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Estelle laughed and said, “I tried to save the chickens, and I nearly blew away myself.”

Her cheeks were flushed, and her wet hair streamed down her back. She was barefooted, a fact which she tried to conceal by leaning forward a little.

“It was very good of you to come over,” she went on, more soberly, in the pause which followed. “We were scared; no use denying that, but we were too busy to dwell upon it. The wind took the tarred paper off the roof and let the rain through everywhere. It was the most exciting experience of our lives.”

She was more breathless and girlish than she had ever been in his presence, and he grew correspondingly secure. A subtle charm came from her streaming hair and her uncorseted and graceful figure. He offered assistance, but she sturdily replied:

“Oh no, thank you. There’s nothing to do till morning, anyway. We kept the bed dry, and so we can sleep.” She smiled on him with something happy hidden in the tones of her voice. She was embarrassed, but not afraid. She trusted him perfectly, and he was exalted by that trust.

“Well, I’ll be over in the morning and see how badly damaged you are. I couldn’t go to bed till I knew you were all right.”

“Thank you. You’re very kind.”

He went out with a feeling that Carrie was trying hard not to laugh at him. He was sure he heard a smothered giggle as he went down the slope. He glowed with admiration for Estelle, so frank, so womanly. They seemed to have drawn closer to each other in that fifteen minutes’ talk than in all the preceding months. In the joy of this deepening friendship he splashed contentedly back to the store, unheeding the pools beneath his feet.

V

NOVEMBER

September and October passed before the surveyors, long looked for, came through, and three months dragged out their slow length before the pre-emptors could file and escape from their claims.

By the first of November the wonder had gone out of the life of the settlers. One by one the novelties and beauties of the plain had passed away or grown familiar. The plover and blackbird fell silent. The prairie-chicken’s piping cry ceased as the flocks grew toward maturity, and the lark and cricket alone possessed the russet plain, which seemed to snap and crackle in the midnight frost, and to wither away in the bright midday sun.

Many of the squatters by this time had spent their last dollar, and there was little work for them to do. Each man, like his neighbor, was waiting to “prove up.” They had all lived on canned beans and crackers since March, and they now faced three months more of this fare. Some of them had no fuel, and winter was rapidly approaching.

The vast, treeless level, so alluring in May and June, had become an oppressive weight to those most sensitive to the weather, and as the air grew chill and the skies overcast, the women turned with apprehensive faces to the untracked northwest, out of which the winds swept pitilessly cold and keen. The land of the straddle-bug was gray and sad.

One day a cold rain mixed with sleet came on, and when the sun set, partly clear, the Coteaux to the west rose like a marble wall, crenelated and shadowed in violet, radiant as the bulwarks of some celestial city; but it made the thoughtful husband look keenly at the thin walls of his cabin and wonder where his fuel was to come from. In this unsheltered land, where coal was high and doctors far away, winter was a dreaded enemy.

The depopulation of the newly claimed land began. Some of the girls went back never to return; others settled in Boomtown, with intent to visit their claims once a month through the winter; but a few, like the Burkes, remained in their little shanties, which looked still more like dens when sodded to the eaves. The Clayton girls flitted away to Wheatland, leaving the plain desolately lonely to Bailey. One by one the huts grew smokeless and silent, until at last the only English-speaking woman within three miles was old Mrs. Bussy, who swore and smoked a pipe, and talked like a man with bronchitis. She was not an attractive personality, and Mrs. Burke derived little comfort from her presence.