The Stroke Of The Hour
by
“They won’t come to-night–sure.”
The girl looked again toward the west, where, here and there, bare poles, or branches of trees, or slips of underbrush, marked a road made across the plains through the snow. The sun was going down golden red, folding up the sky a wide, soft curtain of pink and mauve and deep purple merging into the fathomless blue, where already the stars were beginning to quiver. The house stood on the edge of a little forest, which had boldly asserted itself in the wide flatness. At this point in the west the prairie merged into an undulating territory, where hill and wood rolled away from the banks of the Saskatchewan, making another England in beauty. The forest was a sort of advance-post of that land of beauty.
Yet there was beauty, too, on this prairie, though there was nothing to the east but snow and the forest so far as eye could see. Nobility and peace and power brooded over the white world.
As the girl looked, it seemed as though the bosom of the land rose and fell. She had felt this vibrating life beat beneath the frozen surface. Now, as she gazed, she smiled sadly to herself, with drooping eyelids looking out from beneath strong brows.
“I know you–I know you,” she said, aloud. “You’ve got to take your toll. And when you’re lying asleep like that, or pretending to, you reach up–and kill. And yet you can be kind–ah, but you can be kind and beautiful! But you must have your toll one way or t’other.” She sighed and paused; then, after a moment, looking along the trail–“I don’t expect they’ll come to-night, and mebbe not to-morrow, if–if they stay for that.”
Her eyes closed, she shivered a little. Her lips drew tight, and her face seemed suddenly to get thinner. “But dad wouldn’t–no, he couldn’t, not considerin’–” Again she shut her eyes in pain.
Her face was now turned from the western road by which she had expected her travellers, and toward the east, where already the snow was taking on a faint bluish tint, a reflection of the sky deepening toward night in that half-circle of the horizon. Distant and a little bleak and cheerless the half-circle was looking now.
“No one–not for two weeks,” she said, in comment on the eastern trail, which was so little frequented in winter, and this year had been less travelled than ever. “It would be nice to have a neighbor,” she added, as she faced the west and the sinking sun again. “I get so lonely–just minutes I get lonely. But it’s them minutes that seem to count more than all the rest when they come. I expect that’s it–we don’t live in months and years, but just in minutes. It doesn’t take long for an earthquake to do its work–it’s seconds then…. P’r’aps dad won’t even come to-morrow,” she added, as she laid her hand on the latch. “It never seemed so long before, not even when he’s been away a week.” She laughed bitterly. “Even bad company’s better than no company at all. Sure. And Mickey has been here always when dad’s been away past times. Mickey was a fool, but he was company; and mebbe he’d have been better company if he’d been more of a scamp and less a fool. I dunno, but I really think he would. Bad company doesn’t put you off so.”
There was a scratching at the inside of the door. “My, if I didn’t forget Shako,” she said, “and he dying for a run!”
She opened the door quickly, and out jumped a Russian dog of almost full breed, with big, soft eyes like those of his mistress, and with the air of the north in every motion–like his mistress also.
“Come, Shako, a run–a run!”
An instant after she was flying off on a path toward the woods, her short skirts flying and showing limbs as graceful and shapely as those of any woman of that world of social grace which she had never seen; for she was a prairie girl through and through, born on the plains and fed on its scanty fare–scanty as to variety, at least. Backward and forward they ran, the girl shouting like a child of ten–she was twenty-three–her eyes flashing, her fine white teeth showing, her hands thrown up in sheer excess of animal life, her hair blowing about her face–brown, strong hair, wavy and plentiful.