A Prairie Courtship. Harold Bindloss
The prairie was flooded with sunlight, and it was no longer monotonously level. It stretched away before her in long, billowy rises, which dipped again to vast shallow hollows when the team plodded over the crest of them, and here and there little specks of flowers peeped out among the whitened grass or there was a faint sprinkling of tender green. The air was cool yet, and exhilarating as wine. Alison, refreshed by her sound sleep, rejoiced in it, and it was some time before she spoke to her companion.
"I felt slightly embarrassed," she said. "That woman would let me pay nothing for my entertainment. She can't have very much, either."
"She hasn't," replied Thorne. "Her husband had his crop hailed out last fall. Still, you see, that kind of thing is a custom of the country. They're a hospitable people, and, in a general way, when you are in need of a kindness, you're most likely to get it from people who are as hard up as you are." He paused with a whimsical smile. "One can't logically feel hurt at the other kind for standing aside or shutting their eyes, but when they proceed to point out that if you had only emulated their virtues you would be equally prosperous, it becomes exasperating, especially as it isn't true. So far as my observation goes, it isn't the practice of the stricter virtues that leads to riches."
"Why didn't you say your experience?" Alison inquired. "It's the usual word."
"It would suggest that I had tried the thing, and I'm afraid that I've only watched other people. To get knowledge that way is considerably easier. But I presume I was taking too much for granted in supposing that you had—any reason for agreeing with my previous observation."
Alison felt that this was a question delicately put, so that if it pleased her she could avoid a definite reply. She did not in the least resent it, and something urged her to take this stranger into her confidence.
"If you mean that I don't know what it is to be poor you are wrong," she confessed. "At the present moment I'm unpleasantly close to the end of my resources."
"But you said that you were going to Mrs. Hunter's."
"I don't know whether she will take me in. I shouldn't be astonished if she didn't."
The man saw the warmth in her face and looked at her thoughtfully.
"Well," he said, "you have courage, and that goes quite a way out here. I don't think you need be unduly anxious, in any case."
He flicked the team with his whip and by and by they reached a straggling birch bluff on the crest of a steeper slope. A rutted trail led between the trees, and as the team moved a little faster down the dip the wagon jolted sharply. Then one of the beasts stumbled, plunged, and recovered itself again, and Thorne, seizing Alison's arm as she was almost flung from her seat, pulled them up and swung himself down. Looking over the side she saw him stoop and lift one of the horse's feet. It was a few minutes before he came back again.
"A badger hole," he explained. "Volador fell into it. An accident of that kind makes trouble now and then."
He drove slowly for the next few miles, but, so far as Alison noticed, the horse showed no sign of injury, and it was midday when they stopped for a meal beside a creek which wound through a deep hollow. On setting out again, however, the horse began to flag and Thorne, who got down once or twice in the meanwhile, was driving at a walking pace when they reached a birch bluff larger than the last one. He pulled the team up and springing to the ground looked at Alison a few minutes later.
"Volador's going very lame," he said. "It would be cruelty to drive him much farther."
Alison was conscious of a shock of dismay. Sitting in the wagon on the crest of the rise she could look down across the birches upon a vast sweep of prairie, and there was no sign of a house anywhere on it. It almost seemed as if she must spend the night in the bluff.
"What is to be done?" she asked.
"Can you ride?"
Alison said she had never tried, and the man's expression hinted that the expedient he had suggested was out of the question.
"Do you think you could walk sixteen miles?" he asked.
"I'm afraid I couldn't," Alison confessed, though if the feat had appeared within her powers she would gladly have attempted it.
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