonder of their young womanhood! We sprang from the wagon and--I don't know how it happened--Jean ran straight into my arms. Not Marjorie--I didn't see what became of her--I didn't stop to look;--Jean ran straight into my arms! I held her there, held her with the strength of ten weeks' harvesting in my muscles and of all my young hot boyhood in my veins; held her and kissed her and would not let her go. . . For the first time since we had been little children together, playing by the dam where the water-wheel across the river tossed its dancing diamonds in the air, I held her and kissed her and would not let her go.

Across the fields of crisp and brittle gra.s.s we trudged together, disregarding the trail and the measureless swoon of that sunset world as we swept homeward on the flood-tide of our happiness. Her firm little arm pressed tight against mine and our limbs swung together in the rhythm of our stride. And when I looked down in her face I saw a light that was not altogether the glint of the setting sun.

But in that most poetic moment of her life Jean forgot to be poetic.

Once more she slipped her arm about me.

"Gee, it's good to have you home again," she said.

And in what should have been my supreme hour I found myself wondering whether Jean's pa.s.sion was love or just plain loneliness.

CHAPTER XII.

That was a busy night on Fourteen. The girls confessed that they had been on the lookout for us since the first of the month. They had even borrowed Spoof's field gla.s.s so that they could sweep the horizon to the eastward far beyond Mrs. Alton's.

"He's the strangest sort of chap, is Spoof," said Jean. "Will you believe me, he hasn't been inside this house since you left? Used to walk over from time to time, and see that the pigs and the cow were living in harmony, and that the fuel had not given out, but was always in a rush home again. Never saw such a man for work; quite different from what he used to be."

Jack looked his sister over with an eye that did not reserve all its approval for Marjorie. "We thought you would have been an accomplished banjo-ist by now," he said.

"Not a lesson--not a single lesson in all this time," Jean grumbled.

"And now I suppose he'll be over to-morrow to indulge us with the pent-up leisure of two months!"

Jean's naivete was little greater than mine. We had been brought up with a sound training in the rudiments of behavior but with little knowledge of its social complexities. My feeling in the matter was a mixed sense of surprise that our neighbour, usually so friendly, had held aloof at a time when he was particularly needed, and of annoyance that Jean should be so obviously put out about it.

But we soon got on to other matters. The girls had dug the potatoes and the garden vegetables, and it was with the honest pride of work well done that they took us into the cellar to view our winter supplies.

There is a very real satisfaction in growing one's own food; it gives one a sense of independence, a feeling that the butcher and baker and grocer have no mortgage on one's bodily needs. I think it was that feeling, threaded through with a very homey kind of content, that welled within us as we viewed the heaps of potatoes and turnips and cabbage and carrots and beets and parsnips that filled our cellar to the roof. Jack and I, not to be outdone, felt that now was the moment to show, in concrete form, something of what our harvest labors had meant. We had seized an opportunity while the threshing outfit was shut down on account of rain to drive to the nearest town and lay in a stock of provisions, which Alec Thomson had decently enough allowed us to buy on his account as he, being a contractor, got a better price than the individual consumer. So now we had to carry in the boxes of dried fruits and of canned goods, the sack of sugar, the three sacks of flour, the packages of tea and coffee, the sides of bacon:--Oh, we were going to live well this winter! Then there were the new boots which we had bought all round, and stockings, and an end of cloth which we were sure would come in handy for some useful purpose, and yarn for knitting. We were a happy party.

The girls had a strange treat in reserve for us. It was Jean who told us of it, although, as it seemed to me, her manner suggested a certain lack of frankness very unlike Jean. It seemed that a few days before our return a jack rabbit had loped up within easy distance of the shanty door, where he perked himself on his hind legs, taking observations.

Marjorie took the gun down from the wall, aimed it with great deliberation, and fired.

Jean declared that the rabbit was not hit, but that he died of fright.

Be that as it may, he furnished the filling for a very deep and tempting rabbit pie.

"And only to think," said Jean, her bright eyes dancing, "it would scarcely have kept any longer. We were managing to freeze it a little at nights, but it would thaw out during the day."

"I don't know but it is a little over-kept as it is," Marjorie admitted, "but we're going to eat it to-night." And so we sat about our little table, with the great rabbit pie in the middle, and great helpings of potatoes and onions on our plates, and flakey white bread and yellow home-made b.u.t.ter within reach, and the light beating down from an oil lamp on the wall, and would not have changed places with any one on earth.

The next day revealed changes in the neighbourhood which we had not had time to notice or discuss in the evening. A number of settlers had come in. The girls had not seen any of them, but could give almost as accurate descriptions as though they had. It seems Spoof had come over to Fourteen every Sunday afternoon during our absence, and, for all the shyness against which Jean had protested, he had managed to regale the girls with the gossip of the community, for our two little shacks were really becoming the centre of a neighbourhood. From Spoof they learned that the Browns had landed from England with three children and hardly anything else, and had built a shack on the south-west quarter of Four.

Mr. Brown had been a game-keeper in England. His wife was a wistful little body who seemed likely to have plenty to wist over before her children were raised on the living that a game-keeper would wring from the soil. On the north-west of Eighteen, just four miles west of us, a Scottish shipbuilder named Smith had located. He appeared to be unmarried. Three miles north of us, on Thirty-four, a Swede named Hanson had built a shanty twelve feet square in which he was housed with his wife and six children, and on Thirty-six a Russian had dug himself a sort of cave in the bank of the gully. He, too, had a wife and numerous offspring, but the exact number had not yet been ascertained.

"Ay tank thar bane plenty," Ole Hansen had said, when discussing the subject with Spoof. And as Ole regarded his own six hopefuls as "yust a nice commence," the imagination was rather stirred by the possibilities of what the cave on Thirty-six might disclose to the census taker.

"How do you say his name?" Spoof had inquired.

"Yah don' say it. Yah sneeze it," Ole explained.

"Sneezit--that'll do," said Spoof. And so, quite without his knowledge or consent, our Russian neighbour was supplied with an English name; a name which may some day--who knows?--be borne with pride by one of our best families.

Then there was Burke, an American from Iowa, a man with a l.u.s.t for labor and for doing things on a big scale. He and his wife had landed on section Twenty about the middle of August, and, ignoring the tradition that it is useless to break prairie sod in the fall, had already turned over a broad strip from end to end of their quarter section. Burke it was who introduced mules into the settlement. From what the girls were able to gather from Spoof mules called for an even more extended vocabulary than did oxen.

"And you want us to believe that Spoof told you all these things without ever coming into the house?" I challenged.

"Never a foot over the doorstep," said Jean. "That is, hardly ever. It's a big country; why be so particular for a foot or two?"

"Oh, I'm not; not at all. I'm merely checking up what you said last night."

"In my intoxication over your return! How could you, Frank?" And with that I had to be satisfied.

"But the best is yet!" Marjorie exclaimed. "Guess who's married?"

"Jake!" we answered together.

"Oh, somebody told. Yes, Jake. He and his wife are settled on Sixteen.

They've a little shack up, and Jake is farming the community, as he calls it. 'Acquaintances,' he says, 'are about all I'll be able to cultivate this year.' He spends most of his time at Spoof's, but I don't notice that Spoof's work goes along any quicker on that account. They called on us a couple of times--Jake and his wife, I mean; they have the advantage over the other settlers of having a light wagon and a team of ponies, which make it easy for them to get about. Mrs. Jake impresses one as being angular and competent, with perhaps more heart in her than her appearance would suggest. They say it was an agency match."

At that point we took up the story with Jake's account of his courtship and wedding, censored, of course, to suit the audience.

"That's mostly lies," said Marjorie, in her matter-of-fact way. "He advertised for her all right, but he went to Minneapolis to meet her, and it was only when he promised to go on a homestead that she consented to come. She told me that much; said she'd had enough of the town, and wanted to get away from everything and everybody. She has a touch of humor, too; said, 'I guess that's what I did, all right, when I came out on the bald-headed with Jake.'"

"But the telegram! He had her telegram."

"He must have faked that. He knew he would meet you boys before he went back, and he had a story made up to show himself in the best light possible."