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Camilla hesitated. Catching her hand, Ichabod lifted her chin so that their eyes met.

“Tell me, are you happy?” he repeated.

Another pause, though her eyes did not falter.

“Happier than I ever thought to be.” She touched his sleeve tenderly. “But not completely so, for–” she was not looking at him now,–“for I love you, and–and–I’m a woman.”

They said no more; and though Ichabod went back to his team, it was not to work. For many minutes he stood motionless, a new problem of right and wrong throbbing in his brain.

Fall came slowly, bringing the drowsy, hazy days of so-called Indian Summer. It was the season of threshing, and all day long to the drowse of the air was added, near and afar, all-pervading through the stillness, the sleepy hum of the separator. Typical voice of the prairie was that busy drone, penetrating to the ears as the ubiquitous odor of the buffalo grass to the nostril, again bearing resemblance in that, once heard, memory would reproduce the sound until recollection was no more.

Winter followed, and they, who had thought the earth quiet before, found it still now indeed. Even the voice of the prairie-chicken was hushed; only the sharp knife-like cutting of spread wings told of a flock’s passage at night. The level country, mottled white with occasional drifts, and brown from spots blown bare by the wind, stretched out seemingly interminable, until the line of earth and sky met.

Idle perforce, the two exotics would stand for hours in the sunshine of their open doorway, shading their eyes from the glare and looking out, out into the distance that was as yet only a name–and that the borrowed name of an Indian tribe.

“What a country!” Camilla would say, struck each time anew with a never-ending wonder.

“Yes, what a country,” Ichabod would echo, unconscious that he had repeated the same words in the same way a score of times before.

In January, a blizzard settled upon them, and for two days and nights they took turns keeping the big kitchen stove red hot. The West knows no such storms, now. Man has not only changed the face of the earth, but, in so doing, has annihilated that terror of the past–the Dakota blizzard.

In those days, though, it was very real, as Ichabod learned. He had prepared for winter, by hauling a huge pile of cordwood and stacking it, as a protection to windward, the full length of the little cabin, thinking the spot always accessible; but he had builded in ignorance.

The snow first commenced falling in the afternoon. By the next morning the tiny house was buried to the window sashes. Looking out, there could be seen but an indistinct slanting white wall, scarcely ten feet away: a screen through which the sunlight filtered dimly, like the solemn haze of a church. The earth was not silent, now. The falling of the sleet and snow was as the striking of fine shot, and the sound of the wind a steady unceasing moan, resembling the sigh of a big dynamo at a distance.

Slowly, inch by inch, during that day the snow crept up the window panes until, before the coming of darkness without, it fell within. Banked though they were on three sides, on the fourth side, unprotected, the cold penetrated bitterly,–a cold no living thing could withstand without shelter. Then it was that Ichabod and Camilla feared to sleep, and that the long vigil began.

By the next morning there was no light from the windows. The snow had drifted level with the eaves. Ichabod stood in the narrow window frame, and, lowering the glass from the top, beat a hole upward with a pole to admit air. Through the tunnel thus formed there filtered the dull gray light of day: and at its end, obstructing, there stood revealed a slanting drab wall,–a condensed milky way.

The storm was yet on, and he closed the window. To get outside for fuel that day was impossible, so with an axe Ichabod chopped a hole through the wall into the big pile, and on wood thus secured sawed steadily in the tiny kitchen, while the kerosene lamp at his side sputtered, and the fire crackled in a silence, like that surrounding a hunted animal in its den.