.
and her hair, which was of a ruddy brown, had fiery gleams in it. Anyone would have called her comely, and there were, indeed, no women in Stukely’s barn to compare with her in that respect, a fact that she recognized.
“Oh, yes,” said Sager reflectively; “she’ll get him sure if she sets her mind on it, and there’s no denying that they make a handsome pair. I’ve nothing against Hawtrey either: a straight man, a hustler, and smart at handling a team. Still, it’s kind of curious that while the man’s never been stuck for the stamps like the rest of us, he’s made nothing very much of his homestead yet. Now there’s Bob, and Jake, and Jasper came in after he did with half the money, and they thrash out four bushels of hard wheat for Hawtrey’s three.”
Stukely made a little gesture of concurrence, for he dimly realized the significance of his companion’s speech. It is results which count in that country, where the one thing demanded is practical efficiency, and the man of simple, steadfast purpose usually goes the farthest. Hawtrey had graces which won him friends, boldness of conception, and the power of application; but he had somehow failed to accomplish as much as his neighbors did. After all, there must be a good deal to be said for the man who raises four bushels of good wheat where his comrade with equal facilities raises three.
In the meanwhile Hawtrey was talking to Sally, and it was not astonishing that they talked of farming, which is the standard topic on that strip of prairie.
“So you’re not going to break that new piece this spring?” she asked.
“No,” answered Hawtrey; “I’d want another team, anyway, and I can’t raise the money; it’s hard to get out here.”
“Plenty under the sod,” declared Sally, who was essentially practical. “That’s where we get ours, but you have to put the breaker in and turn it over. You”—and she flashed a quick glance at him—“got most of yours from England. Won’t they send you any more?”
Hawtrey’s eyes twinkled as he shook his head. “I’m afraid they won’t,” he replied. “You see, I’ve put the screw on them rather hard the last few years.”
“How did you do that?” Sally inquired. “Told them you were thinking of coming home again?”
There was a certain wryness in the young man’s smile, for though Hawtrey had cast no particular slur upon the family’s credit he had signally failed to enhance it, and he was quite aware that his English relatives did not greatly desire his presence in the Old Country.
“My dear,” he said, “you really shouldn’t hit a fellow in the eye that way.”
As it happened, he did not see the girl’s face just then, or he might have noticed a momentary change in its expression. Gregory Hawtrey was a little casual in speech, but, so far, most of the young women upon whom he bestowed an epithet indicative of affection had attached no significance to it. They had wisely decided that he did not mean anything.
The Scottish fiddler’s voice broke in.
“Can ye no’ watch the music? Noo it’s paddy-bash!” he cried.
His French Canadian comrade waved his fiddle-bow protestingly.
“Paddybashy! V’la la belle chose!” he exclaimed with ineffable contempt, and broke in upon the ranting melody with a succession of harsh, crashing chords.
Then began a contest as to which could drown the other’s instrument, and the snapping time grew faster, until the dancers gasped, and men who wore long boots encouraged them with cries and stamped a staccato accompaniment upon the benches or on the floor. It was savage, rasping music, but one player infused into it the ebullient nerve of France, and the other was from the misty land where the fiddler learns the witchery of the clanging reel and the swing of the Strathspey. It is doubtless not high art, but there is probably no music in the world that fires the blood like this and turns the sober dance to rhythmic riot. Perhaps, too, amid the prairie snow, it gains something that gives it a closer compelling grip.
Hawtrey was breathless when it ceased, and Sally’s eyes flashed with the effulgence of the Northern night when her partner found her a resting-place upon an upturned barrel.
“No,” she declared, “I won’t have any cider.” She turned and glanced at him imperiously. “You’re not going for any more either.”
It was, no doubt, not the speech a well-trained English maiden would have made, but, though Hawtrey smiled rather curiously, it fell inoffensively from Sally’s lips. Though it is not always set down to their credit, the brown-faced, hard-handed men as a rule live very abstemiously in that country, and, as it happened, Hawtrey, who certainly showed no sign of it, had already consumed rather more cider than anybody else. He made a little bow of submission, and Sally resumed their conversation where it had broken off.
“We could let you have our ox-team to do that breaking with,” she volunteered. “You’ve had Sproatly living with you all winter. Why don’t you make him stay and work out his keep?”
Hawtrey laughed. “Sally,” he said, “do you think anybody could make Sproatly work?”
“It would be hard,” the girl admitted, and then looked up at him with a little glint in her eyes. “Still, I’d put a move on him if you sent him along to me.”
She was a capable young woman, but Hawtrey was dubious concerning her ability to accomplish such a task. Sproatly was an Englishman of good education, though his appearance seldom suggested it. Most of the summer he drove about the prairie in a wagon, vending cheap oleographs and patent medicines, and during the winter contrived to obtain free quarters from his bachelor acquaintances. It is a hospitable country, but there were men round Lander’s who, when they went away to work in far-off lumber camps, as they sometimes did, nailed up their doors and windows to prevent Sproatly from getting in.
“Does he never do anything?” Sally added.
“No,” Hawtrey assured her, “at least, never when he can help it. He had, however, started something shortly before I left him. You see, the house has needed cleaning, the last month or two, and we tossed up for who should do it. It fell to Sproatly, who didn’t seem quite pleased, but he got as far as firing the chairs and tables out into the snow. Then he sat down for a smoke, and he was looking at them through the window when I drove away.”
“Ah,” commented Sally, “you want somebody to keep the house straight and look after you. Didn’t you know any nice girls back there in the Old Country?”
She spoke naturally, and there was nothing to show that the girl’s heart beat a little more rapidly than usual as she watched Hawtrey. His face, however, grew a trifle graver, for she had touched upon a momentous question to such men as he. Living in Spartan simplicity upon the prairie, there are a good many of them, well-trained, well-connected young Englishmen, and others like them from Canadian cities. They naturally look for some grace of culture or refinement in the woman they would marry, and there are few women of the station to which they once belonged who could face the loneliness and unassisted drudgery that must be borne by the small wheat-grower’s wife. There were also reasons why this question had been troubling Hawtrey in particular of late.
“Oh, yes, of course, I knew nice girls in England, one or two,” he answered. “I’m not quite sure, however, that girls of that kind would find things even moderately comfortable here.”
A certain reflectiveness in his tone, which seemed to indicate that he had already given the matter some consideration, jarred upon Sally. Moreover, she had an ample share of the Western farmer’s pride, which firmly declines to believe that there is any land to compare with the one the plow is slowly wresting from the wide white levels of the prairie.
“We make out well enough,” she asserted with a snap in her eyes.
Hawtrey made an expressive gesture. “Oh, yes,” he admitted, “it’s in you. All you want in order to beat the wilderness and turn it into a garden is an ax, a span of oxen, and a breaker plow. You ought to be proud of