
* A Project Gutenberg Canada Ebook *

This ebook is made available at no cost and with very few
restrictions. These restrictions apply only if (1) you make
a change in the ebook (other than alteration for different
display devices), or (2) you are making commercial use of
the ebook. If either of these conditions applies, please
check gutenberg.ca/links/licence.html before proceeding.

This work is in the Canadian public domain, but may be
under copyright in some countries. If you live outside
Canada, check your country's copyright laws.
IF THE BOOK IS UNDER COPYRIGHT IN YOUR COUNTRY,
DO NOT DOWNLOAD OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE.

Title: Grain
Author: Stead, Robert James Campbell (1880-1959)
Date of first publication: 1926
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Toronto: McClelland & Stewart
Date first posted: 29 August 2011
Date last updated: 29 August 2011
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #845

This ebook was produced by Gardner Buchanan, woodie4
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net






    By ROBERT STEAD


    _Grain_
    _The Smoking Flax_
    _The Cow Puncher_
    _The Homesteaders_
    _Neighbours_
    _Dennison Grant_



    GRAIN

    _By_ ROBERT STEAD

    McCLELLAND & STEWART
    PUBLISHERS : : TORONTO



    COPYRIGHT, 1926,
    BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY



GRAIN

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




GRAIN




CHAPTER ONE


The eleventh of April, 1896, is not generally known to be a date of
special significance, yet it was on that day, or, to be more exact, that
night, that the hero of this narrative made his entry into a not
over-hospitable world. Perhaps the term hero, with its suggestion of
high enterprise, sits inappropriately upon the chief character of a
somewhat commonplace tale; there was in Gander Stake little of that
quality which is associated with the clash of righteous steel or the
impact of noble purposes. Yet that he was without heroic fibre I will
not admit, and you who bear with me through these pages shall judge
whether or not the word is wholly unwarranted.

His advent in the Stake family and in the little farm settlement of
which it was a unit, was not, of course, quite unexpected. Perhaps his
eight-year-old brother, Jackson junior, a thin, dark-eyed, silent boy,
who found himself suddenly the recipient of a night's entertainment at
the neighboring farmhouse of Fraser Fyfe, was the only one in the
immediate circle to be taken entirely by surprise. But, even with the
added interest of the unforeseen, Jackie refused to be deeply stirred by
the latest family acquisition. He regarded the little, puckered,
wrinkled morsel shyly and without comment, but with an inward sense of
depression which sent him presently to the fields in search of
venturesome spring gophers.

To Mrs. Stake and her husband the impending event had been an occasion
for serious consideration and concern. It was eight years since Jackie's
arrival, but time had not entirely dulled the memory of that experience.

"You'll have a good doctor this time," Jackson had comforted his wife
and himself together. "Doctor Freeman is well spoken of in the
neighborhood."

Susie Stake clenched her fingers under the blankets in foreboding. "Good
enough, I guess--if he gets here in time. So was Doctor Blain a good
doctor, but he didn't get here.... Mrs. Martin----"

Jackson's great, hard hand found hers and pressed it in a passion of
inarticulate sympathy. Mrs. Martin, at the age of twenty-four, had been
rewarded for her contribution to the State--the third in as many
years--with a bed under six feet of frozen clay. The incident was too
recent to be disregarded. Susie Stake herself had stood in the snow by
that open grave, and wondered.

"It'll be spring," Jackson had argued, "an' the roads'll be open. Jackie
was in January, an' a howlin' blizzard."

Gander's arrival had been under more happy circumstances. The snows of
winter were gone, or nearly so, on the eleventh of April, and although
the streams were full of ice-cold water, and a bridge on the most
impassable of them had gone down with the current, trifles like these
were no deterrent to Dr. Freeman. He came on horseback, swimming the
streams that could not be waded, and drenched to the skin. For all his
haste Gander preceded him by twenty minutes, and, before the doctor's
arrival, had already sent his first lusty announcement into the world.

Dr. Freeman pronounced all well, and shared with Jackson Stake a pot of
strong tea and thick slabs of bread and butter. He loitered for an hour,
probably to justify the ten dollar fee which he would collect from
Jackson in the fall--if the crops were good. Then he straddled his horse
for home, and nature once more was left to take her course.

       *       *       *       *       *

There is no means of knowing at exactly what date young Gander began
making appraisals of his new environment. His immediate interests were
few and he concentrated upon them with imperious determination. His
disappointments he expressed in wails of incredible volume, and his
approvals he gurgled with equal if less lusty enthusiasm. He had not
asked for admission into the world; he had not at all been consulted
about a matter in which he, plainly, was most concerned; but, now that
he was in the world, he proposed that it should serve him.

Gander was utterly selfish. If he thought of his older brother at all it
probably was with contempt and hostility, feelings which were
reciprocated by young Jackson. If he thought of his father at all he no
doubt regarded him as an enormous, shaggy, but not dangerous animal,
given at times to grotesque antics apparently intended to be humorous,
and an unseemly curiosity concerning his--Gander's--toes, hair, and
absence of teeth. The suspension bridge of scalp across a chasm in his
little skull was a matter of concern to this great animal, who had once
or twice stroked his rough fingers gingerly across the gap, as though
they might fall in. His mother he took for granted. She supplied him
with all the needs of his little life--food, warmth, and attention, and
upon occasion he would reward her with an amiable gurgle, quite without
value on any market in the world, and yet unpurchasable by anything
those markets have to offer.

If he took note of his surroundings beyond the wooden cradle in which he
lay, the arms in which he was lifted, the rounded founts from which he
drew his nutriment, he must have marvelled at the habitation which Fate
had selected for his home. To him at first it would seem very big,
although his mother found it inconveniently small, and filled with
equipment of amazing variety and interest.

A huge bed occupied one corner of the room, and, next to his cradle, was
the most important article of furniture. Here his father and mother
slept. The bed could be screened off by means of a curtain, with gaudy
figures on it, which could be stretched along a wire. This Gander held
to be a wholly esthetic device for the display of the gaudy figures
already mentioned, which at a later age he took to represent angels,
and, still later, goblins. There was a stove, where a fire crackled
cheerfully, and a kettle sang most amiably, puffing a vigorous white
cloud out from its headless neck. When he was old enough to reach it he
attempted to stem that cloud with his little hand--an experiment he was
in no hurry to repeat. His mother rubbed baking soda upon the burn and
encouraged him to play drummer-boy with his uninjured member by means of
an iron ladle and a sonorous tin wash-pan.

The roof overhead was of boards--elm boards, as Gander learned when he
was older--supported on rafters of peeled poplar poles. Over these was a
layer of tarpaper, and, over that, poplar shingles nailed to the elm
boards. Long before Gander's time the shingles had cupped with the
weather, curling up at their discolored edges, and releasing small
round knots which left small round holes in the space they once had
occupied. When one of these holes coincided with a similar hole in the
elm board below, or straddled the gaunt cracks which now gaped between
the strips of lumber shrinking with the kitchen's heat, the fragile
tarpaper soon gave way. Through the apertures thus provided Gander
observed many a starry heaven, winter and summer, although his mother
had a thrifty habit of stuffing the major openings with old rags upon
the approach of frosty weather.

Frosty weather! Then, too, was something to observe. With an unreasoning
disregard for the fitness of things, the early settlers always made use
of shingle nails half an inch too long for the boards into which they
were driven. It was the only shingle nail they knew, and that every nail
should protrude through the board, splintering off a fragment at its
end, they accepted as inevitable, very much as they accepted early
sunrise in summer, and late sunrise in winter. In frosty weather each of
these nail-ends became a condensing point for the household vapors, and
a thousand little globules of ice formed in rows between the poplar
rafters, dripping a little when the heat from the stove overpowered the
cold at the other end of the nail, and recovering their losses through
the long, crackling night.

"Have to strip those rafters an' cover 'em with buildin' paper,
sometime," Jackson Stake remarked to his wife every winter.

"Yes," Susie Stake agreed. "Sometime."

The walls were of logs--round, poplar logs, the spaces between them
chinked and plastered. The logs, like the boards of the roof, had
undergone a drying and shrinking process which left the chinks and
plaster hanging loosely between, like idle brake-shoes on a wheel. A
well-directed poke with any rough instrument would sometimes dislodge a
chink altogether, and afford a loop-hole through which young adventurers
might watch for Indians. But this was a dangerous pastime, as Gander
discovered when he had been caught at it and rewarded with one of his
father's infrequent thrashings.

The floor, too, was of poplar boards, with the inevitable cracks between
them. The Stake family residence, it seemed, consisted largely of
cracks. Jackson himself had hauled the logs in the winter of '85, the
first winter after he had filed on the homestead. Jackson's quarter was
in brush country, not far from a lake, and although his own land
provided no timber worth while, there were poplar and elm, and some oak,
on the rougher Government lands that abruptly broke into deep ravines
plunging down into the valley. Some of these logs he hauled to the
portable mill at the head of the lake and had them sawn into boards and
shingles.

Had Jackson Stake homesteaded on the open prairie further south his
first house would, no doubt, have been of sods, with a sod roof covered
with yellow clay that baked itself impervious under the hot sun; not so
esthetic a building material as logs and plaster, but less subject to
cracks. But the young settler carried from the wooded East in which he
had been born a sort of superstitious fear of the prairie.

"That open country looks sleek enough, but so does a bald head," he
remarked to his neighbor, Fraser Fyfe. "I like to see a few bristles
stickin' through, if only to encourage cultivation."

Jackson's own sandy hair stood in thick curls about his big head, and
he scuffled it with his fingers as he talked. There was a cheerful
virility about him, and when he had promised Susan Harden a frame house
with lathed and plastered walls and an upstairs she had said yes, not
for the house, but for himself. But that was before he left the East,
when he and his hopes were young. Gander was driving a four-horse team
before the ribs of his father's frame house at last rose stark against
the prairie sky.

The boards of the floor had knots, like the shingles of the roof, but
not so many of them fell out. Susie Stake's regular scrubbings kept the
floor from drying up, and the knots held their ground. Indeed, as the
wear of the softer lumber went on about them, they more than held their
ground; they rose in little hummocks and elevations over the surrounding
plain. When the table was set for company, as happened once in a blue
moon, care had to be taken to set all the legs on the hill-tops, or all
in the valleys beneath. "A teetering table," said Jackson Stake, "is
mighty hard on manners, an' ours can't stand no unnecessary
provocation."

As soon as he could walk Gander was allowed to visit the wide, wide
world on his own account. He had already explored most of the farmyard
by a process of propulsions which was neither creeping nor crawling, but
a combination of both. Anchoring himself on his hands he would draw his
right knee up to his wrists, then heave forward, dragging the left leg
inert. From the standpoint of gracefulness it left something to be
desired, but as a means of locomotion it was simple and effective. It
enabled him to explore the stables, and, upon a certain great occasion,
to make the acquaintance of the family pig. Young Jackson, who
retrieved him, told at school that he didn't know which was which, but
that was an exaggeration.

In course of time Gander made the discovery that both legs might be used
in travel, and from then on he assumed an upright position, with
intermittent relapses to the horizontal. As his effective range
increased he roved further and further afield, pursuing gophers and
butterflies, and proving all things by the child's simple test of
thrusting them into his mouth. He was fond of food in all its forms, but
he disliked water, unless mixed with earth to the consistency of mud,
when he found it very agreeable. He protested regularly against being
put to sleep in the little box-bed which succeeded his cradle, but he
loved to lie in the grass under the afternoon sun, and he gave his
father and mother more than one uneasy hour by his protracted naps in
distant corners of the farm.

He was fond of horses. He wandered among their feet at the peril of his
life, but without mishap from that source. He was the foster-child of
the family collie, Queenie, in whom he confided all his troubles, and
who was usually the first to locate him when he wandered too far from
home. He hated geese, having had a disastrous encounter with that
masculine bully of the farmyard from whom he was afterwards to derive
his appellation; but he admired the turkey-gobbler, who strutted around
with his great tail spread until it scraped along the earth and his
bulging blood-red neck threatening instant apoplexy. He had discovered
that when this gentleman's vanity was at its height sticks might be
thrown at him, from a distance, with reasonable impunity. Ducks he
loved. He would sit by the duck pond for hours watching them turn tail
up as they grubbed among the grassy roots, or filtering juicy morsels
out of the water through their broad, chattery bills. With hens he had
little concern. He regarded them somewhat as a small boy regards girls,
as objects of slight interest and no possible importance. He liked his
mother, tolerated his father, and hated his brother Jackson. But he


loved Queenie.

It was when he was three years old that an incident occurred which
annoyed him somewhat, and which needs to be told. A man with a black
coat and a funny collar buttoned behind arrived that day at the Stake
homestead, in time for dinner. That the event was of unusual importance
Gander knew by the production of his mother's only white tablecloth, by
the killing of one of the hens which thronged the kitchen door, and, in
particular, by the wholly unwarranted scrubbing to which he himself had
been subjected. He afterwards recalled that the hen had been killed
before the arrival of the stranger, which suggested collusion on the
part of his mother, but that point had escaped him at the moment.

The stranger spoke to him pleasantly, but Gander maintained a haughty
aloofness. He had suspicions. He observed that the visitor's vest went
right up to his collar, and he surmised that he was without a shirt, but
he kept this deduction quite to himself. Had he known to what
indignities he was to be subjected it might have been a different story,
but for the moment the discomfort of a clean wash and clean clothes was
balanced by the prospect of hen with dumplings, and one must take the
bitter with the sweet in life, mustn't he? Through some error his mother
referred to the savory stew before her as chicken. Gander was about to
mouth a prompt correction when he was brought up short by one of those
telepathic despatches which mothers were able to broadcast long before
the discovery of radio. He lapsed into a bewildered silence. Obviously
strange doings were afoot.

It was Jackson Stake's practice to ask a blessing before meals--a
commendable hang-over from his Puritan ancestry. The exact purport of
this ceremony Gander had never been able to learn, as his father always
confided in his plate, rattling the words off in a great hurry, as
though in fear of being caught at it. It was Gander's belief that the
purpose of the blessing was to give everyone an equal start--a purpose
which he thwarted as often as possible by surreptitious plunderings in
his potatoes and gravy. To-day the stranger was asked to say the
blessing, which he did in a quite audible voice. Gander caught enough of
his words to gather that they involved, in some way, the Stake family;
they were not mentioned by name, but by suggestion or allusion so
obvious that even Gander could not be misled. He watched his father
closely and was somewhat disappointed to find when the long blessing was
finished that relationships remained quite cordial.

The meal was a trying one for Gander. He had coveted intensely one of
the "chicken's" drum-sticks, but the first went to the stranger, and the
second, in defiance of all precedent, to his father! Gander expostulated
against this outrage, and although his mother sought to convince him
that the neck was a particularly choice morsel, he gulped his dinner
through a mist of indignant tears.

Matters improved when the meal was finished. The visitor read from a
book, and even sang, an exercise in which the boy joined lustily.
Suddenly he found himself quite the centre of interest. His father and
mother were standing, with Gander between them, and the stranger in
front. They were answering a number of questions, somewhat hesitatingly,
Gander thought, and in a low voice, as though in fear of being
overheard. Then, quite without warning, the stranger splashed a few
drops of water on his head.

Gander's first impulse was belligerent, but the stranger spoke to him so
pleasantly that it was impossible to impute hostile intent, so he let
the incident pass with a dignified rebuke.

"I ain't dirty," he said. "I got washed before dinner, dang it all!"

The "dang it all" was his own mature and triumphant climax, borrowed
from his father's vocabulary, and absolutely unused until that very
moment. Gander prided himself upon having carried it off rather well. In
the hubbub which followed his remark he failed to catch the fact that he
had been christened William Harden.

And not one of them knew that his name was to be Gander!




CHAPTER TWO


By all the rules upon which insurance companies base what they call the
expectation of life Gander should have been dead long before he reached
his tenth anniversary. In that brief decade he had piloted his little
ship, quite without medical interference, through the seas of those
infantile diseases, measles, whooping cough, and scarlet fever. Gander
regarded these as mere incidents, annoying for the few days during which
they enforced his confinement in the house, but otherwise without
significance. His attack by a malady known locally as the prairie itch
was a more serious matter; it flourished in winter, when he wore his
heavy woolens, and subjected him to genuine discomfort when he sat by
the kitchen stove after being out in the cold. There he would scratch
and squirm until it was time to go to bed. His mother gave him sulphur
and molasses, and, when one of his numerous colds threatened to rasp the
tonsils out of his throat, fed him on a concoction of onions boiled in
vinegar.

Gander had not at that time read Genesis, nor, for that matter, has he
yet, so far as I am aware, but he believed with our first parents that
all the fruits of the field were given to man for his subsistence, and
he conducted himself accordingly. Strawberries, raspberries, saskatoons,
currants, chokeberries, rose-haws, "buffalo beans"--not commonly
regarded as edible--found their way into his capacious little maw with
no more serious results than may be set right by timely administrations
of that well-known lubricant which every adult considers indispensable
to the health of children, but which no one takes on his own account
after he has reached the age of self-determination. He ate the leaves of
every flower of the prairie, but was particularly partial to rose leaves
and the purple blooms of the so-called prairie crocus. He gnawed the
bark from the toothsome red willow, and he dug up "snake" root and ate
it moist and earthy as it came from its natural element. He chewed the
rank weeds and cattails that grew in the marsh at the head of the lake,
and, under cover of the deepest secrecy, he smoked sections of porous
cane which he cut from the shanks of discarded buggy whips.

His adventures with disease and foodstuffs by no means covered the range
of Gander's hazards. Before he was ten he twice had fallen into the
lake; once in summer, from a log upon which he had improvised a raft,
and once in winter, when he skated into a fishing hole. In each case he
managed to get out again, and, in the former instance, did not bother to
go home to report the occurrence.

His winter plunge was more serious. By much coaxing Gander had persuaded
his father to exchange the price of four bushels of wheat for a pair of
skates. In those days the luxury of special skating boots, with the
blades securely screwed to the soles, was unknown, at least in Gander's
circles, or perhaps this adventure would not have taken place. Ten
bushels of wheat for boots and skates would have seemed prohibitive to
even so indulgent a father as Jackson Stake. The skates of that day
could be attached to any stout farm boot, provided the heel or sole were
not too badly worn away. Adjustments were made by means of a key, in the
genial neighborhood of the kitchen stove; then one walked to the ice
with his skates flung over his shoulder, and snapped them to place as he
sat on a stone or a stump by the edge of the lake. Gander had done all
this, and was swinging up and down the lake in great exhilaration of
spirit, the ice ringing under his steel blades, when pop! into the hole
he went. Some one had made the hole the previous day for spearing fish,
and the tissue of ice which had formed during the night was not strong
enough to bear the child's weight. He splashed over his head, but bobbed
up again in an instant; flung out his arms, and managed to find
hand-hold on some of the rough chopped ice about the hole.

"O-o-h!" said Gander, "it's cold!" his teeth already chattering. His
first impulse was to shout for help, but it was a mile and a half to his
father's house, and there was not a chance in a thousand of any one
being within reach of his voice. No one--but Queenie! The dog had come
down to the lake with him, and was off in the bush, hunting rabbits.

"Oh, Queenie, Queenie!" he called, and then, because he was essentially
religious, he began to pray. "Oh, God, make Queenie hear me," he cried,
"and I won't----" But before he had made any indiscreet commitments the
dog appeared, racing toward him.

"All right, God," he said, his assurance returning. "I guess Queenie an'
me can make it."

The dog came close to the black hole in the ice, now slopping water over
its edge, and Gander, after one or two unsuccessful attempts, during
which he was almost at the point of praying again, managed to slip one
hand through her leather collar. "Now, Queenie, pull!" he threatened.
"You pull me out or I'll pull you in."

The dog pulled, and Gander had enough presence of mind not to expect to
be pulled out perpendicularly. He threw his body into a horizontal
position, as in swimming. This brought one of his feet into contact with
the solid ice at the opposite side of the hole. A thrust, a lurch, a
scramble, and he was up in safety again. He whipped his skates from his
boots and started on a run for home.

"Well, for the soul or sake o' me!" his mother exclaimed as Gander
plunged through the door, panting to exhaustion, with Queenie at his
heels. "What you been up to?... My land, did you fall in the lake?" She
was on her knees beside him then, her heart suddenly choked with
concern. Gander's outer clothes were a thick icy film, but his run had
kept his body warm. The buttons were frozen fast in their buttonholes,
so his mother ripped the trousers down the outside of the leg until they
could be drawn off him. In a few minutes she had him in bed with a hot
stove-lid at his feet and a glass of hot chokeberry wine in his stomach.
Gander experienced a sense of delicious comfort, and presently fell
asleep. When he awoke it was morning, and he was as fit as ever.

By the time Gander was eight he was shooting gophers with a
muzzle-loading shotgun that had been in the family for at least a
generation. He carried his powder and shot in old-fashioned horns made
for the purpose, and reloaded the gun himself, out alone on the
prairies. First he would pour a charge of powder into the barrel--a
barrel so long (and the boy so short) that he had to stand it at a slope
in order to reach its muzzle--then force it down with a crumpled lump of
paper in front of his ramrod. The powder must be well pounded down,
after which the charge of shot is poured in, and held to place by
another wad of paper, which need not be pounded down quite so hard as
the first. Then you turn the gun end for end, raise the hammer, and
examine the nipple cautiously, to make sure that the powder has come
down all the way. If not, you will do well to drop a few grains of
powder from your horn straight into the nipple; it may save you a
mis-fire, and the annoyance of having to do it afterward. Having made
sure that the powder has come down all right you take the box of
percussion caps out of your pants pocket--the little box with the lid
which never comes off easily and never goes on straight--and you press a
cap home on the nipple. Then you let the hammer carefully down to place,
and you are ready for the next gopher.

"A dangerous business!" you say. "Incredibly dangerous for a boy of
eight!" Not so dangerous as dodging street cars and automobiles, which,
we may remember, were not among the menaces threatening young Gander's
life.

As a matter of fact, Gander met with only one mishap in all his shooting
experiences. That was the summer he was ten. He had been hunting plover,
and was walking homeward with his empty gun swung across his shoulder,
when, cresting a ridge that commanded a small pond, he was astonished to
see a dozen or more grey geese resting at the water's edge. It is an
unusual thing for the wild goose to rest without sentries on guard, but
fancied security may be the undoing of even a goose. The boy sank as
silently as an Indian into the grass; then drew himself gently back over
the ridge and out of sight. There he quickly reloaded his gun, pouring
in twice the charges he would have used for plover, and then, his heart
thumping like a drum, he wormed his way like a snake back up to the
crest of the ridge.

Gander never had shot a goose; this was his chance of sudden glory.
Steady, Gander, steady! What will they say at home when you carry in a
great grey goose--maybe two of them? What will they say at school? What
will that detested brother Jackie say, who is forever belittling your
marksmanship? Gander raised his gun slowly. The blood was swirling in
his head, but his hand was steady. There were two geese sitting right in
a row; a long shot but a good target. Gander lined them with his sight,
being careful to keep his eye close down to the breech. There they are,
covered by it! Gander hugged the stock to his shoulder and fired the
left barrel--he had grown into the habit of always firing the left
barrel first, because that was the rear trigger, and his little arm was
too short to reach the other trigger with comfort.

What happened next Gander never knew. When he awoke the sun was just
setting--and it was mid-afternoon when he fired! He arose on his left
arm, but a stab of pain flattened him again on the grass. His right arm
seemed paralyzed. There was something clammy and sticky about his face.
He rubbed his cheek and found a cut now choked with a plaster of dried
blood. The discovery sent a strange creepy feeling up his spine. Had he
shot himself? Was he dying? The tears came into his eyes--he was only
ten--and the thought of dying alone on the prairie came as near to
terrifying him as anything ever had done. He wished Queenie were there,
but he had forbidden her to come on this trip, because, with all her
amiable qualities, she had an annoying habit of racing in among the
plover at inopportune moments. She was a collie, not a bird dog. Once
again his religious subconsciousness asserted itself, and he began to
pray. Then his eye fell on his gun, lying some paces away, and the sight
stirred him to action.

He arose slowly. He got up on his knees, he stood on his legs. To his
surprise and joy they did not collapse under him. Then he experimented
with his right arm. It was stiff and sore, but he could hold it out. He
even could swing it a little.

"I guess it ain't broke, or I couldn't do that," he consoled himself.
And suddenly his heart was very light as he realized that he was not
about to die, after all.

He picked up his gun and examined it. It appeared to be none the worse;
it was docile in his hands. He stroked the long, lean barrel; it gave no
hint of its recent treachery.

"Just a kick," he soliloquized, a little sheepish now over his scare.
"But gee--didn't it spill me! Wonder what made it kick like that? I held
it good an' tight." Then, his mind suddenly connecting up with recent
events--"Wonder if I got a goose!"

He raced down to the water's edge, all his injuries forgotten. There
were the tracks, right there in the mud. He hunted around. Just as he
was about convinced that he had missed his mark he almost fell over a
stout body in a clump of grass. He seized it. A grey goose--a great big
grey goose! When he lifted it by the head it seemed almost as long as
himself. With a whoop he gathered up his gun and started on a run for
home.

"Pretty late out shootin', ain't yuh?" his father challenged, as he
stood in the door. "Got your mother scared half--jumpin' jack rabbits,
what's that? A goose!" His father was beside him with a great stride.
"A dandy, ain't he? Good boy, Bill! But you're all over blood--should be
more careful carryin' it. Good boy!"

It was the proudest moment in Gander's life. What were a cut face and a
bruised arm to glory like this?

"Gun kicked a bit," he explained. "Nothin' much. Cut my face a bit."

"You might ha' been killed," his mother commented. "I'm scared to death
some day you'll come home dead. Well, there's another goose to pluck an'
clean an' stuff an' cook----"

"Gee, we ain't had a goose for a dog's age," Gander protested. He
resented his mother's lack of enthusiasm. Hadn't he shot a goose, and he
was only ten? He was beginning to feel that mothers didn't understand.
His father did.

"What did you do--fire both barrels at once?" his father asked him. He
had the gun in his hands, examining it.

"No--just the left. Look out for it--the right's loaded."

His father was dropping the ramrod down the barrels. "'Tain't!" he said
at length. "No charge in this gun!"

The two men looked at each other for a full minute.

"Sure you loaded both barrels?"

"Sure. I came up on the geese sudden, with the gun emp'y. Then I dodged
back behind the ridge an' loaded 'er--double charge in both barrels. But
I only fired one--I'm sure o' that."

His father hung the gun on its two nails over the door before he spoke.
"Guess you rammed both charges into one barrel, Bill," he said,
solemnly. "It's a God's mercy you ain't killed."

Two days later Jackson Stake brought a new breech-loading shotgun home
from Plainville. "Take that, Bill," he said, "an' throw that ol'
gopher-duster in the bone-yard."

Gander's eyes jumped, and he committed one of those rare indiscretions
in the Stake household--he gave evidence of affection. He actually put
his arms around his father. And Jackson Stake absent-mindedly rested his
hand in the boy's tousled hair for a fraction of a moment.

"Well of all things!" said Susie Stake. "I bet that weepon cost the
price of a load o' wheat."

"May be cheaper 'n a funeral at that," was her husband's dry rejoinder.




CHAPTER THREE


Gander had started to school the April he was five years old. Jackie was
then thirteen, and too big to be spared from the work of the farm, but
he walked the mile and a half with Gander to the prairie schoolhouse and
presented him to the teacher, Miss Evelyn Fry.

"This is my brother Bill," he said. "Mother sent 'im to school."

Miss Fry regarded the little chap in the new cottonade pants with the
pockets with some misgivings.

"Looks small," she said. "How old is he?"

"Five."

"Sure he's five, Jackson?"

"Well, he'll be five this week, if that'll do you," said Jackie,
belligerently.

Miss Fry's second appraisal of Gander seemed more favorable. She had to
be on guard against parents sending their children under school age as
the easiest means of disposing of them. She meant that her school should
not be exactly a nursery.

"All right, William," she said. "Are you going to be a good pupil?"

William was non-committal.

"I'm sure you are," she pressed, reaching down and taking up one of his
lean hands in hers. An hour ago Susie Stake had scrubbed it clean as one
scouring could make it, but the business of pelting clods of wet earth
at venturesome spring gophers along the trail had left its marks of
toil. Miss Fry was accustomed to soiled hands, with deep lines of
mourning under the finger nails.

"I'm sure you're going to be a good pupil," she repeated, "and learn to
read, and spell, and count numbers?"

Gander was in a difficulty, and he studied the dusty floor, as though in
it he might find some solution of his problem. The fact is he had no
idea what Miss Fry meant by pupil. But he was favorably impressed by
this young person, so fresh and dainty in comparison with his
over-worked mother, who was almost the only other woman he knew.

"Guess so," he compromised, twining his thin legs around each other as
an outlet for his embarrassment.

"You will sit with Tommy Burge," Miss Fry told him. "Tommy, this is
William Stake. Show him your desk and help him to feel at home."

The Burges lived south of the school, on the road to Plainville, and
three miles from the Stake homestead. Gander had seen Tommy once or
twice, and knew him by sight, but no acquaintance had been developed. He
was as slim as Gander, with long legs and a fair face peppered with
freckles in large flakes like oatmeal, a circumstance which had gained
for him the cognomen of Porridge.

Jackie had left for home without further formality. He was a man now,
helping his father to clean wheat, and he had been a little humiliated
by having to go to the school at all, even to accompany his brother. Of
course, Jackie attended school during the winter months along with the
other big boys of the neighborhood, but that was different.

Tommy Burge took Gander in charge. "This is our seat," he explained. "If
you got any books you can stick 'em in there," indicating a shelf under
the desk.

"Ain't got any," said Gander. Thereupon the two boys for an instant
looked into each other's eyes, blushed under the searching gaze of
childhood, giggled, and Gander knew they would be friends.

Miss Fry rang a bell, and the children who had been playing outside
while Gander was being introduced to his new surroundings came storming
in. Storming is the word--there is no other for it. They jammed in the
doorway, the bigger boys pushing or tripping the smaller ones and
pulling the hair of the little girls, who squealed, and would have been
offended had they been denied this playful gallantry. A stern word from
Miss Fry checked the stampede, and the mass disentangled. As each child
entered the room he or she developed an over-powering thirst, which
deflected the procession toward the water pail sitting on a bench in a
corner. There was but one drinking cup, and the water had been in the
room since the previous Friday--this was Monday--but neither of these
facts checked the thirst or, so far as ever could be learned, affected
the health of the children. They drank in turns, and as each finished he
threw what remained in the cup ostensibly on the floor, but actually on
the legs of his companions. There was then a mild fight to be next in
turn, in which the last user generally contrived to thrust the cup into
a certain selected pair of hands--a mark of favoritism which never
passed unnoticed or without comment.

Miss Fry regarded this behavior with disapproval. Before she had begun
her career as teacher of Willow Green School she had entertained visions
of well-trained and orderly children marching in double file to the
"Left--right" which she would beat out with the precision of a drill
sergeant. Her first day's teaching had been one of disillusionment. With
a good deal of trouble she had lined the children up at the door, but
just as her ruler began to beat time two of the bigger boys linked hands
and rushed the whole group pell-mell into the school, almost trampling
the teacher as they came.

"That's the way they load steers at the stockyards at Plainville," they
explained to her proudly.

She had plans to stop all this--when she could. But she was only
eighteen years old; she was a hundred miles from home, and a little
terrified by this chaos of youthful energy. She noted the farm-bred
muscles of her older boys and remembered that her parents had prophesied
disaster. These boys were not accustomed to taking orders; if they
obeyed it was because it pleased them to do so, or because they liked
her--not because they were afraid of her. She took these things into
consideration, and, being wise for her years, held her throne by
judicious concessions.

When the children finally were herded into their seats they proved to be
much less numerous than the rabble about the door and the water pail
would have suggested. To be exact, there were just fourteen of them.
Willow Green School District had twenty-seven pupils of school age on
its register, but the attendance fell off sharply with the commencement
of farm operations in the spring, when all the older boys, and most of
the girls over twelve, were kept at home to help in the fields or about
the house. True, there were always two or three new pupils--such as
Gander--to take up the vacant spaces. So the dove-tailing of the

generations goes on.

If Gander had been closely observant of his environment--he was not, as
his entire attention was occupied with an approving and sometimes
suggestive criticism of a drawing which Tommy Burge was perfecting under
cover of his First Reader, and which was confidentially understood to
portray Miss Fry, or an idealization of Miss Fry, as conceived by Master
Tommy; a sort of Futurist art, of bold strokes and conspicuous angles,
with height and breadth but without perspective--had Gander been
observant of his environment he would have seen a room of four walls and
a ceiling, with a door in the east, windows in the north, and
blackboards above the wainscoting on the west and south. The walls were
in need of whitewash, and the woodwork, of paint--a detail which Gander
would not have noticed, had he been never so observant. Two rows of
desks made of soft pine lumber, which lent itself admirably to the
engraving of initials and other adornments, faced the teacher's table
placed at the west end of the room on a platform raised a few inches
above the floor. In the southwest corner was a dilapidated organ, bought
by the Ladies' Aid of Willow Green School District with the proceeds of
two box socials, as an incentive to singing at the church services held
in the school on Sundays. On the south wall, over the blackboard, hung a
map of Canada and a map of Manitoba, both of which were kept rolled up
except during the period of geography lessons; and on the west wall,
over the teacher's head, was a lithograph of Sir John Macdonald, for
many years Prime Minister of Canada, but now sufficiently dead to have
his portrait displayed in a schoolroom without suggestion of partizan
designs upon the young minds exposed to its contagion. Even yet there
were rumblings in the school board and at the annual meetings over the
propriety of bringing the children under such sinister influences, and a
movement to hang the portrait of Sir Wilfred Laurier beside that of Sir
John had collapsed only when it was discovered that to have it framed
would cost two dollars.

One object did, indeed, catch Gander's attention, and he consulted his
friend and mentor, Tommy Burge, thereon. It was a black daub on the
plaster ceiling above the huge box stove which occupied the centre of
the room, between the two rows of seats, and served the purpose, in cold
weather, of rendering the remote corners somewhat less Arctic and the
seats immediately alongside insufferably torrid.

"What's that?" he whispered to Tommy, indicating the daub with an
up-pointed finger safe behind his desk from the teacher's view.

"Ink," said Thomas. "Bottle blew up."

This was interesting. This was something worth while.

"How?" Gander demanded.

"Ink was froze, an' Dick Claus put it on the stove to thaw, an' forgot
about it, an' it blew up, an----"

"Thomas, I'm afraid you're talking more than is necessary. William, this
is your first day in school, but you must learn not to talk during the
periods of study."

Gander had no idea what was meant by periods of study, but he understood
that he had incurred the teacher's displeasure. He squirmed in his seat
and felt uncomfortable, until Tommy, with a couple of deft touches,
revised his portrait of Miss Fry in keeping with the mood of the moment,
and restored Gander's good humor. Gander giggled.

"William, what are you laughing at?"

No answer, but a terrific heart-fluttering under Gander's blouse.

"William, you must tell me what you were laughing at."

Gander tried to speak, but the roof of his mouth had gone suddenly dry,
and he made only an incoherent gasp. And Miss Fry was actually coming
down the aisle!

Meanwhile the ill-fated work of art lay under Tommy's reader. With
conspicuous presence of mind Tommy added another stroke or two while
Miss Fry approached.

The teacher looked at the drawing for a moment as it lay on the desk,
then lifted it in her hand. "Who is this supposed to represent, Tommy?"
she demanded.

"John A." was Tommy's prompt rejoinder. The politics of Tommy's father,
Martin Burge, were well known to be the antithesis of that espoused by
the distinguished statesman whose portrait hung above the teacher's
desk. Indeed, it had been Mrs. Burge who had offered to supply, for the
more appropriate adornment of the room, the picture of Sir Wilfred which
she had obtained as a premium with a year's subscription to the Winnipeg
_Tribune_.

Miss Fry crumpled the paper in her hand, lifted the lid of the box
stove, and with great deliberation dropped the scrap of Liberal
propaganda inside. "You ought to set your new seat-mate a better
example, Tommy," she said. "No more of this nonsense, or you will stay
in at recess."

Tommy and Gander were sobered by this episode, but not for long. Percy
Marsh, who occupied the seat immediately behind, came to the relief of
their drooping spirits. He contrived to drop another scrap of paper
between Tommy and Gander. This, when surreptitiously smoothed out,
revealed a poem by Master Marsh:

    "Miss Fry
    Couldn't hurt a fly."

Tommy spelled this out laboriously, grasped its meaning, and managed to
convey it to Gander while the subject of the poem was working out a
problem in division on the blackboard for the Second Class. Gander felt
reassured, not so much by this information as by the temerity which
dared to express it almost under the teacher's eye. The poem was given a
timely touch by Tommy's capture of a fly, almost at that moment, from
which he proceeded to extract the legs and wings for his own and
Gander's amusement.

At first recess Gander was initiated into a game known as Pom, Pom,
Pull-away. His instincts ran more to baseball, but a considerable pond
in the centre of the school-yard made that game impracticable; besides,
no one had a ball. Pom, Pom, Pull-away could be played on the relatively
dry area beside the school. It consisted of choosing sides and placing
two bases, on each of which a "prisoner" was located. To rescue the
prisoner one had to run across the enemy's flank, and, if captured by
them, became an additional prisoner on the base. The game was conducted
to the accompaniment of a chant:

    "Pom, Pom, Pull-away,
    If you don't come I'll pull you away!"

For some time Gander remained in the safety of his home camp, as was
becoming in a raw recruit, but as the game proceeded his courage rose.
He saw other boys distinguishing themselves and the call to glory fell
not unheeded on his ears. A little girl about his own age--Josephine
Burge, sister of his seat-mate Tommy--in a pink calico dress which
Gander thought very beautiful, was languishing in jail. Percy Marsh had
rushed to her rescue, and, being one of the bigger boys, had drawn all
the enemy's fire. They were pursuing him over the school-yard, and, in
the midst of this deployment, Gander went "over the top." Silently and
unnoticed he dashed to the aid of the prisoner, whose hand was
outstretched toward him as far as her lithe little body would reach,
because it was a rule of the game that the moment she was touched by one
of her side she was free. Their hands met, clasped, and home they ran in
triumph together.

"Hurrah for Billie Stake! Good boy, young Stake!" cried his comrades.
Glory was his, and a new joy of life was upon him.

That was the first time he ever held Jo Burge's hand....

At noon the boys ate their lunches squatted against the sunny side of
the school building; the girls, always more fastidious, ate theirs from
their desks inside. Miss Fry walked the half mile to her boarding-house
on the Gordon farm, returning within the hour to resume her classes at
one o'clock. Gander had brought his lunch in a school-bag which his
mother had made from the better sections of a discarded grain sack, and
he now produced it with some hesitation, being a shy boy, and struggling
with an intense desire to go off somewhere and eat it by himself. But
Tommy Burge had taken him under his wing, and before he knew it he had
his bread-and-butter sandwiches spread out on his knees before him, and
was attacking them with a will. There were two thick sandwiches, two
cookies, and a hard-boiled egg. Gander noted that his luncheon--he
called it his dinner--did not suffer by comparison with those about him,
some of which consisted of bread and butter only; coarse, heavy bread
such as Susie Stake would never have drawn from her oven, or, if she
had, would have promptly thrown to her pigs or chickens.

They gulped their meal quickly, but interlarded it with conversation.

"You near caught it th' smornin', Porridge," Dick Claus--he of the
ink-bottle episode--remarked to Tommy Burge. "Ol' Fry's on your trail,
all right."

"Huh," said Tommy. "She ain't, neither."

"What you mean sayin' that was John A.?" Pete Loudy wanted to know. "Eh?
I've a mind to bloody yer nose for it." Pete was Nine, and had the
confidence of his years, especially when addressing Six.

"Don't take that, Porridge," one or two of the older boys, always eager
for a fight which involved no risk to themselves, counselled. "Don' be
scared of him because he's big. You can lick 'im, easy."

But Tommy had a well-developed sense of proportion. He knew--probably by
experience--the difference between Six and Nine, so he smiled amiably
upon Pete's truculent gestures, as though he were quite in sympathy with
the champion of John A.'s memory.

Gander was less fortunate. His attention had been drawn to a portion of
Peter's unfinished lunch; dark, soggy bread, incredibly uninviting.
Gander was by no means fastidious but he always had been accustomed to
wholesome food. This dark mass fascinated him and seemed to set some
mechanism in his stomach in reverse gear. His intent observation did
not escape Peter's notice.

"Well, what's a-matter with it?" Pete demanded.

"It's rotten," Gander observed, with great frankness.

This, of course, was too much. Pete bounced upon the little boy,
punching at his head and face.

It was Gander's first engagement of any consequence and his tactics were
simple and spontaneous. He wrapped his arms about his face and shrieked
at the top of his voice. The other boys looked on, a little startled,
but unwilling to interfere, partly from a wholesome respect for Pete's
prowess, and partly from their natural human enjoyment of a fight. Only
Tommy Burge, who felt a moral responsibility for his seat-mate, tugged
half-heartedly at a broken end of Pete's suspenders.

Gander's screams brought the girls running out of the school. They
formed a segment of a circle a little way from the centre of
hostilities, horrified at the brutality of the master sex and eager to
miss none of its manifestations. Suddenly from among them dashed a
little figure in pink calico, and with cheeks blazing with indignation
redder than her dress.

"Itth th' little Thtake boy!" she cried, and buried her fingers in Pete
Loudy's hair. Her hands were small but her grip was astonishingly
strong, and she had no squeamishness about her method of attack. Pete's
shriek rose higher than the best of Gander's. He turned on his new
assailant, but Tommy Burge, encouraged, or ashamed, as the case may be,
by his sister's onset, seized him by the waist and down they went
together. By the time Pete had wriggled loose his better judgment had
cooled his fighting ardor. To hit a girl was considered bad form even in
a school-yard where the boys fought with each other as their parents
had fought with the wilderness--with the single idea of victory, and few
compunctions about the method of attaining it. Besides, girls were
notoriously tattle-tales. If he hit Jo Burge it surely would be reported
to Miss Fry, and Pete had no great reserve of good conduct to his
credit.

"Pete, Pete, tenderfeet!" the other boys ridiculed him, finding safety
in his discomfiture. "Fightin' with the girls!"

"Didn't, neither," Pete defended himself, shame-facedly. "Whole fam'ly
piled on me----"

Meanwhile Gander had disentangled himself, and, somewhat to his
surprise, had found no serious injuries. A little miss, of whose
acquaintance at that time he had not the honor, stuck a taunting finger
in his face. "I know who your girl is," she said. "It's Jo Burge!"

Gander had no very clear idea what it meant to have a girl, but supposed
it was quite reprehensible. Still, there had been something in that
little tormentor's manner that suggested she would have been not
unwilling to change places with Josephine Burge.

The incident excited within Gander an interest in Tommy's sister. During
the afternoon he once or twice ventured to glance in Jo's direction,
and, curiously enough, found that at the same moment she was glancing in
his. A strange color flowed through Gander's dark skin as a result of
these coincidences, and he found his attention distracted from a
narrative concerning a cat, a hat, and a rat, in which Miss Fry had
sought to interest him.

At afternoon recess the sport took another form. This was known as
"Drowndin' Out Gophers." The school water pail, a broken baseball bat,
and such sticks or clubs as could be found, were the necessary
equipment. On a dry knoll near the school several gophers were rejoicing
in the sun of early spring after their long winter indoors, and, sitting
up staunchly upon their tails, were sending their challenging whistle
forth to the world.

The game consisted in chasing a gopher into a hole and pouring water,
carried from a nearby pond, down after him. When the hole was full of
water the gopher, willy-nilly, must come out. The bedraggled, shivering
little creature stirred no sympathy in the circle of children around the
hole, each eager to prove his prowess by being the first to "lam" the
victim. Half dazed with water and fright he would nevertheless put up a
remarkable dash for liberty, twisting and doubling about among his
pursuers' feet, and sometimes actually reaching another hole unharmed,
but even in such case he only had postponed, he had not escaped, the
inevitable end of the sport. More water would be carried, and again he
would be forced into the open, more terrified and exhausted than before,
until a merciful blow ended his suffering. Gander joined in the chase
with shrieks of delight, and found running beside him, more than once,
that little form in the pink calico. How she could run! Gander had
counted himself speedy for his age, but this little girl was almost, if
not quite, a match for him. As she ran her flimsy dress would billow
high above her knees, but Gander and most of his companions were yet in
the age of innocence. When, years later, he herded cows with Jo Burge,
he used to think of those races.

At four o'clock Gander started for home, swinging his empty school-bag
about his head and talking to himself after the manner of children who
spend much of their time alone. As it happened no other pupils lived in
Gander's direction, so he walked the mile and a half with no
companionship except his own imaginings. These were busy with the events
of the day, or, rather, with anticipated developments built on the day's
events. The anticipations included a tremendous thrashing administered
to Pete Loudy in the admiring presence of Josephine Burge; the
persuasion of his mother to include another hard-boiled egg in his
luncheon which he could share with Tommy Burge; and a little, elusive,
shy half-resolution to gather a handful of crocuses for presentation to
the most beautiful of all women, Miss Evelyn Fry.

Susie Stake watched from the south window for the coming of her boy from
school. The promise (or threat?) of Genesis 3:16, postponed in the case
of Susie Stake, was now being fulfilled. Minnie, two and a half years
old, hung about her knees, and Hamilton, a babe of three months,
occupied the cradle that once had been Gander's. These, with the growing
herd of cows to be milked night and morning, the growing flocks of hens,
geese, ducks, and turkeys to be fed and cared for, the growing area of
garden to be planted and hoed and weeded for the growing appetites about
her growing table, left the busy mother little time for sentiment. She
had sat up the night before, making for Gander a pair of trousers from a
new piece of cottonade bought in Sempter's store--the first occasion
upon which Gander's trousers had not been salvaged from a worn-out pair
of his father's--and a school-bag from remnants of a discarded grain
sack, while the rest of her family slept the sleep of the unconcerned.

In the morning, above Gander's unavailing wails, his mother had scoured
his hands and face and neck into some measure of cleanliness, made up
his lunch, put in an extra cookie, told him to be careful of his new
pants, and to be sure and do as Miss Fry bid him, kissed him, and sent
him off to school. She followed his little figure down the path through
the willows with something as like moisture in her eye as Susie Stake
ever had time to entertain. More than once during the day, in the midst
of her work, she had thought of him; when she saw his place vacant at
the noon table it took her with a goneness under the waist which she
would have been ashamed to confess, and by four o'clock she was
beginning to send her glances down the road to the school. It was
Gander's first little step into life.

It was after five o'clock when Gander came loitering along. Whatever
sentiment or concern his mother had felt for him during his absence she
now suppressed; it was a way with the Stakes to show no weaknesses
toward each other.

"Well for the soul or sake o' me, I thought you was goin' to stay all
night! Get off them good pants and go hunt the eggs."




CHAPTER FOUR


Gander attended school with more or less regularity until he was ten
years old. The qualification is rendered necessary by those frequent
interruptions caused by rain storms, blizzards, illness and
accidents--always regarded as godsends by young Gander--temporary
embarrassments in the matter of wardrobe, and, it must be confessed, a
few occasions when he had deliberately gone gopher-snaring at the cost
of higher education.

Gander was dull; learning came to him with difficulty; books were
bothersome, and he was not disposed to be bothered. After his first
shyness had broken down he enjoyed mingling with the other boys; he
gloried in the games at recess and during the noon hour; he never wholly
disliked any teacher, but he hated study. For Gander was a farmer born
and bred; he had an eye for horses and a knack with machinery; the
mysteries of the self-binder he had solved before he was nine, but the
mysteries of cube root he had not solved when he left school--nor since.
He knew more than any of his teachers about the profession by which he
was to make his livelihood, and he regarded their book-learning as
nonessential and irrelevant--neither of which words would he have
understood. He made chums of Tommy Burge, Dick Claus, and Freddie Gordon
(of the school teacher's boarding-house), but particularly of Tommy
Burge. And he developed a strange kindliness of regard toward Josephine
Burge; a regard which, for all his blundering shyness, he in some way
managed to disclose to the one individual who had most right to know.

The summer he was ten years old Gander began to take a man's place on
the farm. Jackson Stake had added to the original homestead until he now
had four hundred and eighty acres of land; rich, mellow, fertile prairie
and scrub sod, with over two hundred acres under cultivation. His cattle
and horse stables, his granaries and sheds, sprawled aimlessly about the
log hut which was still his home, its numerous lean-tos marking, with
some degree of precision, the periodical increases in his family; the
new frame house, with lath-and-plaster finish, of which Susie Stake had
dreamed for a decade and a half had not yet come into being, although
every spring her husband had prophesied that if the crop "came off" the
new house would surely be built the following season.

"What do you think about buildin' our new house this year?" she would
say each May, when the prairie was a garden of flowers and a man's heart
might be expected lightly to turn to rash commitments.

"Not this year, I am afraid, Susie; got to buy a new binder. Maybe next
year, if the crop comes off."

Mrs. Stake was a bad but effective loser. "I'll believe it when I see
it," she would close the discussion.

Meanwhile Jackson enlarged his stables and barns; abandoned the
twenty-acre field idea which he had transplanted from his early Eastern
environment to the broad measures of the West, and now farmed his land
by quarter sections; abandoned the two-horse team for teams of four and
six; abandoned the fourteen-inch single-furrow walking plough for
two-and three-furrow sulky gangs; abandoned the broadcast seeder for the
disc drill, and the six-foot binder for the eight; abandoned the grain
sack for the bulk system of handling wheat; abandoned the old
horse-power threshers whose metallic crescendo sang through the frosty
autumn mornings of the 1880's for the steam and gasoline of the
twentieth century.

Jackson Stake was but one unit in a hundred thousand who were making
possible the great trek from the country to the city, a trek which never
could have taken place but for the application of machinery to land, so
that now one farmer may raise enough wheat to feed many hundreds of city
dwellers. But if in this he was adding his weight to a gathering social
and economic crisis he was quite oblivious to the fact; he saw no
further than the need of bringing more land under cultivation, to grow
more wheat; and even while he pursued this policy he would have told you
that he lost money on every bushel of wheat he grew, and that it was the
cows, the hogs, and the hens that held the farm together. And Mrs.
Stake, had she been standing by, would have reminded him who it was that
milked the cows, and fed the hens, and mothered the young chickens, and,
perhaps, threw the chopped barley to the hogs. Mrs. Stake had a gift of
mentioning such matters.

The summer Gander was ten he drove a two-horse team on the mower, and,
later, a four-horse team on the binder. He was now a tall, thin boy,
hump-shouldered from sitting huddled on his machines, grimy with oil and
blear-eyed with dust; knowing nothing about cube root but able to
harness and handle four horses abreast, and filled with the joy of a
man's accomplishment. He was still too small to be of much service
stocking sheaves or forking hay, and his natural aptitude for horses and
machinery led to his being made teamster of the binder and mower. His
brother Jackie, now eighteen, and his father, followed him in the
fields, working the long harvest days until after sunset to save the
thirty dollars a month which a hired man would have cost. But for
Gander's services the hired man would have been inevitable; the
statement that he was filled with the joy of a man's accomplishment is,
therefore, no figure of speech. True, Gander did not get the thirty
dollars a month--nor did he expect it. He was working for his father and
with his father, and that was enough. Gander was still in the tribal
stage of development; his individualism was swallowed up in the family
group.

Not so Jackie. Jackie discussed it with his father.

"Dad, I'm doing a man's work and I think I ought to get a man's pay," he
said one day in harvest, as they sat in the shade of a stook for a few
minutes after eating the four o'clock lunch which Minnie brought from
the house. "I ain't a kicker, but I could get thirty dollars workin' on
any other farm 'round here, and not work any harder, either."

His father chewed meditatively on a straw. There had been something in
Jackie's mood in recent times which rather had prepared him for this
conversation.

"An' how much would you get in winter?" he asked.

"Perhaps somethin', perhaps nothin'," Jackie returned, doggedly. "Or I
could go into Winnipeg and hit somethin' for the winter."

"Hit a soup kitchen, mos' likely. I guess there ain't no jobs chasin'
young fellows like you up and down the streets o' Winnipeg in January.
Some fellows don' know a good home when they got it."

"I suppose you're alludin' to that log shack we eat and sleep in,"
Jackie retorted. "Yes, it's a pretty classy residence. You've been
goin' to build a frame house as long's I can remember, with lath and
plaster inside----"

Jackson senior paused in the mastication of his straw. His big red face
hardened. When he spoke it was with the finality of an ultimatum.

"Lath an' plaster don' make a home, an' sometimes poplar logs do. I
built that place with my own saw an' axe, an' you didn' help me, nothin'
partic'lar. It was good enough for me then, an' it's good enough for me
yet, an' any day it aint' good enough for you perhaps you'd better buzz
round a bit an' find somethin' more to your likin'."

There was a silence in which both men gazed blankly at the shimmering
heat away through the avenues of stooks.

"I don' mean that remark to be took too literal," the older man conceded
at length. "You've been a good help on the farm--I'll say that for
you--an' I'm not handin' you any grand bounce. What I can't understand
is why you wan' to leave it."

"I ain't sayin' I want to leave, but I think I'm worth as much as other
men that's gettin' paid."

"Well, we're not quarrelin' on that, either, but, there's more ways of
payin' than writin' a check. You get everythin' you need. You charge it
up at Sempter's store, an' I settle for it. Besides, I been payin'
instalments on you ever since you was born, Jackie, an' before. Seems
like the new generation nowadays don' take that into consideration. They
think the old man should be like a stove-pipe--everythin' goin' out an'
nothin' comin' in. I figger on bein' fair, Jackie, but it don' seem to
be as you have any kick comin'."

"I know all that, Dad, but every time I want a dollar I got to go
bowin' an' scrapin' to you, just like Mother does. When I go into
Plainville I see other fellows there with money to rattle in their
jeans--workin' on the section, dollar and a quarter a day, and quit at
six o'clock, and pay sure every month. They don't work as hard as I do,
and if they want to treat some o' their friends to ice cream
or--or--anythin' else, it's nobody's business."

Jackie was reaching the gravamen of his indictment. He paused, gulped,
and plunged on:

"One day this summer you gave me fifty cents to go to a show--after I'd
asked you for it--and I went and--took a girl along, and the tickets
were thirty-five cents, and there was I standin' at the door tryin' to
squeeze four bits till it looked like seventy cents, and the
door-keeper--it was a travelin' show, and he didn't know me from a load
o' hay--he says, 'Well, well, young man, what's the delay?' lookin' at
me like I was a lump o' cheese. I'd a mind to soak him one for luck
right there, but when you got a girl with you you got to be a gentleman,
and just then Jim French came along--he's workin' on the section
now--and says, 'What's a-matter, Jackie, old boy?' and I says 'Guess I
must 'a' lost my money, Jim; had it down town a few minutes ago,'--lyin'
a bit to cover my family pride, you understand--and Jim sticks a dollar
bill in my hand and says 'Pay me any time you like,' and in he goes.
Well, it made me so mad I felt like jumpin' the whole thing right there.
I'm just a clod-hopper, a farmer's lout, but I got some feelin'."
Jackie's emotions were not far from tears. He came to silence,
swallowing hard.

His father took his time in answering. Then:

"Ever pay Jim back his dollar?"

"Well I guess I did. Very next time I was in town."

"Where'd you get it?" his father sprung on him. Jackie had walked into
his trap.

"From you. Had to ask you for it, though."

"Yes--from me. An' you could 'a' got it before the show, just as well as
after, if you'd said so, an' saved your wounded feelin's. An' it's my
notion that a boy that gets money for the askin' ain't so darn' bad off
as he might be. I don' get mine that way--an' never did."

Jackson glanced at the shadow of the stook, creeping around to the
eastward. His legs were stiff with toil and he rose with a groan, but
once upon his feet he strode quickly through the crisp stubble. Gander
drove up at the moment, the binder clattering as it came. The young
teamster saw his father through the corner of his eye, and his chest
swelled with manly pride. Not for an instant did he deflect his
attention from the job in hand. He cracked his long whip over the backs
of his four bays and by they want on the half-run, the binder snapping
out its great sheaves of golden wheat and its drive-chains singing in
the hot afternoon. Just as it passed Jackson it tripped another sheaf;
the ejecting arms swung upward; the needle ploughed the resilient stalks
until its polished point protruded through the knotter, for all the
world as though it were sticking out its tongue at its lord and owner;
the compressing finger came up; the cord tightened; the beak, with two
threads of twine in its jaws, made its revolution, too quickly for the
eye to see, and the knot was tied; the knife cut the string, and the
sheaf fell on the carrier. Then the loose chatter of the packers, as,
the strain for a moment relieved, they thrust fresh wheat into the loop
of twine left by the needle when it receded into its sheath. It was
done in a second, or, at most, two; every six or eight yards around that
half-mile field the operation was repeated, and a boy of ten was the
magician who slew those serried ranks of wheat in less time than a score
of grown men with aching backs swinging cradles in the days of his
grandfather. An industry which has been so mechanized can spare a Jackie
now and again--and does.

There was a glow of pride in Jackson Stake's eye as this young farmer
drove past; he followed him for a moment with his glance, then turned to
his stooking. A stoop, a grab with his bare hands into the waists of two
sheaves; a swing of the elbows and the back which brought them into
upright position, heads together, butts slightly tapering out, in the
form of an inverted V; then a swift, sharp, downward stroke, planting
them firmly in the stubble. Around this nucleus other sheaves were set
in a circle; butts out, heads tapering in, to turn the rain; not less
than eight, not more than twelve, and father and son moved on to the
next. By the time all the field was cut it would be a sea of stooks,
ready for two or three weeks of curing in the autumn sun and rain, and
then for the thresher. A business this which lays heavy tribute of risk
and labor upon its devotees; which rewards them sometimes handsomely,
sometimes sparsely, sometimes not at all; but which has in it the
elemental fascination of the soil.

The Jacksons, senior and junior, plied their work without another word.
To the father no further discussion seemed necessary. Jackie was
restless, and a bit ungrateful; when he was older he would realize the
advantages of having a home he could call his own, in foul weather as
well as fair.

"I'm ready to do what's right with Jackie," the elder Stake assured
himself. "The far quarter can be his when he marries, an' a team, an'
the use o' the machinery until he can buy his own; but I'm not tellin'
him that--not jus' now. No use startin' foolish notions. Time enough.
An' if the crop comes off all right I'll slip him a little cash after
threshin'; maybe a twenty-dollar bill to do as he likes, an' no
questions asked. I don' blame him for bein' sore, held up there at the
door o' the hall; dang it all, when I was his age I'd 'a' bust my way
in, but times is different now. Wonder who the girl was? He didn't say,
did he? Well, Jackie's gettin' along; eighteen now, but it seems like
yesterday I walked the post road to Plainville for him, an' Susie." Over
the gap of years the advent of his first-born came back to him, poignant
and overwhelming, and a mist which was not from the red rust of the
wheat sent the sea of stooks swimming before his eyes. "Dang it all,
I'll make it fifty, if the crop comes off, so help me!" he promised
himself.

But he didn't make it fifty dollars, or twenty dollars, or any other
sum, when the crop "came off." For on Friday of that week Jackie drove
to town with cash for two hundred pounds of twine, and a boy from the
livery stable brought the team home, saying Jackie had taken the morning
train to Winnipeg.




CHAPTER FIVE


After Jackie left the farm such work as Gander could do was even more in
demand than it had been before. He finished cutting the crop, with an
occasional "spell off" from his father, who was now obliged to hire a
man in place of Jackie, and found him much less efficient. When the
stooking was finished Jackson Stake and his hired man stacked the
sheaves from a strip of the earliest cutting, in order to clear a space
where fall ploughing could be started in case wet weather should
interfere with threshing. In the stacking process Gander was of no great
assistance; the sheaves were too heavy for his slim arms, but he made
himself useful in other ways about the farm. He could drive to
Plainville for supplies; keep the wood pile replenished, and have the
horses' mangers and oatboxes filled when they came from the fields at
noon and night. And he lent a hand, somewhat less willingly, to his
mother in the house. He regarded domestic service as beneath the dignity
of a man. His sister Minnie, now a ruddy-cheeked girl of seven, was a
better dishwasher than he--and was welcome to the distinction.

Threshing was a great event, as always it is on those farms where grain
growing is the major occupation. Several times had Jackson Stake been on
the verge of buying a threshing machine of his own, but always he had
been deterred by the vigorous opposition of his wife, who insisted that
a new house must take precedence over any such investment. And when
Susie really insisted, Jackson, who was not without stubbornness on his
own account, had the wisdom to temporize, with the result that the
machine was not bought, nor was the house built.

"I'd think you have enough machin'ry debts as it is," his wife would say
to him. "An' a threshin' machine, of all things! What you know about a
steam engine? Mos' likely blow it up, an' then where'd you be?"

"Guess I'm kind of accustomed to a blowin' up," Jackson would say, in
his droll good humor. "An' look at the threshin' bills I got to pay!
Enough to build a new house every two or three years." He flattered
himself that this was a diplomatic touch.

"Well, I don' see that those that's got machines are buildin' many
houses on what they save. There's Bill Powers; been runnin' a thresher
ever since we came to the country, an' what's he got? Nothin' on his
place but a mortgage. Better hire Bill again an' save your money."

Bill Powers was the chief thresherman of the community. He had graduated
from the old horse-power days into the steam-engine class in the early
nineties, and was now wearing out his third machine, which, with the
assistance of his homestead quarter, carried the accumulated mortgages
passed on by its predecessors. Bill's credit was a matter of high
finance on a small scale. He bought oil, grease, and belting from the
Square Deal Hardware Store by giving orders, payable after threshing, on
such comparatively solid farmers as Jackson Stake. He had little trouble
with men leaving him during the rush of the season because he never had
enough money to pay them off; how he managed at the end of the term no
one seemed to understand. But he was a good thresher; he took all the
wheat out of the straw; he wasted nothing; he cleaned up after the sets
as conscientiously when the farmer was away as when he stood at his
elbow; he gave sixty pounds to the bushel and a little over--it was said
of Bill Powers that his "thresher's measure" was always better than the
elevator weight; and in fifteen years' threshing with steam he never had
had a fire. Jackson Stake had fallen into the way of engaging him each
year, after the annual debate with Mrs. Stake on the buying of a
threshing machine had been settled in the negative.

It was late at night, near the end of September, when Powers' outfit
moved on to the Stake farm from Gordon's, a mile or two to the south.
Mr. Stake and his hired man were helping their neighbor with his
threshing, and Gander was at home filling mangers and, in his small way,
getting ready for "the gang." His mother, also, was getting ready, but
in no small way. The "cook car," in which the thresher feeds his men,
was an innovation in those days not yet adopted by Mr. Powers, although
he had so far fallen in line with the march of progress as to carry with
his outfit a caboose in which the gang slept during the all too brief
hours between quitting time at night and starting time the following
morning. The result of such an arrangement was that the farmer's wife
had to be ready, frequently at short notice, to feed eighteen or twenty
additional men, each equipped with the most ravenous appetite, and to
feed them well. To feed the threshers well was a matter of honor among
the farm women, and in this culinary competition Mrs. Stake excelled. It
never had been said of Mrs. Stake, nor would it, while she had power to
bake and boil, that she had failed to rise to the occasion of the
threshers' visit. Indeed, so established was her reputation that it was
the fixed policy of the Powers gang to get to Stake's as soon as
possible, and to remain as long as circumstances would permit.

This year Mrs. Stake was placed at a special disadvantage. It had been
understood that the threshers would move to Loudy's from Gordon's before
coming to Stake's, but an insurrection which had been simmering in the
gang for some days came to a head that very afternoon. Mrs. Loudy's
reputation for cooking was at the opposite pole from that of Mrs.
Stake's, and, while the mill was stopped for a few minutes for the
repair of a broken belt, a knot of men gathered around Powers and
reckoned that they'd move to Stake's as soon as they had cleaned up at
Gordon's.

Powers scratched his ear with a hand black with engine oil as he
received this ultimatum.

"But gosh, boys!" he expostulated, "I promised Loudy I'd go there next,
and he's got everythin' ready. Can't hardly pass him up now."

"Nothin' doin'!" said the spokesman of the gang. "I threshed at Loudy's
last year, an' I cut 'em off my visitin' list, from that time,
henceforth. Nothin' doin'!"

"That's right!" said another. "Salt pork she fed us; doesn't seem to
know there's a butcher shop in Plainville. Send 'er that word, Bill, an'
let's move to Stake's to-night."

"But Mrs. Stake ain't ready," Bill argued. "Ain't lookin' for us for
three days. 'Tain't fair to Mrs. Stake, boys, to stampede in on 'er like
that."

There was a laugh of derision at this defence. "Huh! You'd think you
didn't _know_ Mrs. Stake, to hear you talk. Send 'er word now, an' I bet
she'll be all set for us by mornin', with fresh beef an' pungkin pie
for to-morrow's dinner, or I'll eat your overalls--an' they don' look
none too appetizin'."

"An' what'll I tell Mrs. Loudy?" Powers pleaded. "It's kind o' rotten on
her."

"Not a bit more rotten than the grub she set out for us a year ago. Tell
her you hear they got some fine juicy quarters o' beef at the Plainville
butcher shop, an' the boys has decided to give her two or three days
more to make her prep'rations."

Powers gave in, as a man must who isn't in a position to pay off his
mutineers, and a spare hand was sent with the word to Mrs. Stake.

"Well for the soul or sake o' me!" that good woman exclaimed, when the
man in the door announced that the threshers would pull over from
Gordon's that night. "What d'you think I am--a hotel?"

"Sure, mum, it'll be all right. The boys says, 'Leave it to Mrs. Stake,'
they says. 'She won't be stuck.'" And with this little speech he
departed, leaving Susie Stake torn between pride in her well-earned
reputation and misgivings over how it could be maintained on such short
notice.

So the afternoon had been a busy one for Mrs. Stake. She was fortunate
in flagging a messenger to town as he went by on the main road and
sending in an order for supplies, which would be delivered late that
night. In the meantime she attacked her baking, and the preparation of
her vegetables. When Gander came in to supper he found a plate of
potatoes, with two fried eggs on top, thrust at him. He ate it off a
corner of the wood box, the table being fully occupied with his mother's
activities.

Gander had just cleaned his plate when a tap came at the door; not a
man's knock, but a hesitating, gentle little tap.

"Well for the soul or sake o' me!" Mrs. Stake exclaimed, for the
fiftieth time that day. "Ain't I got enough without visitors?" Then, her
sense of courtesy righting itself, she began scraping her doughy hands
on the back of a knife. "Open the door, William," she commanded. "What
you sittin' there gawkin' about?"

Gander opened the door and beheld a mite about his own size, or smaller,
in the wedge of light from the table lamp. It was Josephine Burge.

"Hello, Jo!" said Gander. "Come in."

Mrs. Stake peered at her caller. "Why, if it ain't little Joey Burge!
My, but it's late for you to be out! Are you all alone?"

"Yes'm," said Jo, wriggling under Mrs. Stake's gaze, and slipping her
arm about Minnie, who had left her potato-peeling and edged up beside
her. "If you please, Mother sent me to say she'd come over in the
mornin' and help you, if you like."

"Well, now, I declare, that's right good o' your ma. That's what I call
neighborly. These con-suffered threshers come plunkin' in on me without
a moment's notice----"

"That's what Mother said, when she heard," the little girl agreed. "And
she sent me over----"

"All by you'self? Ain't it pretty dark?"

"Yes'm. Tommy couldn't get away, 'cause my father's helpin' at the
threshin', and he ain't home yet. So I came. I know the road well, and
it'll be moonlight goin' back."

"Well that's a right smart girl. You won't have had your supper?"

Josephine hesitated. "Well--some," she admitted.

"Guess you could get a couple o' these buns inside o' you, without
bustin'," Mrs. Stake suggested, "'specially if they was greased with a
dish o' corn syrup." She broke two fresh brown buns from a great panful,
poured some golden syrup in a saucer, and drew the little girl up to a
corner which she cleared on the table. Any supper in which Josephine
already had indulged had no difficulty in making way for the new
arrivals.

"Threshin's a powerful hard time on women," her hostess commented, as
she resumed the kneading of a panful of dough. "The men hire lots o'
help for threshin', but the women jus' got to hitch up an' go to it. I'm
waitin' till Minnie grows up--if she don' light out about the time she's
some use, like most o' them do. Well, it's a God's goodness o' your ma
to come over to-morrow. Thank her kindly for me, an' tell her I'll save
some odds an' ends for her to do, or maybe she better bring her fancy
work. Maybe we'll both do a little fancy work between meals, eh, Joey?"

The little girl smiled suitably at this sarcastic humor, and finished
her second bun. Mrs. Stake was too occupied with her work to notice that
the second bun had been finished, and presently Josephine wriggled to
her feet.

"Well, I guess I better be goin'," she said.

"Yes; your ma'll be uneasy if you're late. William'll run home with you
for comp'ny. Get your hat, William, an' run home with Joey, an' don'
stay."

"Can I go?" piped Minnie. "Can I go, Ma? Can I, Ma?"

"You're too small; you couldn't keep up," said Gander. He liked his
sister Minnie well enough, but he had a mature instinct that this was
no occasion to encourage her presence.

"Yes, you're too small," their mother dismissed the subject. "'Sides, I
need you here. Skip along, now, William, an' hurry back. An' tell your
ma I'm ever so much obliged." It was understood that the closing
sentence was intended for Josephine.

The two children were at once on their way, running lightly through the
groves of poplar and willow that shut the farm buildings from the
highroad, picking their steps deftly in the darkness. It was not until
they emerged on the road allowance that they drew up to a walk. Gander
had a feeling that this was a time for speech, but he had no idea what
to say. He was not a romantic boy in the sense of being a worshipper of
heroes and heroines. The few books which the Stake household afforded
were without interest to him; his little sister, only seven years old,
was already a better reader than he. Gander hated school, and he hated
books, but he loved horses, and machines, and he suspected that he loved
Josephine Burge. But he had no words in which to express his
sentiment--he had no models to copy. And, after all, what need of words?
He reached out and took Jo's hand in his, and again they ran on
together.

When they stopped for breath a full moon was shoving a blood-red segment
over the crest of the world. They paused to look at it, and then turned
their eyes to the glow from burning straw piles on all quarters of the
horizon, for in this way, for lack of a better market, do the farmers
lavish their humus and nitrogen into the air.

"They look like moons, don't they?" said Josephine.

"Yep; a little," said Gander, and again, they ran on together.

Presently the long, sharp note of a thresher's whistle cut across the
night.

They stopped to listen.

"They're through at Gordon's," Gander remarked. "They'll be movin' now."

"They'll be comin' up this road, won't they?" Josephine asked.

"Yep; I guess."

"They'll see us, won't they?"

A pause. "I guess."

"Do you care?"

"Nope."

"Neither do I."

Then they walked, and Gander felt his tongue unloosed.

"Guess I won't be goin' to school no more," he remarked.

"No more? Any more." Josephine was not quite a hater of books. "Why?"

"Jackie's lit out, an' I got to work."

"I heard about that. Will he come back?"

"Dunno. He can stay, for all I care."

This was a confidential discussion, of great interest, and Josephine
waited for her companion to continue. About the Burge's table the going
of young Jackson had been analyzed, with no very satisfactory
conclusions. As Gander did not speak she led him out.

"But you have a hired man now. He can do the work, when the threshin's
over, an' you can go to school."

"Hired men ain't much good," said Gander. "'Sides, I don' want to go to
school."

"I wish you would. It's--it's lonely at school, without you."

This confession silenced both for another hundred yards. "Maybe I'll go
a little while in winter," Gander conceded.

They could now hear the panting of the steam engine, and the voices of
men carried curiously distinct through darkness now thinning in the
ruddy light of the rising moon. As they crested a hill they saw the
black caterpillar of the "outfit" stretched before them, Bill Powers
walking ahead with a lantern, on the lookout for stones and badger
holes, and the engine following solemnly a few yards behind. The
highroad was little more than a prairie trail, with ruts too close for
the wide-geared trucks of the engine, so that one side ran on the road
and the other on the virgin prairie sod. The light from Powers' lantern
glinted on the front wheels of the engine as they wobbled drunkenly but
irresistibly along their uneven course. A sharper exhaust snorted out as
they struck the grade of the hill, and Gander and Josephine drew over as
far as the field that bordered the road to let the outfit pass by. Here
they could watch unobserved. Their boast about indifference to public
opinion had been sheer bravado.

The straw-wagon drew up beside the engine and Gander could dimly observe
the fireman shoving straw into the fire-box. It was his ambition some
day to fire an engine, and even his devotion to Josephine could hardly
hold him from running up and climbing on board. But while he wrestled
with temptation the opportunity moved on.

Behind the engine came the separator, and behind it, the caboose. Behind
that again was the water-tank, and one or two supply wagons; quite a
train, as it moved solemnly along that lonely road, here and there a
point of metal catching the moonlight and picking itself out in
brilliance against its somber background. The steady pant of the
exhaust, the rumble of the wheels, the voice of Bill Powers raised
occasionally in caution or direction to his engineer--these were the
accompaniments of that mechanical procession which on the morrow would
thresh in a dozen hours the wheat to feed a hundred families for a year.
Only two or three men were about; the others still were having supper at
Gordon's, and the absence of human attendants heightened the dramatic
ghostliness of the scene. And although Gander was a boy not touched by
the romance of books here was something that stirred him deeply--the
romance of machinery, of steam, which, at the pull of a lever, turned
loose the power of giants! He watched until it had gone over the hill.

"I'm goin' to run one o' those, some day; you see if I don't," he
whispered to Josephine, and his words were the confession of a great and
secret yearning, as that of a young artist who gives his dearest friend
a glimpse of his ambitions.

"Course you are, when you're a man," said Josephine. So that was
settled.

At the Burge gate Gander stopped. "Guess I won't go no further," he
said.

"Won't you come in?" Josephine invited him, feeling that that was the
proper thing to do.

"Nope. Guess I'll skip home. Maybe I'll catch up on the outfit."

They hesitated. "Wish I could go over to-morrow, with Mother," she
confessed.

"Wish so, too. P'raps you can.... Night, Jo."

"Night, Bill."

She moved toward the house, and he watched her little figure as it
silhouetted across the square of light from the kitchen window. Then he
turned and ran to overtake his other love.




CHAPTER SIX


Gander's prediction that his school days were at an end proved to be
accurate. As soon as the ploughs in Jackson Stake's fields of brown
stubble were stopped by the freeze-up the hired man was paid off and
turned at large. What might become of him through the winter months of
unemployment was no concern of Jackson Stake's; possibly he would drift
into Winnipeg, where, after his money was spent, a compassionate city
would see that at least he had something to eat. In any case one
doesn't--or, in those days, didn't--pay thirty dollars a month to any
man after freeze-up. The practice of paying for labor of any kind was a
new one to Jackson Stake, and he took to it rather badly; by a second
year he would be more ready to "dicker" for help through the winter
months on a board and lodgings basis.

With the going of the hired man Gander's help about the farm became
indispensable. His father was now hauling wheat to the elevators at
Plainville; the sloughs in the pasture had dried up, and with the
approach of winter the stock needed additional attention. The November
mornings opened gray, with a spray of light filtering through frosty
mist; mid-days were sunny, but with a chill nip in the air, and night
came early. Each morning the stock was turned out to feed in the straw
piles, which they browsed into the shape of huge mushrooms, or
single-storeyed Chinese pagodas, burrowing under the sides in answer to
the joint attractions of food and shelter. At the approach of dusk
Gander and Queenie would set out across the fields, rounding up the
milch cows and the younger stock, but, except in the threat of storm,
leaving the steers and the spare horses to shift for themselves. There
was something about these November days, with their stillness, their
silence, and their forecast of winter, that would have stirred a nature
more romantic than Gander's; to him they were merely part of the routine
of the farm, a routine in which he found a sort of placid enjoyment,
particularly in contrast to the more deadly routine of the school, from
which it enabled him to escape.

It was not all work, of course. On afternoons when he was not needed
about the farm he went skating on the lake, his thin figure a pathetic
suggestion of loneliness, thinner than ever in its contrast with the
great expanse of ice and the hills sprinkled white with snow and hoar
frost which shouldered up from the lake to the prairies beyond. Yet
Gander was not lonely; never in all his days on the farm and the prairie
did Gander know the pang of loneliness. This was his native environment;
he was no more lonely on these prairies than is the coyote or the
badger.

Once in a while Tommy Burge and Josephine would join him on the lake,
but Josephine had no skates, and Tommy, with the blindness of big
brothers, saw no reason why he should lend her his. Gander's position,
in such circumstances, was a difficult one. If he urged Tommy to lend
his skates he ran the risk of being suspected of showing preference for
the company of a girl, which was a very black suspicion; if he lent his
own, Tommy and Josephine would go skating off together, while he sat on
the bank, a victim of misplaced gallantry.

"How'd you like to watch for rabbits down this run, Porridge?" Gander
would suggest. "I saw tracks there yesterday, an' you might catch one,
if you had a snare."

Tommy would look at his sister's skateless boots, and understand. "You
catch 'em, Gander," he would say. "I ain't got any snare."

Gander would finally compromise by lending Josephine one of his skates,
and then the two would stride off together, each sliding on one foot and
using the other as a propeller. Occasionally the foot with the skate
would develop more speed than the one without, and a collapse would
ensue--a collapse which would bring the two youngsters into
unconventional entanglements. Laughing, they would lie on the ice until
its cold began to penetrate them; then, steadying themselves upon each
other, they would scramble to their feet, and slide off to their next
catastrophe.

There were days, too, when Gander went shooting rabbits, partridges, or
prairie chickens with the new breech-loader which his father had bought
him; he knew every track in the fresh-fallen snow, and wandered up and
down every coulee and ravine leading into that part of the lake which
lay not far from his father's farm. A gun under his arm and a dog at his
heels gave him a sense of confidence and companionship such as he found
in nothing else. Once in a while he would raise a fox or a coyote, but
never really within shotgun range, although he always emptied a
cartridge or two on general principles. He was looking forward to the
time when he would be able to persuade his father to buy a forty-four
rifle, such as was pictured in the mail order catalogue which hung
beneath the clock in the house, and which he consulted almost every
evening.

When wheat hauling was finished Jackson Stake had little occasion to be
away from home, and a lull developed in the farm operations. There
really was no reason why Gander should not then have gone back to
school, had be been so disposed--but he was not. He even could have gone
without any sacrifice of his dignity, as it was the practice of the big
boys of the community to go in winter, and Gander now counted himself a
big boy, although he would not turn eleven until the spring. But he had
cut a season's crop, he had taken a man's place, and one who has done
that is no longer a child. On one pretext and another he managed to stay
at home, and his father, never strict in matters of this kind, was glad
enough to accept his help with the firewood and the stock.

By this time the Stake farmhouse had been enlarged by two additions,
built at the rear and sloping up to the eave of the original roof. As
the original eave had been none too high, and a slope must be provided
for the roof of the addition, the back wall was not more than five feet
from the floor, so that Mrs. Stake, who was tall for a woman, when she
worked in these little rooms had to move about in a very stooped
position. But there was space for a bed under the sloping roof, for a
window in the gable end, and a wooden box or two for belongings. The
only warmth in winter was through the door which communicated with the
main part of the house, and was left open at night in the somewhat
optimistic anticipation that the heat from the kitchen stove would force
its way outward in the teeth of the cold which poured in through the
thin roof and about the frosted window.

Jackie and Gander had slept in one of these little lean-to rooms, and
their father and mother and Minnie and Hamilton in the other. When
Jackie left, Minnie was promoted to his room, but with the concession
to Gander's advancing years of a separate bed, home-built of a
two-by-four scantling and pieces of an old packing box, in the opposite
corner from Gander's. So much for the preservation of the conventions,
which, let it be confessed, were frequently shattered when the frost
would send Minnie wriggling out of her blankets to the warmth of her
brother's long legs and arms about her.

One night, near the approach of Christmas, Gander, who usually dropped
to sleep as soon as his head was on the pillow, lay planning a rabbit
snare which he proposed to set in a run-way down by the lake. His mother
sat by the table in the living-room, darning socks, and his father
smoked beside the fire, with his chair so arranged as to promote
convenient expectoration into the open ash-pan of the stove. They had
been sitting in silence for some time, and Gander had just reached the
point where his snare was about to tighten upon its first victim, when
his mother spoke.

"I've been wonderin' about our boy, Jackson," she said, and the tone of
her voice brought Gander back from his jungles. His mother was a
practical woman, who seldom dallied with sentiment, but there certainly
was something in her voice now as though she had been thinking of a
little baby. Once in a while she used to speak to Gander that way,
before the work of the farm and the care of the other children became so
pressing. Gander lay still, his ears alert.

"I've been wonderin' about our boy," his mother said. "He's been gone
since August, an' not a word."

There was silence for a minute, and Gander could hear his father drawing
on his pipe, and the tick of the clock on the wall:

"I reckon he has our address. He knows where we live."

"Maybe he hasn't got any money to come home with."

"Maybe not, but a husky chap like him should be able to raise the price
of a stamp, anyway. He was goin' away where there's lot o' money. Maybe
he's got so much now he's forgot all about us."

There was another period of silence. At length Gander's mother spoke
again:

"It don' seem right to let him go like that. It's cold weather now, an'
not many jobs, I'm thinkin'."

"He can come home when he likes," her husband returned. "Only I ain't
doin' no coaxin'."

"Jackie won't come home beggin'. He'd starve first. You done not too bad
this year, Jackson, an' I was thinkin' you might go down to the city for
a day or two an' look aroun'."

There was a long silence. Then:

"It wouldn't be the first cold trip I took for Jackie, Mother. Do you
remember?"

"I do." Gander started in his bed; his mother's voice sounded so nearly
like a sob.

"An' this is all we get for it. As soon's they're able to git out, they
git. It don' seem worth while."

"I'd give him another chance, if it was me."

"So I will--any time he asks for it."

There was another silence so long that Gander fell asleep, but the next
day he thought of it. Jackie had slid readily from his mind. He never
had liked his brother, mainly because, with all a child's intensity, he
resented Jackie's attempts to "boss" him. It was born in Gander's blood
to take orders from none--a quality in his nature which was to determine
his course in more important matters than anything that related to his
brother. The obeying of orders clashed with his sense of independence.
He loved to work in the fields with his father, for there they worked as
man and man; Jackson Stake was much too wise a driver to let this colt
feel the rein. Perhaps he had learned something from his experience with
his first-born. Or perhaps it was that Gander appealed to him
differently.

Gander reacted toward his father perfectly. They were friends and chums
together. That was one reason he feared the intrusion of Jackie's
return. Again, Jackie's desertion of the farm seemed to hang as
something of a quarrel between his father and mother, and Gander was his
father's partisan. His mother had been losing her grip on him ever since
the night when she had failed to enthuse over his shooting of the wild
goose--when the plucking and dressing of the goose had loomed bigger in
her imagination than Gander's triumph in shooting it. Besides, his
mother was disposed to give orders.

For a day or two Gander lived under a fear of losing the status he had
gained, but he heard nothing more of the trip in search of Jackie, and
the danger passed away.

So another season came and went. Gander, although without a man's
strength, was able to take a man's place in the driving of a team and
the management of most of the farm machinery. He drove a seeder in the
spring, up and down the moist, black fields; up and down, up and down,
up and down. He drove a plough in the summer-fallow; a mower in the long
prairie grass about the sloughs in haying time. It was a man's life; a
life that thrilled him with the joy of accomplishment. If he was being
robbed of his childhood he was content to be robbed, for in its place
he was being given manhood before its time. When he saw other boys of
his own age going to school he regarded them with pity and contempt. A
poor business, that, for one who could drive a four-horse team!

His little sister Minnie was quite different. She loved school, she was
bright at her studies, and she had a habit of using Gander as a
yardstick by which to measure her progress.

"Do you know the difference between a noun and a pronoun?" she demanded
of her brother one evening at the supper table.

"Don' know as I do," Gander admitted, without apologies.

"Huh! Teacher'd call you a dunce."

"Would she?" said Gander. "Well, I know the difference between a Deering
an' a Massey-Harris across a fifty-acre field, an' I bet she don't, an'
you can tell her that for me."

"You mustn't be impident," his mother rebuked him. "Let the teacher
learn Minnie all she can."

"Yes, let her learn Minnie all she can," Gander flared back, "an' let
her learn somethin' herself, too. I bet she don' know a Clyde from a
Perch'ron."

The contempt in Gander's voice stirred his father's usually slow-moving
cerebration.

"I don' know as William is so very far out," he said. "I've noticed that
the boys an' girls that goes to school until they're fourteen or fifteen
gets themselves eddicated _off_ the farm. Jackie went pretty steady, an'
he's flew his kite. Minnie here is bright at school, an' she'll likely
do the same, about the time you're figgerin' on havin' a hired girl an'
not havin' to pay out no wages for her. William----"

"An' that's about the only kind o' hired girl I'll ever have, it looks
to me," Mrs. Stake interrupted. "One that don' cost no wages."

"Well, maybe. We'll see." Jackson was capable of almost any obliquity to
escape a clash with his wife. "As for William, while I'd like for him to
know the diff'rence between those words, an' all that, I want him with
me here on the farm, an' maybe when he's my age he can offer a roof to
some o' them eddicated fellows that can't get a job in the city.
'Course, a fellow should be able to read an' figger, even on the farm,
or some o' them sharks'll leave him holdin' an emp'y sack at the end o'
the year, but these pronouns, or whatever it is, what does it matter
about them?"

"Me for the farm, anyway," said Gander. "I want to stick with Dad."

Jackson Stake rubbed his fingers through the lad's hair. It wasn't often
that he so far forgot himself. "You bet!" he said.

Fifteen years later his college-bred son-in-law, Minnie's husband, was
writing magazine articles on How to Keep the Boys on the Farm.

The summer Gander was twelve his father hired a man for the season. He
was introduced as Bill, and perhaps that was one of the reasons for the
friendship which sprang up between himself and young William Stake. It
was one of Gander's secret ambitions to be called Bill; William he
despised, as being sissy and stuck-up. The boys and girls of the
neighborhood called him Bill, but his father and mother called him
William, and he irked under it as if it were an offensive epithet. Once
in a great while his father called him Bill, and then he knew that they
were man to man together, but such experiences occurred only at rare
intervals.

Bill, the hired man, was slight and wiry of stature, with heavy creases
showing through the ruddy stubble on his face, brows that hung well over
his pale eyes, and hair thinning to a poor stand on top. Jackson picked
him up one June day in Plainville, and for a year and a half he was a
fixture on the Stake farm. He carried his worldly belongings in a grain
sack, and dropped into the life of the place with ready adaptability.

"Where'd you get that spec'men?" the farmer's wife demanded of her
husband.

"Found him holdin' up a corner o' the Palace hotel," Jackson explained.
"He said he knew all about farmin', so I asked him out to give me a few
lessons."

"But where'd he come from? Who's his people?"

"Dunno. Didn' ask for no pedigrees. But he seems at home with horses."

"Well, let's hope he's all right," said Mrs. Stake. "But I'd like to
know somethin' about him. Why didn' you get some one we know?"

"Of course he's all right," her husband assured her. "If he ain't I'll
tie the can on him, quick. An' you can't get anybody you know, no more.
'Tain't like it use to be, when you could always hire one o' the
neighbor's boys. There don' seem to be the loose help 'round home, like
there use to be. When I was a boy I hired out with a neighbor, but now,
I guess all the young fellows has gone to the city--or gone
homesteadin'. What us farmers is goin' to do for help I dunno."

"Oh, 'us farmers' 'll get help, all right, even if we have to hire men
that's maybe nothin' but hotel bums. But how about us farmers' wives?
Tell me that, Jackson. How about _us_?"

Jackson backed away, mentally. "Oh, you'll manage. You're a dandy
manager," he told her. "'Sides, Minnie's gettin' to be a bit o' help,
ain't she?"

Susie Stake swept by to the stove, as though she could spare no more
time with such a trifler. The years, which so often are generous to the
feminine frame, were leaving Mrs. Stake, each in its turn, a little more
angular than it found her. This had been particularly so since Jackie's
disappearance. After a long silence he had written to his mother from
the head of the lakes, where he said he was working in a grain elevator,
and expected to get on a boat in the spring. Months later he was heard
from in Kingston, and now, for months, no word at all. Even Gander had
noticed that his mother's dark hair seemed to draw back further from her
brow, and that there were threads of white in it.

She turned from the stove as suddenly as she had gone to it. "Where's he
goin' to sleep?" she demanded.

"We can fix him up in the granary for the summer, an' if he's all right
he'll have to bunk with William when the cold weather comes."

"William? Minnie----"

"Well, we'll have to get her out o' the room. Should be out, anyway.
William's too big a boy now."

"Guess we'll pretty near need that new house, won't we?"

"Well, if the crop comes off----"

By all the tests to which Jackson Stake subjected him, Bill seemed to be
"all right." He knew how to harness and handle horses, and, more
remarkable still, he was able and willing to milk. Mrs. Stake qualified
all her objections to the new man when she found him willing to milk. He
was less at home with machinery, in which sphere Gander was able to lord
it over him, but he picked up instructions readily. He was gentle with
the children, and never fell into worse language than did his employer.
He showed no disposition to go to town, and Jackson Stake, scenting his
weakness--a weakness from which he himself was not entirely immune--so
planned the work of the farm as to keep Bill's feet out of the paths of
temptation. Altogether he seemed a very satisfactory man.

But there was one angle of his life of which Jackson Stake and his wife
knew nothing. It was an angle disclosed only in his confidences with
young William, and the boy, with the instinctive curiosity of his years,
kept his secrets well. Life on a mixed farm, where stock raising is
combined with grain growing, is lived close to the fundamentals. Gander,
from his own observations, and from the conversation bandied about among
the farmers' boys at school, had long since outgrown that uninformed
condition sometimes described as innocence. His mind was groping into
new experiences, instinctively, but blindly; instinctively, because he
was a healthy human being, and blindly, because those who should have
guided him were restrained by shyness from turning a single ray of light
upon his path. Working from what he knew, he was speculating vaguely
upon the unknown.

His speculations were given point and piquancy by the confidences of the
elder Bill. The man was old enough to be Gander's father, but was,
apparently, unmarried. He explained this to Gander by pointing out that
no married man was wanted on the farm, and, so far as he could see, no
children were wanted anywhere, so what was a man to do? If a man was
well off, and had a home of his own, of course he could get married; but
if he was just a hired man, what was he to do?

He answered that question to his own satisfaction, while Gander's little
soul went surging within him. There had been no great show of religious
teaching among the Stakes; yet religion, and with it a code of strict
moral ethics, was the unwritten background of their existence. Just as
they hid their sentiment from each other, and held it a weakness to show
any sign of family affection, so also they concealed their religious
life, still and deep, behind a mask of matter-of-factness. Yet they knew
good from evil, and no Stake had ever called evil good. Gander knew
this, too; but here was a man who opened to him a life which, although
it shocked his principles, had the appeal of fascinating adventure.
Bill's exploits lost nothing in the telling, and Gander was stirred
between horror at his revelations and admiration of a courage which
placed all the conventions at defiance.

"Human nature is human nature, wherever you find it," the hired man
would defend his philosophies. "Ain't it Kipling or somebody says 'The
Colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady is sisters under their skins'? But the
Colonel's lady has a fine house or a suit in a swell apartment, and Judy
O'Grady is maybe a workin' girl, like I've seen hundreds of 'em in the
cities, with nothin' to call home except a bit of a room in some cheap
lodging-house. Believe me, they're all alike, but they don't all have
the same chance. They've set up a system by which a man or a woman
that's got a home can be decent and respectable--although they don't all
do it--but what about us folks that haven't got any home? Take me. I'd
like a home as much as anybody, but likin' don't put any shingles over
my head. If I was to go to your dad and say, 'I'm thinkin' of gettin'
married,' what'd he say? Don't you know? I'll tell you. He'd say, 'All
right, Bill, I guess I can let you go by the end of the month.' So I'd
get a wife, but I'd lose my job, and how are you goin' to keep a wife
when you haven't got a job? But that don't change my nature any--nor
hers either. You see, your father and mother are awful nice people, but
it's them, and folks like them, that's really responsible."

Gander didn't accept all this argument; his foundations were too solid
for that. But Bill became something of a hero in his eyes; a sort of
moral Wild Wester at war with things as they are. It is the province of
youth to protest, and Gander's sympathies were with his friend.

The crop "came off" as usual, but the new house was not built. With the
approach of cold weather a third lean-to was added, to which Minnie and
little Hamilton were assigned. Bill shared the other room with Gander.
There they slept together in a temperature which condensed their breath
on the thick quilts that covered them. In the mornings they would
reluctantly burst from their warm beds. The hired man would climb into
his stiff clothes with amazing alacrity, puffing and blowing with his
exertions. Then he would take the lantern from the kitchen wall, light
it, and for a moment watch the vapor fade from the globe. Then out into
the crisp, starry morning, the snow creaking beneath his feet. Gander,
having not yet attained to this hardihood, dressed more slowly behind
the kitchen stove.

Meanwhile his education went on apace.




CHAPTER SEVEN


During the next year or two Gander stretched up into a lanky youth, lean
and sinewy, stooped with his early labor. Under a thin face his Adam's
apple became the feature of his long neck; it jumped and gulped and
hopped about with prodigious activity. When Gander swallowed the
mechanics of the operation were almost as visible as if his dark skin
had been transparent.

"Sometimes," said his little sister Minnie, "it looks as though Gander
was going to swallow that lump in his neck." But, for all its ramblings,
it never failed to return to its place.

About this time he discarded the braces, which from his early childhood
had performed an important office, and adopted a belt instead, as being
more in keeping with man's estate. The change was not entirely a happy
one, as Gander was singularly hipless at this stage of his development.
He learned to make up for his structural deficiencies by walking with a
peculiar hitch designed to hold his overalls in place.

It was also about this time that he acquired the nickname with which he
was henceforth identified. Gander attended church services in the
schoolhouse with the other members of the family, partly because of the
unobtrusive but stern religious background against which his life was
set, which took church-going for granted, and partly for the opportunity
of a half-hour's chat with the other boys of the neighborhood before or
after service. And there was always the exchange of a glance, and
perhaps a word or two, with Josephine Burge.

Church services were held in Willow Green schoolhouse every second
Sunday at three in the afternoon, and it was the custom of the little
congregation to assemble about half past two and fill the period until
the preacher's arrival with the gossip of the neighborhood. The farmers,
after tying their horses, would gather on the shady side of the school
building, and, half squatted on their heels against the board wall, or
leaning on their buggy wheels, discuss the crop prospects, the need of
rain, the prowess of the Plainville baseball team, and the
maladministration of the municipal council; while within the stuffy room
their wives and elder daughters exchanged confidences about the latest
babies, the prices charged by the Plainville stores, the bargains which
might be had from mail order houses, and the numerous unsuccessful
attempts to establish a Sunday school at Willow Green. All of these
attempts had failed owing to the fact that no farmer in the neighborhood
was prepared to assume the duties of Superintendent, which involved the
making of prayers in public. The religion of Willow Green district was
too subjective for the making of prayers in public.

Upon the arrival of the preacher, dusty and hot in his clerical garb,
the men filed in, and the school teacher detached herself from the knot
of adolescent girls which had gathered about her, and proceeded to press
the dilapidated organ into service. The preacher announced the opening
hymn, and then everybody stood up and sang.

Everybody sang. That was the remarkable feature of the service. There
was no trained talent to bring home to those farmers and their wives,
their sons and their daughters, the fact that they could not sing. So in
blissful ignorance of a truth which would have been obvious to any
cultured congregation, they raised their voices--and sang. Not all in
the same key, to be sure; occasionally not all to the same time, and
sometimes not all to the same tune; but all in the same spirit. Culture
had not yet demanded in those rural districts its severe price of
contempt for the untrained.

In this exercise William H. Stake's song rose as high as any; higher,
sometimes, for he was just at the stage where his voice, unruly as any
prairie broncho, plunged and bucked into unexpected and involuntary
cadenzas. These unpremeditated flights of song were a source of some
embarrassment to William, but it was a peculiarity of the case that he
never was sure just how far his vocal broncho had bolted from the beaten
path. After silence for a few lines he would venture forth again, gently
at first, but gathering confidence as he went, until once more, in a
sudden evil moment, his note went honking off over the heads of the
congregation.

It was Dick Claus, the mark of whose exploded ink bottle might still be
defined through the thin whitewash on the ceiling over the stove, who
christened him. "Did you hear young Bill Stake?" he said, as the boys
gathered for an after-meeting behind the school at the close of the
service. "Honking like a gander."

"Hello, Gander!" they greeted him, as he joined their group. William's
Adam's apple fled for cover, and his long neck twisted in boyish
confusion. The name stuck. By the time he was eighteen only the older
generation remembered that Gander Stake ever had been called William.

The church services and occasional social events in the community
brought Gander into intermittent contact with Josephine Burge. He had
not yet reached the age when he might boldly set out to Josephine's
house to call upon her; the fires of a boy's heart, at fourteen or
fifteen, seldom smoke so openly. But he found excuse once in a while to
call on Porridge Burge, if only to borrow a wrench or a clevis, the
return of which, by the good fortune of fate, gave occasion for another
visit the following day. Tommy usually received his guest in the
tool-shed which his father had recently built, and which afforded good
cover for the smoking of that porous cane to be found in broken whip
stalks. And it almost always happened that for some reason or other Jo
had to seek something in the tool-shed during Gander's visit. Tommy
regarded these interruptions with true brotherly blindness, but Gander
knew.

He began to be conscious of a yearning to be alone with Jo Burge. To
meet her at church, or at one of the summer picnics, or to talk with her
in the tool-shed under the chaperonage of Tommy, was only tantalization.
He had no clear idea of why he wanted to be alone with her, and less of
how it was to be accomplished, as he was not of an inventive mind except
in his experiments with machinery. But he knew that the mere presence of
Josephine--alone--was something very much to be desired. Working about
the farm, harnessing his horses, shuttling up and down the black fields
on his sulky plough, the figure of Josephine Burge fluttered before him,
beckoning, beckoning. He remembered the wisdom that Bill had poured into
his young ears, and wondered what Jo must think of him.

It was Bill's theory that women are born to be mastered; that they
recognize the master and obey him, but for those who are afraid they
have only contempt.

"You mind Eve?" Bill had said to Gander. "She played for Adam with an
apple--not that one you're always choking over, but a fresh one out of
the garden. A pippin, I guess it was, or maybe a spy. Adam took it, and
so got us all into a lot o' trouble. But suppose he hadn't. Suppose he
had said, 'Eve, you know better than this. I'm surprised at you. Tut!
Tut!' What would Eva ha' done? She'd ha' give him the stoney stare,
henceforth. Put him down for a dub and flounced out o' the garden to
hunt up a he-man of her own."

Gander reflected on this. "Of course, she thinks I'm a dub," he would
say to himself. "And I am."

Fortunately for Gander he was unable to consult Bill in his dilemma.
After a year and a half of steady work the hired man had suddenly
announced that the white lights were calling him and he must be on his
way. Jackson Stake jocularly professed some misgivings as to the color
of the lights, and parted with him regretfully. He had been a good man.
He had visited Plainville only two or three times in that year and a
half, and even then had managed to come home sober. The farmer argued
with him, and offered to increase his pay.

"It's pleasant of you to make the offer, Mr. Stake, but it's no good,"
Bill answered. "If you were to offer me the farm it would be just the
same. I'm a bird of passage, and I've roosted here longer than most
places. I'd like to stay, but I can't. That's the way I'm built."

Gander had been sorry to see him go, and yet he was conscious in his own
heart that the man's influence over him had been evil. His parents knew
nothing of this; Gander had kept his secrets well. But his whole
viewpoint on life had changed. The spiritualism of childhood, never
strong in Gander, had been obliterated in the stark realism of life as
he now saw it through eyes that he believed to be mature. Yet he was
shy, and ashamed of his shyness. According to his new light it was the
measure of his weakness. The prize was for the bold, not for the shy.
Girls loved to be mastered. Jo----

It seemed strange to Gander that he never had discussed Jo. For some
reason he could not bring himself to mention Jo to his friend Bill.
There she was, in his mind, but while he thought of her he talked of
others. And in this simple distinction, without knowing it, he belied
all Bill's theories. Jo he kept to himself, held apart, as one
different, superior. Jo was for him; for no one else. And he had not the
courage to assert his right. That was why he despised himself as he
turned black furrows in his father's field, and blacker thoughts in his
own mind.

The opportunity of Jo's companionship came in an unexpected way.

Gander had overheard another discussion between his father and mother
concerning the missing boy, Jackson. Not much had come to his ears, but
he had known from his mother's voice that there were tears in it--a
thing almost unprecedented--and his father had spoken with unusual
harshness. Gander had lain awake for some minutes that night, worrying
about this domestic problem. In the morning he noticed that strained
relations appeared to exist between his father and mother; they spoke
with unnecessary civility across the breakfast table, and as Gander
slowly thought this matter over his anger at his erring brother mounted
higher and higher. For nearly two hours Josephine Burge was spared the
attention of his imaginings.

A day or two later Jackson Stake suddenly announced that he and his wife
were going to the Brandon fair.

"Yes, sir, Bill," he said to Gander; one of the rare occasions on which
he called him Bill, and the boy's heart bounded--"Your mother an' me are
goin' to take in the big show. We've held this old homestead down pretty
steady, an' we're goin' out to see the white lights, as Bill used to
call 'em, for ourselves. We'll be away a couple o' days, an' we'll take
Ham with us, because he can't very well be left, an' you an' Minnie'll
have to run the farm. Think you can do that, Bill?"

"You bet we can. The summer-fallow's just finished, an' Minnie an' me'll
make it go all right." Gander's heart was glad to see the smiles back in
his father's face; for a day or two they had been strangely missing.
This idea of going to the Brandon fair was certainly a new one for
Jackson Stake, who seldom travelled further than Plainville. The boy was
too young to recognize the strange currency in which domestic peace
offerings are sometimes presented.

"Yes, the summer-fallow's finished," his father picked up his thought,
"but this long spell o' dry weather has left the pasture as bare as a
barn wall. I reckon if there's nothin' else doin' you might let the
stock out on to the school section an' herd them there while we're away.
It'll give them a chance to fill their ribs again. Minnie can stay over
at Fraser Fyfe's durin' the day, an' you an' her'll be at home together
nights an' mornin's."

For some strange reason it seemed to please Jackson Stake to spend the
fifty dollars involved in the trip to Brandon. The farmer was usually
close in money matters; he was on record as saying of himself that he
was so close he would "bust a rib if he swallowed a flax-seed." But when
he spent he spent freely, and this was to be one of the occasions. He
whistled an old tune of the lumber woods--what was left of it--as he
harnessed a team to drive to Plainville, where he and his wife would
take the train. Susie Stake went grimly, as though she was making a
concession but was prepared to see it through. Gander was important with
the responsibility of the farm, and Minnie danced gleefully over the
prospect of long days spent with little Elsie Fyfe.

To Gander and Minnie the house seemed very silent that first night, and
they behaved as seriously as any little old couple. Minnie washed up all
the dishes, and put them in their place; she was now a girl of eleven or
twelve, with hair a little darker than red, and a complexion that would
be one of her hazards by-and-by. Gander went twice down the mangers, to
see that the horses were tied, and even after he was half ready for bed
went out again to make sure the granary door was hooked and that there
was no danger of the mosquito smudge blazing up if the wind should rise
during the night. In the morning Minnie cooked porridge as well as her
mother could have done, fried a couple of eggs, and made toast in front
of the kitchen fire.

"Wish you'd put me up a bite o' lunch, Minn," Gander told her. "Dad said
to run the stock over on the school section for a day or two, the
pasture's got so dry, an' I'll have to herd 'em there, account o' the
neighbor's crops. Guess I won't bother comin' in at noon, an' you can
stay over at Elsie's until it's time to get supper."

"All right." She made four more slices of toast, boiled two eggs hard,
mixed a spoonful of pepper and salt in an empty pill box, cut off a
healthy slab of cheese, wrapped the lot together and put it in the lunch
bag she used when going to school. It was midsummer holidays now, and
the bag was out of use.

"I'm not sending any water, Gander; it would get too hot, and tea would
get too cold." She laughed gently over this paradox, as though something
funny about it had touched her imagination. "You'll be riding one of the
horses, I suppose, and you can gallop over to Burge's, or some of the
other neighbors, for fresh water when you want it."

Yes, Gander had thought of that. But he hadn't said anything about it.

When his lunch was ready he took it from his sister's hand. He didn't
often look at Minnie, but in some way she held his eye this morning. She
was so smart, so neat, so competent. For the first time in his life it
occurred to Gander that Minnie was pretty. Funny, wasn't it, one's
sister being pretty? Now Jo Burge; he knew Jo was pretty, but then she
was Tommy's sister, and two or three years older than Minnie. He
wondered if Tommy thought that Minnie was pretty. Could it be
possible---- Gander's heart suddenly thumped very sharply, and his
Adam's apple jumped in panic. Could Tommy think of Minnie as he was
thinking of Jo?

Gander saddled one of the work horses, his father having taken the
drivers to town, and set out in the clear, bright morning to round up
the stock toward the vacant school section. Minnie washed her
dishes--not neglecting the porridge pot; swept the floor, made up
Gander's bed and her own, placed water in the pans for the chickens,
and then, having put on a clean calico dress, went singing down the road
to Elsie Fyfe's. Her mother had arranged before she left that Mrs. Fyfe
would look after the milch cows, taking the milk in payment for her
trouble, so Minnie had no responsibility in that connection.

Meanwhile Gander rounded his stock toward a gate in the far end of the
field opening on to the school section. School sections, as every
Westerner knows, are tracts of land set aside to create an endowment
fund for the support of the public schools--an unique and unexplained
exception to the policy of frantic exploitation of the people's domain.
The school section bears no necessary relationship to the location of a
school; country schools for the most part are built on the corner of
some settler's farm, on an acre of land bought or donated for the
purpose. Now it often happened that the school section remained unsold
after the neighboring land had been taken up, and it consequently
afforded choice grazing range for the herds of the surrounding settlers.
It was so in this case. It was also so that the school section lay
directly south of Jackson Stake's, and directly north of the farm of
Martin Burge.

Gander, riding one of the sober work horses, rounded his herd of lazy
cows and obstinate steers toward the gate at the south end of the
pasture. Queenie before this time had gone to her reward, and her
successor, a mongrel pup supposed to answer to the name of Gyp, was too
distracted by gophers and the smell of a fresh badger hole to be of any
assistance. But Gander had all day before him. He rode forward and back
over the close-cropped pasture, brown with the midsummer drouth, slowly
edging his stock to the southern end of the field. Near a clump of
willows he raised a mother prairie hen which went whirring with curious
flight over a ridge immediately ahead while her chicks darted for cover
among the willows; a minute later he saw the mother gliding confidently
back to the willow clump, where she rejoined her excited but obedient
family. There evidently had been careful rehearsal of the proceeding to
be followed in such an emergency.

Gander edged his stock to the corner of the field and finally crowded
them through the gate. Then, as it suddenly dawned on their slow
comprehensions that they were being led--or, rather, driven--into green
pastures, their tactics were as suddenly reversed; with necks
outstretched and nostrils dilated and their long tongues like little
scythes whipping the green tufts of grass into their jaws they sampled
the verdure of the school section, and, liking it well, broke into a
run. Over a ridge to the southward they stampeded, and, by the time
Gander had again rounded them up, they were half way across the section.
Here they fell into a riot of feasting, and the boy knew that, for the
present, they would need little more attention. The nearest cultivated
crop was half a mile away, and, the cattle now having been quietened,
were likely to gorge themselves for an hour or two, after which they
would lie down and re-chew the morning's takings with placid
deliberation.

It was now that Gander began to put into effect the plan which had been
slowly forming in his mind. Half a mile south lay the homestead of
Martin Burge, and, somewhere about the house, or in the fields, was
Josephine, his daughter. Gander proposed to take a chance on the
behavior of the herd for an hour or two, and seek her out. When he
found her he would boldly invite her to come over to the school section
and help him watch the cows. The prairie was carpeted with flowers, and
under the clumps of willows it was cool and drowsy. True, Tommy might be
in the way; he so often was in the way; but this time he must stand
aside. Gander would tell him so, in as many words, if it came to that.

The school section lay in gentle swells culminating in low ridges.
Gander turned his horse's head to the southward and rode over the next
ridge. As the slope on the other side came into view it revealed a herd
of cattle dotted along its grassy sward. Evidently some other settler
was taking advantage of the free range. And, a quarter of a mile away,
was another herd-boy on horseback.

Gander's pulses were thumping and a slow rage was gathering in his
heart. Was he not to have even the school section to himself? He
resented this other presence; it interfered with his plans. Everything
seemed to interfere with his plans, even his most careful plans. Virtue
was being thrust upon him; intolerably thrust upon him.

From somewhere it came into Gander's mind that forces which he did not
understand persisted in overriding him. His independence was being
challenged, his right to manhood denied. He seemed to be under orders.
He knew that his friend Bill would have scoffed at any such idea. Yet it
held him--and exasperated him.

He was for going back over the ridge and making a long detour, when he
saw that the other boy had noticed him, and was riding in his direction.
Retreat would now be too obvious, so he rode slowly on to the
southward.

The other boy's horse broke into a gallop, and in a minute or two they
came up together. Then they looked into each other's face, and Gander
saw--Josephine Burge!




CHAPTER EIGHT


Jo was dressed in a blouse and knickers, with a broad straw hat drawn
over her head. She was riding astride and wearing knickers at a time
when both these practices were still considered strictly masculine.
Gander's eyes fell from her face to the curve of her leg about her
pony's ribs, to the boot in her stirrup, and he felt the color gathering
under his own sun-burned cheeks. She was wearing a pair of brown
stockings; there was a hole in one, through which her white skin shone
like a silver dollar.

"'Lo, Bill," she said.

"'Lo, Jo."

"Herding?"

"Yep."

"So am I."

Then they looked at each other again, and Gander marvelled how Jo had
grown since he last had seen her. True, she sat low on her horse; she
was only a little body, at that; but there was a look of maturity about
her that Gander never had seen before. Perhaps it was the loose blouse,
the knickers----

"They're Tommy's," she said, as though in answer to his thoughts. "Too
small for him now, of course, but handy for me, when I'm on horseback.
Of course, I didn't expect to meet anyone, but when I saw it was you I
didn't mind--very much. Do you?"

Gander could see that there was a color in Jo's face, too, for which the
burn of the prairie sun could not altogether account.

"'Course not," he said.

"Besides, they're safer," she went on to justify her costume. "And more
modest than skirts, when you're riding astride, anyway. In a ladies'
magazine I take, it says they're quite the thing, but of course the
people around Plainville don't know that, yet."

How grown-up she was! A ladies' magazine she was reading! Gander read
nothing. Presently it dawned on him that this girl might not be clay in
his hands. More likely she would make clay of him!

She stepped her horse up closer. "Where are your cows?" she asked.

"Just over the ridge."

"And where were you going?"

"Oh, just ridin' around." Gander's bold purposes had seeped from him
like water from a sieve.

"Let's go and look at them," she suggested.

They rode up over the ridge, and Jo's pony, being lighter on his feet
than Gander's sturdy horse, pranced into the lead. With Jo a few feet
ahead Gander studied the little figure from another angle. Her hair was
gathered up under the crown of her straw hat; her neck was straight and
supple; her body swung free at the waist with every motion of her mount.
Here was the great day of his imaginings, when he and Jo should be
alone, just their two selves together. And he could think of nothing but
the commonplace.

"Dad and Mother have gone to Brandon fair," he explained, "and I thought
I'd run the stock on the school section for a day or two. The pasture's
as bare as a barn wall."

"Yep. If we don't get rain soon it's all day with the crops."

How matter-of-fact she was!

They had reached the crest of the ridge. "See, we can watch both herds
from here," she said. "Let's get off and sit in the shade of the
willows."

Just what Gander would have suggested, if he had had the courage. Old
Bill was right....

She threw herself lightly from her pony, and dropped the reins at his
feet. "He'll stand," she said. "Will yours?"

"'Course. Too lazy to run away," Gander answered, with a nervous laugh.

She looked slimmer, but taller, when he saw her on her feet. Yet when he
stood beside her her head came little above his shoulder.

They sat in the shade of a clump of willows, while the prairie breezes
fanned their faces, and the cattle drowsed in the pastures below, and
patches of sun and shade, like a great quilt of the Creator, drew slowly
across the waving grass and the dimpled wheat-fields in the distance.
For a while they talked of their school days, and the crop prospects,
and then they fell silent.

When the sun seemed directly overhead Jo arose and stretched herself.

"Come to our place for dinner," she invited.

"Got my dinner with me," Gander explained, indicating his lunch bag.
"Guess we could make it do for two," he added, and wondered if she
noticed the catch in his voice.

"I'd like to," she said, "but they'll be looking for me at the house.
Won't you come?"

"Nope."

"Why?"

Then it burst from him. "Because Tommy'll be there, and when he knows
I'm here he'll want to herd this afternoon, and I don't want him. I want
you."

The speech was not finished before Gander was trembling with the
temerity of it. She _must_ know, now.

"Tommy's ploughing," she answered, as though nothing epochal had been
said. "I can't plough, but I can herd, so I'm sure to be here this
afternoon. Won't you come?"

But Gander was irritated that she should pretend not to see the
significance of his words. "No. Guess I'll just eat my grub here. But
I'll keep an eye on your cows, and you can bring me a bottle of water
when you come back, if you like."

The breeze had died down and the summer afternoon lay blisteringly hot
when Jo returned. She dropped from her horse and handed Gander a bottle.
"Fresh from the well," she said.

"Thanks, Jo."

"And you see I came back, after all."

So she _had_ understood!

"Cattle giving any trouble?"

"Nope. Too hot and drowsy."

"It _is_ hot, isn't it?"

Gander noted that she had changed her stockings. The silver dollar was
no longer in evidence. And she had drawn her blouse lightly about her
throat with a ribbon of red braid. Gander appraised her as
beautiful--and she had made these changes for him! He rather wished that
he had worn something better than his farm overalls.

He drank eagerly from the water bottle, for he was thirsty with his
lunch and with the heat, and then they sat in the shade of the willows,
edging around to the east as the afternoon wore away. The crystal sky
of the morning deadened to an opaque blue in which thunder-clouds
slowly began to shape themselves.

"Might have rain to-night," Gander remarked.

"Uh-hum; hope so," she agreed.

"You talk like you were 'most asleep," he told her, somewhat curtly,
annoyed that she had no conversation for him, and equally annoyed that
he had none for her.

"I am--pretty near," she said.

The cattle began to stir about, and Gander drew himself to his feet. She
rose on one knee, as though to join him.

"Never mind, Jo," he said, with something like kindness in his voice.
"I'll move 'em around to the other side o' the ridge, an' perhaps
they'll settle down again. You have a sleep, if you want to."

She took him at his word. When he came back he found her stretched in
the lengthening shade. She had thrown her hat aside and taken his lunch
bag, stuffed with grass and leaves, to make a pillow.

He slipped up quietly, uncertain whether she was asleep, and sat down
beside her. Her hair, released by the removal of her hat, hung loose
around her head; a strand or two curled about her neck. Little beads of
moisture had gathered on her forehead, for the day was very hot. Gander
studied her fair face more intently than ever he had done before. There
were tiny points of freckles about her cheek and nose; not the big
flakes which had gained her brother the sobriquet of Porridge, but
little points which seemed to shine through the clear skin, as though
they were under it, not on it. She was surely asleep; her chest rose and
fell in steady rhythm, and her lips, slightly parted, trembled gently
with the current of her breath.

For a long time Gander sat beside her, wondering if she really was
asleep, or if this was a subtle feminine play to test him. Leaning low
over her face he stooped until almost he had touched her lips. Yet he
did not touch them; something seemed to hold him back. He rose
impatiently to his feet, and walked aimlessly about among the willows;
coming upon his saddle, where he had thrown it upon the grass, he fussed
with its straps and girth without knowing he did so, buckling and
unbuckling, lacing and unlacing. When he returned to the girl she was
sitting up.

"Guess I fell asleep, Gander, eh?" she said, as she drew her hair into
some kind of order, for she had not yet put on her hat. "You're a good
boy to look after me so well."

"Oh, that's nothin'." He could think of nothing else to say.

The clouds were thickening in the west, and the sun was tempered by a
screen which now reached well overhead. The stock were straggling over
the next ridge.

"They want water," she said. "We'll have to drive them to water or
they'll make for the grain fields."

"Yes," he agreed, slowly, knowing that, after watering, it would be time
for each to work homeward.

They saddled their horses, and the girl was astride as soon as her
companion. Then, the broodings of the day for the moment crowded out of
mind by the operations in hand, Gander again became the dominant and
efficient man of the farm.

"We'll work 'em over to the southeast, Jo; there's a slough here, if it
ain't all dried up. Then you can cut your herd out, an' they'll be close
to home."

"Good!" She dug her heels into her pony and was off at a gallop down one
side of the ridge. Gander took the other, and in a few minutes they had
the herd moving stolidly to the southeast. When they smelt water they
broke into a run, but the slough proved to be almost dry; inside the
circle of rank grass and rushes was a broad belt of soft mud, etched
with the light footprints of snipe and plover and the heavier
trafficking of a family of muskrats. The little sheet of water in the
centre lay scummy and green with stagnancy, but the herd bolted
knee-deep into mud, from which they drew their hoofs with a suction that
popped in the still air like corks. Gander's horse was impatient for the
water, too, but his rider held him back.

"If you get in there you'll never get out," he said. "You'd bog to the
flanks. Besides, 'tain't fit for a horse to drink. You'll be home soon,
an' fill up at the pump."

The cattle took their time, and the horses edged toward each other,
until the boy and girl again sat close together. Gander was conscious of
the seconds, the minutes, of opportunity slipping by, and he powerless
to arrest them.

Suddenly a drop of water struck his cheek.

"Rain!" they cried, looking quickly in each other's face, and the joy in
their voices was wholesome and clean. "It's coming!"

The sun was now completely obscured, and clouds were scudding overhead,
with patches of serene blue shining tranquilly through their turmoil. On
the prairie not a leaf moved. Every living thing stood silent for the
gestation of the storm.

Then down came the wind. Gander first saw it raising clouds of dust from
the summer-fallow, a mile away; then spirals of leaves from the clumps
of willows on the ridges. Yet where he sat it was as still as death.

"Jo," he said, "are you my girl?"

She drew her hat from her head, perhaps in anticipation of the wind, and
her fair hair flung loose about her neck.

"Bill," she answered him, simply, "I've always been your girl."

He stepped his horse toward her, but the next minute the blast hit them.
Her hair was all about his face, and what he said she did not hear.

The cattle swung out before the storm and the two riders in a moment had
work on their hands. They were off at a gallop, rounding up the milling
herd and crowding them back against the wind. A few great drops
splattered on Gander's shirt; his shouts were whipped from his mouth
unheard. Yet for the moment he was happy, and Jo was not uppermost in
his thoughts. Here was rain, rain! Rain, the first love of every farmer;
the bride of every dry, thirsty field; the mother of every crop that
grows! Gander was a farmer. All his instincts were rooted deep in the
soil.

With some difficulty they got the herd in motion, and then the girl,
with expert horsemanship, cut her own cattle from the moving mass. They
came up over a ridge again, and faced the sun, blazing in their eyes.
The wind had died as quickly as it had come; the clouds were blown into
a thunder-bank, vivid with pink and mauve, floating like a mighty
iceberg in the eastern sky; the blaze of intense lightning flashes lit
it with sharper color from time to time, but the promised rain had
vanished in thin air.

The girl and boy drew up again together, and Gander's jaw was grim and
set. There was something fearful and majestic about him as he gazed
defiantly at the empty sky; defiantly, perhaps, at God.

The girl watched him for a moment as he sat launching his soul against
the inevitable. She, too, was rooted in the soil, and knew something of
the mocking tragedy of rain that threatens but does not come. It was as
though the heavens flirted with the earth, arousing her hope and
passion, only to draw away in cold and beautiful disdain.

"I know--I know," she murmured to herself. Then her sympathy suddenly
mothered him. Riding close she threw her arms about him and kissed him
on the cheek. The next moment she was galloping her cattle toward their
own gate.

Gander rode slowly homeward, a medley of mixed emotions. The sun seemed
to come out hotter than ever, but he was afraid his cheeks burned not
entirely of the sun. He was too young to be long caught in despair over
the fleeting rain; his protest had been a sort of reflex of his father,
rather than a cry from his own heart. His thoughts again hung about the
girl, and he was ashamed of his own timidity. She had even dared more
than he! He was a coward, and she would think of him always as a coward.
No, not always! To-morrow! To-morrow she should see!

He was unusually silent as he ate the supper that Minnie set before him.
He was wondering if Jo had been asleep; if she really had been asleep.
"I don't believe she was asleep," he told himself. "I don't believe it.
She was--she was--" He could not disentangle the meshes of his own
confusion, but he felt that he had been mocked. Not exactly that he had
been mocked; that he had mocked himself.

As he did his evening chores he noticed that the sun sank behind a
solid wall of indigo, bordering it for a minute with a ribbon of gold
which reddened into brass and copper to the north and south. Overhead a
tattered banner of high cloud glowed in slowly changing colors long
after the prairie lay under a greying mist of twilight.

Gander went to his room, and Minnie to hers. For a long while he lay,
belittling himself, straining at the leash, unseen and not understood,
which the inherited virtue of generations had flung about him.
"To-morrow," he promised. "To-morrow. I've been a coward, a coward,
but--to-morrow!"

He awoke suddenly with the crash of thunder in his ears. Sitting up in
bed, he looked through his little window into a world of utter
blackness, but black only for a moment; it was suddenly split with light
that shone far out on the prairies, and even revealed the wheat-fields
rolling in the rising wind. Then came the rain; not a scattered drop or
two, but a blast of rain, lashing the window, trampling the roof,
battering the tin chimney, flogging the walls and eaves--a very flail of
rain. With a great sigh Gander sank back in his bed. Rain! Rain!

Then it lulled a little, and he could hear the sibilant drip of water
from the roof--a drip and patter that seemed to accentuate the silence.
It was for a moment only; the walls of his little room again leapt at
him out of the darkness; broken fragments of lightning fled through the
sky; the crash of thunder shook his window as though it would tear it
from the sash. Then down came the rain more terrific than before. And so
it went on, and on. After each lull, a crash; after each crash a flood
of rain, gradually lulling for another crash. Gander lay and thought of
the fields, drinking, drinking, under that downpour; already the water
would be gathering in the pasture, running in little rivulets, winding
about the roots of the willows, dripping into gopher holes, filling the
cracks of the drouth, healing the hurt prairie. And, some way, it seemed
to heal more than the hurt prairie, because Gander was at peace.

Quietly, from under the muffled roar of the rain, came a voice almost in
Gander's ear. "Gander, Gander, are you asleep?"

He was wide awake again in an instant. "No, Minn; what is it?"

"I'm afraid, Gander. It's an awful storm. I wish Daddy was here."

She was standing beside his bed; a flash of lightning revealed her
little figure, her night-dress, her hair hanging in braids about her
shoulders, her brown eyes big with alarm.

"It's all right, Minn," he said, reassuringly; "it's a big storm, but
it's just what we want. I bet the fields are runnin' in water."

"But the lightning is--very close. I counted the seconds. It's--it's
very close." Then, mustering her courage for her big request, "Gander,
can I--may I--get in with you?"

"I--I guess so. Of course. Come along."

He made room for her, and she slipped under the blanket beside him. Her
arms went up around his shoulders; he could feel the beat of her
frightened heart. "I'm all right, now," she said, presently.

Then she lay still, her little frame trembling against his, but in the
frequent flashes he could see that her eyes were wide. And, just as he
thought she was falling asleep, she suddenly sprang up in bed.
"Gander!" she shrieked. "There's a man at the window! I saw a man at
the window!"

Gander felt a strange creeping up his spine and into the hair at the
back of his neck. "Nonsense!" he said, in as steady a voice as he could.
"You're scared, Minnie. You're seein' things."

"I saw a man!" she said. "I saw a man! Gander, I saw him right there at
the window!"

Whatever Gander would have said was cut short by a knocking at the door;
a boisterous, insistent knocking. Gander drew his sister down and
crawled out over her. She was trembling and he feared that, perhaps, she
felt him tremble, too. But he was the man of the house, and the duty was
his.

"Lie still, Minnie," he said, "an' I'll see."

Gander had years ago outgrown the effeminacy of a night-gown. Without
stopping for any dressing he strode into the larger room, found the lamp
on the table, and lit it, while the knocking kept up thunderously on the
door. Then, suddenly conscious of his bare legs, he ran back and drew on
his overalls. The knocking had stopped with the lighting of the lamp,
but as Gander again walked across the floor he could hear his heart
thumping above the drumming of the rain. He threw the door open. The
figure of a man in a dripping oilskin coat and felt hat, pulled close
down on his head, was limned in the wedge of light that thrust its way
into a darkness slantingly streaked with rain.

"Well, William," said the man, "I hope I didn't scare you. Are you all
right?"

"Oh, it's you, Mr. Fyfe. Come in! Yep, o' course, I'm all right."

"Of course," said Mr. Fraser Fyfe, shaking the water from his coat as
he stood inside the door. "I figgered you'd be all right, but the wife
got a bit uneasy when the storm broke. Rainin' cats an' dogs, eh,
Gander?"

Gander always liked his neighbors better when they called him Gander. It
didn't sound so juvenile as William.

"Yep. But it's just what we want. I hope it's rainin' at Brandon. It'll
kind o' cheer Dad up a bit."

"You bet it will. Cheer us all up a bit. Well--you're all right, eh?"

"Right as rain," said Gander, without noticing the appropriateness of

his figure of speech.

"Minnie, too?"

"Yep. She's all right." Gander would not have liked to confess that she
was in his bed, but his heart was beating steadily again.

"I looked in at the window, but I didn't see any light, so I figgered
you were all asleep," Mr. Fyfe remarked. "Well--guess I'll be going
again."

Gander's duties as host came upon him. "Won't you sit down? Won't you
stay till the rain is over?" he urged.

"Guess not. I'm a bit too wet in spots for sitting down. And I hope the
rain won't be over till morning."

"Hope so, too. It was awful good o' you to come over, Mr. Fyfe."

"Oh, that's nothing. I knew you were all right, but the wife got uneasy.
'Fraser,' she says, 'I'm worried about those children over at Stake's.'
'Children!' says I. 'Gander's as good as a man, and scared o' nothing.'
But she'd got it into her head, and you know what women are--or do you,
Gander?" Mr. Fyfe's eyes twinkled under his dripping hat.

"I guess I do--some."

Mr. Fyfe hesitated, his hand on the door.

"Well, guess I better be going," he reminded himself, after a pause.
"The wife'll be worried about me, next. Women are great worriers."

"I can lend you an umbrella," Gander suggested.

"Nope. They catch the lightning. I'll be all right. Needed a bath,
anyway. So long, Gander."

The farmer drew the door open and slipped out into the storm. Gander
watched from the window until a flash of lightning revealed his neighbor
ploughing his way through the half mile of mud and water that lay
between the two homesteads. Then he went silently back to bed.

Minnie again drew him down beside her, her soft cheek against his.
"Gander," she whispered, "I'm so proud of you. You're so brave."

"Huh! Guess I'm not very brave. It was Double F that was brave."

"You are, too. He said so. I heard him, right there in the kitchen. He
said you were scared of nothing."

She lay silent for a few moments, then, wrapping her arms about him
again, "It's fine to have a big brother, that's scared of nothing," she
said. And in his arms she fell asleep.

But Gander lay awake, thinking.

The storm had spent itself when they arose in the morning. The sky was
as clear as silver, and the air washed clean and sweet with the rain.
Gander fed his horses and then stood for a long time unconsciously
watching the play of light on the wet leaves.

"Guess I won't need to turn the stock out to-day," he told his sister
at breakfast. "The rain'll freshen up the grass in the pasture, an' I
want to do some work on the mower. The knives are to sharpen an' there's
a new pitman-rod bearin' to fit. We'll want to jump into the hayin' as
soon as Dad gets back."

"Can I help?" Minnie demanded, bright with the prospect of her brother's
company for the whole day.

"Well, I _might_ let you turn the grindstone," he conceded.




CHAPTER NINE


The next turning point in Gander's life was in 1914. He was then
eighteen years old; six feet tall when he straightened up, which was
seldom; with a fuzz about his cheeks and lips that called for occasional
removal, and an Adam's apple protruding from his thin neck like the
knuckle of a bent fore-finger. The hitch which he had acquired in
supporting his overalls had been permanently incorporated into his gait,
and, although his voice no longer showed any tendency to break forth on
honking episodes, the name Gander was as much his as though it had been
branded on him with iron. The community had forgotten that ever he had
been called William.

The new house had been built. The very year after his visit to the
Brandon Fair, Jackson Stake announced that, crop or no crop, he was
going to have a new house for his old woman. He was beginning to call
her "the old woman" now, a term which, on his lips, carried no
suggestion of disrespect, but was rather an appellation of endearment, a
safe sort of sentimentalism carefully camouflaged with a coat of
transparent harshness. And Mrs. Stake was getting along. She was nearing
forty-five when the house was built, and farmers' wives are sometimes
old at forty-five.

"You've got this ol' hen-house pretty near tramped into the cellar,"
Jackson had remarked one night as he watched his wife shuttling steadily
back and forth between the stove and the kitchen table. The knots in the
board floor were coming up higher with the years. "Dang it all, we'll
build a new house this summer, whether school keeps or not!"

"I'll believe it when I see it," said Susie Stake, who had ceased to be
an optimist.

But her husband, while slow to make up his mind, was resolute in
carrying out a decision finally taken. The spirit which had tamed his
section of wild scrub and prairie land into one of the most fruitful
farms of the Plainville neighborhood had in it a dogged perseverance
akin to stubbornness. For years he had been on the verge of building a
new house, and it was his wife's scepticism of his good intentions, much
more than any appeal she ever had made, that finally shoved him over the
edge. The next day he ordered the lumber, and the following week the
carpenters were at work. Before the season's wheat was ripe it stood
complete, a frame box with four corners and a roof, a little to the
north of the cabin which had sheltered Jackson Stake and his wife during
all these years, and the numerous lean-tos which had marked their
domestic husbandry. The lean-tos were dragged to various corners of the
yard for use as chicken houses and hog pens. The farmer had intended
using the central part as a granary but the sills were found to have
rotted away, so the idea had to be abandoned. It is one thing to live in
a house with rotten sills, but quite another to risk the year's harvest
in it. The logs which had been hewn and built into place back in those
days when life lay all ahead were torn from their plastered chinks and
cut into firewood. By and by the old cellar itself filled up, and
another landmark of the pioneer had vanished forever.

For a few months Susie Stake revelled in the freedom of her new house.
There were two good-sized rooms on the ground floor, divided by a
stairway which led to the second story. The southern room was used as a
kitchen and general living quarters, but the northern one was reserved
as a family parlor, to be entered only on special occasions. Upstairs
were four bedrooms; square, boxy apartments, each equipped with four
walls, a roof, a floor, a door and a window. In these commodious
quarters Susie Stake, for the first time in her married life, felt that
she had breathing space. Her foot took on a somewhat lighter tread, and
once in a while Jackson would surprise her singing as she trained her
flowers, set in tomato cans in the southern window. On such occasions
the farmer would harrow his thinning hair with his great fingers and
bask for a moment in a pleasant glow of virtuous accomplishment.

But the new house created new needs. For example, there was the
furnishing of the parlor--always called simply "the room." Mrs. Stake
never had been given to much entertainment; her companionship had been
with the members of her family, and with her cows, her chickens, geese,
ducks and pigs. But the new house forced social obligations upon her.
Neighbors who for years had been content to inquire for her health at
Willow Green schoolhouse on Sundays now found their friendship quickened
to the point of paying visits. A new and comparatively pretentious house
in a prairie district is a social factor of as great importance as a new
bride in any feminine circle. It is to be investigated, scrutinized,
commended or criticized as the occasion seems to warrant. Susie Stake's
house was not her house alone; it belonged to the community.

It was this that made the new needs. The log cabin never had seemed
bare, but "the room," even when decorated with two enlarged crayon
portraits of ancestral Hardens and a calendar from the Plainville
garage, seemed unaccountably empty. The friendliest of conversations
sounded hollow against its plastered walls. It was cold and uninviting,
and it could be cured only by further expenditures.

One by one these were wormed out of Jackson Stake. First a carpet, which
cost him eleven dollars and seemed an outrageous extravagance when
linoleum, which cleans up better after muddy boots, could have been
bought for eight; then a parlor suite--pronounced "soot" until Minnie,
at sixteen, discovered the mistake, and with much mortification set the
household right on so delicate a matter--a parlor suite with birch
mahogany arms and brightly patterned upholstery and crimson furbelows
that hung close to the carpet, and a rocking chair with springs that
squeaked until Gander said he guessed it wanted a shot of grease in the
differential; then a polished oak centre table on legs as spindly as
those of a young calf, on which to set photographs and Minnie's copy of
"Songs of a Sourdough" and a china creation spelled v-a-s-e but the
pronunciation of which, in 1914, had not been definitely settled in the
Stake household.

"It's not the first cost--it's the upkeep," Jackson one day confided to
his chief friend and chief rival, Fraser Fyfe, in the shade of the
horse-stable. "Jumpin' jack rabbits! I've paid out more money--It's like
one o' them new-fangled automo-billygoats that cost two cents a mile for
gasoline an' the rest o' your bank roll for incidentals. I figgered when
I built a house I would be at the end of it. So I was, but not the end I
figgered. An' now Minnie's raisin' a war-cry for a piano. Huh! You'd
think farmin' was an industry, instead of a pursoot."

"Pursoot is right," Double F agreed, amiably. "I been pursooin' it for
twenty years. That is, sometimes I'm pursooin' it, and sometimes it's
pursooin' me. And just when I figgered I'd got the crittur by the tail
what gets into you but you must build a house, and now ain't I hearin'
mornin', noon, and night, 'Well, if Stakes can build a new house I don'
see why we can't. Ain't you as well off as Jackson Stake? Don' you
figger you're as good a farmer as Jackson Stake?' It got so bad with us
I had to promise to put in a telephone, when the gang came along here
diggin' holes, so that now the women can tell their troubles to each
other, an' give us men folks a chance to do a bit o' work between
times." Double F blew a whiff of tobacco smoke from his pipe and
contemplated the harshness of his lot with some complacency.

So the seasons had worn away, each bringing its new need, and each new
need, when supplied, creating other needs in its wake, as is the way
with a civilization which grows more complex with each accomplishment.
And at eighteen Gander, lanky and competent, found himself again faced
with a problem of high importance.

It was a hot day about the first of August that Fraser Fyfe came
strolling across the fields for a word with his neighbor. The wheat was
already taking on the copper and gold of harvest, and the prairies lay
bathed in the ripening sunshine. The lazy clank of Jackson Stake's
windmill came down from the tower above the water trough as the blades
stirred irresolutely in the noon-day breeze.

"I wonder you wouldn't put in a 'phone of your own, an' save me these
long walks, an' me a busy man," Double F announced himself. "But I
suppose you're still savin' up for the piano----"

"It's not that, Neighbor. I wouldn' be so unkind as to deprive you o'
your one excuse for seekin' a little upliftin' comp'ny. What's the news
to-day? Mrs. Gordon burn her biscuits again? The young lad was tellin'
Gander that since they got the 'phone his mother burns most every batch
o' biscuits; when she gets listenin' in on a juicy conversation she
knows nothin' more until the kitchen's full o' smoke."

"Well, it's more than biscuits burnin' this time, I'm thinkin'. The news
from Plainville is that there's a war on."

"Who with? The Germans? I seen somethin' about that in the paper."

"Yep. They're goin' to go to it. They were for bustin' into Belgium an'
England said 'Stay out,' an' they didn't, an' so there you are!"

The two men lit their pipes the better to digest this momentous news.

"'Twon't last long," Jackson Stake prophesied, when his pipe was going
freely.

"I give 'em three months," Mr. Fyfe allowed.

"Yep. Now-a-days, with our inventions, an' everythin', you can kill 'em
too quick to keep it up long."

"Three months I give 'em," said Mr. Fyfe, with finality.

It was typical of their British outlook that it did not occur to either
of them to so much as wonder what the outcome would be. They took that
for granted.

"They're goin' to send men from Canada," Mr. Fyfe continued.

"Well, it'll be a good trip, but it'll be all over before they get
there."

"That's so," said Mr. Fyfe. "I give 'em three months." Then, looking his
neighbor in the face, "Jackson, what do you reckon this is goin' to do
to the price o' wheat?"

Jackson Stake's mouth slowly opened as the really significant part of
the news began to dawn upon him. "Jumpin' jack rabbits! Yes! I remember
my father tellin' about the price o' wheat the time o' the American
civil war. Two dollars a bushel, I think it was.... But this won't last
that long. It'll be over in three months."

But for all his mercenary outlook, something deeper than the price of
wheat was stirring in the farmer's veins. He was opening and closing his
great fists until the veins stood out like whip lashes on the backs of
his hands.

"Yep. I give 'em three months. But that's the wheat season. You can't
tell what's goin' to happen in three months."

The two farmers discussed their crop prospects in the light of possible
record prices for wheat, and, when Mr. Fyfe at last had gone home,
Jackson carried the news into the house.

"Double F tells me there's a war on," he announced. "Jus' got the word
from Plainville."

His wife made no answer. She was busy kneading dough with her strong,
lean fists.

"I said there was a war on," her husband repeated, somewhat annoyed that
his important news had produced so little effect.

"I heard you," she answered. "I suppose it's among the Board o'
Directors over Mrs. Burge gettin' first prize for butter at the
Plainville Fair. I heard talk there was goin' to be doin's about that,
an' her husband on the Board."

"No, Mother, this is no butter scrap, but a real war. With Germany."

Mrs. Stake continued her kneading. "Germany," she remarked, between
punches. "I've heard about them. There was a German family lived near us
when I was a little girl. Nice folks, too, but he drank too much beer,
although I'm not sayin' only Germans do that." She paused, and Jackson
had a feeling that hostilities were threatening much nearer home than
Europe. "Well, it's a pity they couldn't settle their troubles some
other way," she concluded.

Jackson opened his mouth to suggest the possible effect on the price of
wheat; then closed it again. He had promised Minnie that if the crop
sold for a dollar a bushel he would buy a piano, but that was when there
seemed no possibility of such a price. Perhaps the less said about it
the better.

"Well, think I'll run into town an' get the mail," he said, after a
silence. "There ain't much doin', an' I'm kind o' interested in the
news."

"Well--don' get anythin' else," his wife cautioned him.

In the yard he met Gander.

"Hear the news, Gander? There's a war on, with Germany."

Gander swallowed a couple of times and hitched his overalls into a more
dependable position. "What about?" he asked.

"Dunno. Somethin' about Belgium. Double F was tellin' me."

"England in it?"

"Yep. Double F says it'll be over in three months."

"Less'n that, I guess," said Gander. "Don' suppose we'll hear much about
it, this far away."

"Oh, the papers'll have it all. I was jus' goin' into town to get the
mail. Come along?"

"I was goin' to do some rivetin' on the binder canvass, but I guess
it'll keep. The crop's comin' in pretty fast. Give me time to clean up a
bit?"

"Sure." The farmer surveyed his lanky son with amusement. There was a
fuzz of down on his dark cheeks, and his hair, long over-due a visit to
the barber, clustered thick about his ears. "Sure. Make yourself pretty.
I had it, too--at your age."

The boy shaved at a broken mirror hanging over the wash bench in front
of the house, put on a clean shirt, which he drew together at the neck
with a gaudy tie, dressed himself in his Sunday suit, blacked his boots.
These preparations took time, and before they were finished his father
became impatient.

"Come on, Gander, come on!" he said. "The war'll be over before we get
to Plainville."

"Be a good thing if you had some o' his trouble," Mrs. Stake remarked.
"You look like the day after an auction sale."

Jackson laughed, good naturedly. He had long since outgrown the nonsense
of changing his clothes, except for Sunday services or on special
occasions, like Fair Day.

They hitched the drivers--two light-footed four-year-old bays--to the
buggy and went spinning into town as the afternoon sun swung well over
the wheat-fields. The smell of the ripening grain was in the air; its
rich green ranks, already coloring into copper at the middle of the
stalk, swayed gently in the breeze, while other ranks, far from this
peaceful scene, rushed to their red harvest overseas. On the way they
talked of the war, as something distant and impersonal; something to be
settled in Europe. But it had its practical application, too.

"It'll likely boost the price o' wheat," Jackson confided in his son. It
was impossible for him to keep this important prospect entirely to
himself. "I mind my father tellin' about the price o' wheat the time o'
the American civil war. Two dollars a bushel, I think it went to."

"Gee! If it would do that again!" said Gander, and for the moment lost
himself in the contemplation of such possibilities.

As they neared Plainville they became aware that the traffic on the
roads was unusually heavy. Every converging trail had its string of
buggies flying their pennants of grey dust. Two or three times they had
been overtaken by automobiles, which were now crowding into the prairie
districts, although as yet they had by no means become the universal
means of locomotion. That was another war-development which neither
Jackson Stake nor his son, nor many a wiser man, foresaw.

Cresting a ridge, the cupolas of the wheat elevators at Plainville came
into view, and down the long road between stretched a procession of
buggies and automobiles. The whole country-side was crowding into
Plainville. Jackson Stake drew his reins tighter; held his whip with a
sharper grasp....

They found the streets of the little prairie town lined with buggies and
motor cars; the livery stables full; every hitching post occupied. They
tied their team to an abandoned land-roller in a vacant lot and pressed
through the crowds that had gathered around the telegraph office and the
telephone exchange. All sorts of rumors were afloat. There had been a
naval engagement; the German navy had been sunk; the German hosts were
held on the borders of Belgium. Farm women and men, youths and girls,
mingled on the street, but for once they were talking about something
other than the weather and the crops. There was an air of excitement, of
high spirits, of bantering, and of unconscious boastfulness. It was
infectious; it swept through the crowd; it caught Jackson Stake and
Gander, and set them cheering boisterously when a number of youths
paraded an effigy of the Kaiser down the street mounted on the most
decrepit nag the community could produce, and with a disused copper
kettle on its head for a helmet. They trailed the figure into the
Roseland Emporium and demanded a sauerkraut cocktail--a flight of humor
that was wafted from lip to lip through the appreciative throng.

As Jackson and Gander worked down the street they came upon another
group gathered about a barrel from which some one was making a speech.
"Believe me, men," he was saying, "This is as much our fight as it is
England's. The Germans have got to be stopped somewhere. You all agree
to that. Now _I_ say, stop them in Belgium. Better fight them in Belgium
than in Plainville. Eh? Yes"--in answer to an inquiry which Jackson did
not hear--"I'm taking names. I've authority here"--he held the yellow
sheet of a telegram aloft--"and I'm enlisting the First Plainville
Company. What's that? Over in three months? Yes--it will be over _here_
in three months, if every one stays at home. That's right--sign your
name there--official forms later." Some young men were writing their
names on a sheet. There was something grim about the set of their
mouths; they didn't seem to be thinking of a three months' holiday.

Gander's eyes met his father's. "Who is he?" the older man asked.

"Why, that's Lee, the tailor. Presses suits, and that kind o' thing."
Gander's Adam's apple was leaping at its leash.

The man on the barrel paused in his harangue, and his eye met Gander's.

"Hello, Gander," he said. "Want to sign up?"

"Haven't thought about it, yet," Gander parried.

"Well, think about it. It's something to think about."

Gander slipped out of the group as soon as he could. At the edge of the
crowd he came upon Tommy Burge.

"'Lo, Porridge."

"'Lo, Gander."

Then the conversation lagged. With so much to talk about, they had
nothing to say. Both were beginning to think.

At Sempter & Burton's store he met Jo Burge. She was a young woman now,
supple and close-knit, with fair skin and eyes and wisps of light brown
hair showing under her summer hat. She greeted Gander cordially.

"This is exciting news, Gander. They're enlisting men already. Don't you
think that's wonderful?"

"It'll be all over in three months," said Gander.

"Yes, I suppose so. But just the same, it's fine to see men answering
the call. It makes us feel that we're in it, and doing our share."

For some reason his meeting with Jo gave Gander less pleasure than he
had hoped. He was pleased with the care he had taken in shaving and
dressing, but there was a hollowness about it all somewhere. Jo was
good to look on now, and Gander never had lost the attachment which had
been formed back in those days at Willow Green school. He suspected that
Jo had not lost it either, yet to-day for some reason she seemed to
place him at a disadvantage. There was a light in her eyes which he
could not fathom or understand.

In the dusk father and son drove silently home together.




CHAPTER TEN


The months that followed were difficult months for Gander. They were a
period of self-searching and indecision. For the first time in his life
he began to read the newspapers, but found in them only a jumble of
conflicting reports; of overwhelming losses inflicted upon the Germans,
who, nevertheless, continued their advance; of heroism among all the
Allied forces, and unspeakable brutality on the part of the enemy. The
First Plainville Company had been raised and away, with Lieutenant Andy
Lee at its head; a second company was now recruiting. Discussions before
the church services at the schoolhouse on Sundays had switched from
crops and cattle to the theatre of war.

It was at those services that Gander felt the eyes of Josephine Burge
heavy upon him. As circumstantial reports of the atrocities in Belgium
increased, so did those pale eyes seem to bore deeper within him. Jo met
him cordially, as before, but there was a new, deep gravity in her
manner, and Gander knew that she was expecting great things of him.
Perhaps she was not deeply in love with him, if at all; but she cared
enough to hope he would play the hero, as other young men of the
district were doing. The realities of war had not yet been brought near
enough home to put the fear of death in the hearts of young women. But
it was already lurking in the hearts of mothers, and, perhaps, of some
fathers.

Gander had become conscious of that, too. He had surprised his mother
watching him with an unwonted wistfulness, and one day, after a silence
at the table, and quite apropos of nothing, she said, "I have lost one
son already." Gander's father had looked across the table but had not
answered. Minnie regarded Gander with eyes eager to light up with
hero-worship.

The companionship between father and son deepened in those days. They
spent much time together, but little conversation. As, one by one, young
men of the neighborhood responded to the call, the strain upon them
tightened. The three months which Fraser Fyfe had stipulated with so
much finality failed to see the war at a close, and the spirit of
adventure which had animated some of the earlier recruits was slowly
giving way to deeper emotions. Jackson Stake no longer read the
head-lines of the paper to the assembled household after supper, but
pored over them by himself in the secrecy of the horse-stable or the
granary. And often, when the day's work was done, he would sit down by
Gander's side and the two men would smoke in silence while the dusk
gathered about them. At length Jackson, rising slowly to his feet, would
draw his hand across his son's shoulder with the faintest gesture of
caress before he knocked the ashes from his pipe and went to bed.

For shelter Gander fled to his work. The sudden call for men had created
a shortage of harvest labor, and Gander attacked the ripened fields with
more than his usual vigor. He had fed and brushed and nursed his eight
big horses into prime condition before the heavy load of the binder fell
upon them; he had tightened every nut, oiled every bearing, before the
call of the red grain swept them into the harvest. The summer had not
been a favorable one for wheat, and the crop was light, so Gander and
his father undertook to harvest it without hiring any help. Gander was
still the teamster and the binder driver, as his knack lay along those
lines, and his father stooked after him. As Gander would approach the
part of the field in which his father was working he would note how the
big frame stalked among the sheaves; bending, grasping, straightening to
a half-erect position, planting the sheaves in place; then on to the
next, and the next, and the next. The sun blazed down upon them; the
smell of oily dust came up hot from the binder bearings; the white line
of sweat crept over the flanks of the big horses. If he dismounted for a
minute or two to straighten out a tangle in the twine or remove a
troublesome straw from the bill-hook of the knotter, the iron seat was
almost unbearably hot when he returned to it. Yet he found occasion,
more than in any previous harvest, to stop as he drew up beside his
father and exchange a word with him.

"Well, Gander, how's she goin'?" Jackson Stake would say, resting his
hands on his kidneys and twisting his back for relief.

"Not so bad, Dad, not so bad, but she's thin as black bristles on a
Tamworth hog. Not more'n eight bushels to the acre; maybe ten, in spots.
Like to drive a round or two?"

"No--you go ahead. Spoils my voice, shoutin' at the horses. Besides,
it's too hot up there. I like it better down here, where it's cool."

Sometimes he would persuade his father to spell off with him.

"Dad, I'm not a kid any more, an' you keep shovin' me over on the easy
job. Rest your back for a round or two an' I'll take the crick out o'
mine sagaciatin' a few o' these sheaves into position." Then Jackson
would take the lines and, cracking the long whip over the horses' backs,
drive off in a great clatter, while Gander threw himself impetuously
into the stooking. But by the time his father had gone the second round
he would stop his horses and climb down from the seat.

"Guess you'll have to take it, Gander," he would say. "Never was any
good drivin' a binder. Either I've got my nigh horse in the standin'
wheat, or my off one is trampin' through the stooks. They know me, an'
they run on me. I bet that off horse has et a peck o' wheat out o' the
stooks in the las' two roun's. Can't afford to lose so much wheat as
that, Gander."

Then Gander's Adam's apple would crawl up into his throat and choke the
words of affection he would have liked to say, and his father would draw
his arm across his shoulder in that way he sometimes did. And that was
all. But both of them understood.

In the middle of the afternoon Minnie would bring sandwiches and tea in
a basket. She would watch from the house until Gander turned the far
corner of the field; then, when she saw his reel glittering in the sun
on the homeward stretch she would leave in time to intercept him at the
nearest corner. Gander would set the basket on the top of the machine
and tell Minnie to hop on to the frame behind, where she would steady
herself by clinging to the arm which supported the wind-break. It was a
never-failing fascination to her to watch the bright knives shuttling in
the wheat, and the ruddy stems falling on the canvas and being swept up
the elevator to the deck.... When they reached their father they would
stop, and, throwing up an extra high stook for shade, sit down on the
warm earth and eat and drink together.

"I was just thinking," said Minnie one day, as she chatted to the
accompaniment of the busy eating of her father and brother, "I was just
thinking as I rode up on the back of the binder that the wheat was
Germans and the knives were the Allies. It was great fun watching them
topple over, in whole regiments. And where a big green weed would stick
up out of the wheat I would say, 'That's a German officer, a captain,
maybe, or maybe a colonel, but just you wait! Your time's coming.' And
then the knives would snip him off, and he'd fall with a flop on the
canvas, and get swept up out of sight, and when I'd look back after a
little there he'd be lying, tied up in a sheaf, full length on the
ground. And once I saw a great big weed, higher than all the others, and
I said, 'Here's the Kaiser,' but we just missed him--he was outside the
swath. Can I go 'round with you again, Gander? We'll get him next time."

"Sure--I guess you can, if you want to. But it's pretty hot."

"Yes," said Minnie, thoughtfully, "but not as hot as it must be in
France, with all those heavy uniforms and everything to carry. I suppose
I'm too big a girl now for make-belief, Gander, don't you think? But I
like to feel that--that--_some_ of us--is--is cutting 'em down."

Gander was struggling with his tea, while his father stared into the
blue haze of the harvest sky. So even Minnie felt it!

Then Jackson Stake expressed a hope that had been forming in his heart;
a hope behind which he could shelter his self-respect--and Gander.

"Perhaps one of us is," he said, "or will be, soon as he can get over.
I wouldn't wonder that's what Jackie's doin'."

Minnie drew her clasped hands up before her young breast. "Wouldn't that
be fine!" she said. "Wouldn't that be fine!"

The harvest season drew by, and threshing was upon them. One day early
in September Bill Powers, seated in his lop-sided buggy, drew up in the
Stake farmyard. It was the noon hour, and Gander and his father were
sunning themselves on the edge of the water trough beside the windmill,
for the summer's heat was over and the day was only pleasantly warm.
Powers had driven from a farm some miles south, where his outfit was at
work. There was chaff on his faded felt hat and engine grease on his
overalls.

Powers' horse edged to the water trough and Gander slipped his
check-rein to let him drink.

"Well, how's the Powers?" Jackson greeted him. "You won't be one o'
those wild European Powers we hear so much about these days?"

The red line of a grin sliced across the dusty stubble of Powers' face.
"No, but I'm about as wild as if I was," he said. He extracted a pair of
long legs from the diminutive box of the buggy, and, thrusting them over
the side, alighted by the simple process of straightening them.

"Come in an' eat," Jackson invited. "Gander an' me has pretty well
cleared the boards, but I reckon the missus can drag out a bite o'
somethin'."

"Nope--thank 'ee the same. Got to get back." Powers stood for a moment
without further speaking, as though he had a weighty matter on his mind
but did not quite know how to present it.

"How's the crop runnin'?" said Jackson.

"Poor. Threshin' out poor. No money threshin' this year, an' wages goin'
up, an' men not to be had. I tell you, Mr. Stake, this war's got to be
more'n a joke. My best men's gone, an' I lost another last night. You
know Dick Claus? Has been firin' for me for two seasons, an' I always
used him well, an' stood likely to raise his pay. By another year I
might ha' let him run the engine himself. Well, he's been actin' kind o'
absent-minded lately, an' yesterday I had to say a word or two to him,
decent, though, as I always do. You can't have a fellow firin' an engine
an' his mind not on the job--you know that, Mr. Stake. Dick was over to
Burge's on Sunday--he's been chasin' that Burge girl a bit, an' he
hasn't been the same since."

Gander felt a strange sensation creeping up his back, and his heart
quickened its beat, but he hoped his face gave no sign.

"Well, he jumped it las' night," Powers continued. "Shoved in the last
forkful o' straw before quittin', an' then handed me the fork. 'You take
it,' he said. 'I'm done. From this on you poke your old garbage-burner
yourself. I'm done. The next pokin' I do'll be at a German--with a
bay'net.' An' this mornin' he beat it for Plainville, to sign up.
Course, I gave him my blessin', even if he did miscall my engine--as
good a steamer as ever lugged a separator up a prairie trail; you know
that, Mr. Stake--we got to win the war, an' I gave him my blessin', but
I thought he might ha' stuck till after threshin'. The Germans'll keep,
but this weather may blow up wet any time. Garbage-burner!" Mr. Powers
twisted his mouth into a protest of disgust.

"Well, I guess they got to have the men," Jackson Stake agreed, with a
gesture of resignation, "but it's a bit hard on us farmers, with our
crops out, an' everythin'. Gander an' me took ours off ourselves this
year, an' saved a wage bill that'll come handy. You can't tell what's
goin' to happen, these times."

"That's what I came to speak about," said Mr. Powers. "Gander's got a
handy way with him, an' now your crop's in stook I thought maybe I could
get him to fire for the rest o' the season. What you say, Gander? I'll
give you the same's I was givin' Dick, an' him with two years'
'sperience."

Gander's heart thumped again, but with an altogether different emotion.
If the thought of Jo Burge could make that heart quicken its beat, so
too could the prospect of firing a steam engine. Short of actually
driving an engine, and perhaps, some day, having one of his own, to fire
one was his greatest ambition. Yet even in that epochal moment he had a
thought for his father.

"It'll depend on Dad," he said. "If he thinks he can get along----"

Jackson Stake was harrowing his hair with his thick fingers--an
unfailing sign of cerebral activity. "I guess I could manage," he said,
"if only we were threshed. But if I don' get threshed Gander an' me were
thinkin' o' stackin' a field or two so we could get along with the
ploughin'. You see, Bill, that's how it is. Now if you was to pull in
here to-morrow Gander could start with you at once."

So Jackson Stake drove his bargain with Bill Powers that his threshing
should be done the following week. With the possibility of the "outfits"
working short-handed, Gander was a good pawn to play, and his father
played him to the best advantage.

Firing Bill Powers' straw-burner opened a new world for Gander, a world
of great activity and accomplishment, in which the throbbing of the
steam exhaust for a time beat down that inner throbbing which could be
quietened, but could not quite be killed. It was a hard life, to one who
weighed his work, but Gander did not count it hard, because he loved his
engine and delighted in its company. Powers, who seemed to sleep only
upon odd occasions, wakened the boy at four each morning. Even at that
hour the lantern was already burning in the caboose. Gander would
stretch his stiff muscles, then thrust his legs out of the bunk and
follow them into the narrow aisle, cluttered with the garments of the
other sleepers. Finding his own clothes, he would climb into them
quickly and silently; quickly, because the atmosphere of the caboose,
although stale with insufficient ventilation, was sharp with the nip of
the autumn night; and silently because noise had a way of bringing upon
his head the frank and personal expletives of those fortunate members of
the gang who were permitted to sleep until the lazy hour of five
o'clock. Then, out into the tingling night air, with the stars blazing a
million points of fire upon the sleeping earth, and away through the
crisp stubble to "the set." Generally he found it by his prairie sense
of direction, or, if the moon still hung in the west, by the temporary
trail made by the grain wagons. There it lay, a blacker hulk against the
darkness, inexpressibly silent and weird in its repose. Gander's first
act was always to place his hand on the boiler, as one might reassure a
nervous horse. By the same half-caressing touch he gauged the coldness
of the night and the temperature of the water. Then, having lighted his
lantern, he cleared the fire-box and ash-pan.

"Well, how's the old girl the smornin'?" Gander would say, as he raked
the ash-pan clean. "Ready for another day's run? I bet we are. Water
pretty low, eh?" as, holding the lantern close to the glass, he
distinguished the dim line of the liquid inside. "She'll go up again
when she gets hot. Ready for a bit o' fire?"

Selecting a small armful of straw from the dump beside the engine he
would set a match to it and thrust it into the fire-box; then, as it
burned up, add more, being careful not to choke his fire before it had
found a draft. Those first moments, when the flues were cold and the
smoke oozed back as from a stubborn kitchen stove, were sometimes the
most trying of the day. But if the fire was properly nursed the heat
would soon create its own draft, and away it would go. It was fine to
see the smoke beginning to roll and billow out of the short stack
overhead.

Then came long minutes of gentle stoking, coaxing the fire to its
maximum heat, and, between times, studying the stars or the waning moon.
Sometimes Gander wondered what those same stars, looking down in Europe,
saw, but he was not imaginative, and he had a man's job on his hands,
and was content. After a while a welcome, sizzling sound, as from a
mighty tea-kettle, would proclaim that the fire had found its teeth.
Then another long wait, and, just as the first flush of dawn crept up
the eastern sky, the steam-gauge would begin to register pressure.

From that on was easy. As soon as he had steam pressure Gander would
turn on the blower, which creates draft by making a vacuum in the
smoke-stack. Under this impetus the fire would spring to new life,
licking up greedily the straw which Gander pressed, almost continuously,
into the fire-box, while the hand on the steam-gauge crept slowly around
the dial. By the time dawn was throwing the shadows of the stooks
across the stubble Gander would send forth a shriek from his whistle,
choking at first with the cold in its larynx, but rising quickly to a
clear, high note which pierced the morning silence for miles around. It
was his word to the world that he was ready for another day's business.

It was Gander's pride to be first to sound his whistle in the morning.
Other firemen, firing other engines off somewhere through the grey dawn,
heard that challenging whistle, and said to themselves, "Gee, Old Bill
Powers is cuttin' 'er out early these mornin's," while Gander grinned in
satisfaction and warmed his back against the boiler.

Powers would be the second man at the set. He usually arrived about the
time Gander was ready to whistle, and with a word such as "Nippy the
smornin', Gander," or, "How's the old gal takin' 'er milk the smornin',
Gander?" he would reach for the battered teapot filled with machine oil
which was warming against the smoke-stack, and stride off with it to the
separator, where he filled the oil cups, adjusted the belts, raked out
accumulations of chaff and seeds, and generally put the mill in order
for the day's run. Meanwhile Gander urged his pressure up to a hundred
and thirty pounds, which was the limit allowed by the exacting
Government inspector on a boiler not as youthful as it once had been;
injected as much water as could be carried without danger of foaming,
filled his cups with oil and tallow, and sent another shrill blast into
the morning air through which the sunlight was now sifting from great
fan-shaped streamers overhead. The men by this time had had their
breakfast, and their horses came jingling out from the barns to take
their places on the bundle wagons, the grain wagons, and the tank
wagons in which water was hauled from the nearest pond. The fields
awoke; "the outfit" shook off its slumber like a giant aroused from
sleep.

After the first few days, Powers, finding Gander competent and eager,
left him practically in charge of the engine and gave his own attention
mainly to the separator. It was a great hour when Bill said to his young
fireman, "All right, Gander, you start 'er the smornin'." The drive belt
had not yet been put on, but Gander had watched the careful Powers run
his engine idle a few minutes every morning to warm the bearings before
applying the load and to clear the cylinder and valve-chest of the
night's condensation. With infinite pride and responsibility he climbed
to the driver's position, and, throttle in hand, gently eased the first
gush of steam into the cylinder. There was a wet hiss from the rear
cylinder-cock; then, almost imperceptibly, the driving-arm began to
lunge forward, the eccentric heaved on the shaft, the governors began to
rotate, the idle fly-wheel stirred into motion. Then a pause at the end
of the stroke, and Gander's Adam's apple jumped in panic lest he had
misgauged the exact amount of power needed, and had suffered the
humiliation of being stranded on dead-centre. But the fly-wheel
furnished the necessary momentum; the crank swung slowly by the point at
the end of the stroke; the steam entered the forward end of the
cylinder; the wrist-pin bearings clicked almost imperceptibly with the
reversal of the pressure, and the driving-arm lunged backward with a
sharper and accelerating hiss. She was away! Gander let her ramble
gently for a few revolutions, while the exhaust beat its pleasant tattoo
inside the stack; then slowly gave her more steam while he watched the
quickening fly-wheel and knew the thrill that comes only to those who
hold great power in the hollow of their hands. Jo Burge? This--this
power--this mighty thing that sprang at his touch--this was life!

Two men ran out from the separator, reeling the great belt between them,
as firemen lay a hose along a city street. Gander stopped his engine,
mounted the fly-wheel, wrapped a grain sack around the belt and the rim
of the wheel, and, throwing all his weight on it, while men strung along
the belt toward the separator like knots on the tail of a kite added
their strength to his, drew the great rubber ribbon around the wheel.

Powers was standing by the engine, making no interference, but ready for
instant emergency.

"All right, Gander; let 'er go. Remember, you've a load on now, an' don'
rip out my separator bearings."

Gander blew a short blast on his whistle as a signal for the men to take
their positions; then gently opened the throttle. The steam roared from
the cylinder-cock, but there was no answering lunge of the driving-arm.

"You got a load, Gander; you got a load!" shouted Powers. "Give 'er
juice!"

Gander opened the throttle further. The driving-arm thrust forward; the
great belt drew taut on its lower side, while the other flapped
prodigiously, almost to the stubble. The arm took its stroke--and
stopped.

"Dead-centre, lad, dead-centre," said Powers, sympathetically. "Never
mind, I sometimes do it myself. Here, you fellows!" he shouted to some
of the crew who were looking on, enjoying Gander's discomfiture, "take a
pull on the belt!"

"Maybe if you'd just call Gander off we could run the whole thing with
the belt," one of the wags suggested. "We got as much horse power as
that ol' soap-kettle, anyway."

"Have you?" said Powers. "We'll see, before night. I bet Gander'll give
you a wet shirt, when he gets 'er goin'!"

The men pulled on the belt until they swung the crank off dead-centre,
and Gander, nettled by their taunts, took no chances this time. He
opened the throttle, and the crank came back with a bound.

"Easy, Gander, easy; you'll throw your belt!" Powers shouted to him. But
the belt held; the engine was in motion; the separator was in motion;
the knives of the feeder began to whittle the sunlight now glancing
across them; a puff of chaff went rocketing out of the blower;
chuck-chuck-chuck sang the exhaust in the smoke-stack, and Gander again
was captain of his soul.

The engine steadily quickened its stroke and a roar came up in a mighty
crescendo from the separator at the other end of the belt. Presently it
struck its gait, and Gander knew that it was the governor-valve, and not
the throttle, that now controlled the speed.

Meanwhile the spike-pitchers had mounted their wagon-loads of sheaves
drawn up on either side of the feeder. Between them was the
feeding-table, along which traveled slats with projecting spikes (hence
the term "spike-pitcher") designed to drag the sheaves under the
revolving knives which cut the bands. When the hum of the separator
showed that she had "hit her gait" Powers gave his men a signal, and the
spike-pitchers dropped their first sheaves on the table. Up the incline
they went, like miniature logs into a sawmill; under the knives which
snapped their bands of binder twine; into the teasing arms which tousled
the straw out of its lumpy mass so that it might feed steadily into the
cylinder; then into the cylinder itself, where rows of whirling teeth
racing through rows of stationary teeth stripped the wheat and chaff
from the stalk and sent all back into the body of the mill, the straw
and chaff to be eventually blown out through the stacker, the wheat to
be elevated to the weighing device, weighed, and dropped into the big,
tight wagon-box standing beside the mill to receive it.

It was not until the first sheaves struck the cylinder that the real
load came on the engine. The belt flapped; the rhythmic
chuck-chuck-chuck of the exhaust suddenly deepened to a roar which sent
ashes and soot hurtling from the smoke-stack overhead. But the sensitive
governor-valve responded to the strain, feeding more steam to the
piston, so that in a moment the engine had automatically adjusted itself
to the load and the mill ran on smoothly with only a hoarser hum as the
separator swallowed its first great gulp of chaff and straw. Working
quickly, with an easy, systematic swing and a dexterity with the
pitchfork which comes not without practice, the spike-pitchers dropped
their sheaves on the feeding-table in two steady streams, heads forward,
each head touching the butts of the sheaf in front, so that the load
might be continuous and even. Out from the great iron funnel at the back
of the machine roared a cyclone of straw; up from the internals of its
digestive apparatus arose a cloud of dust. Chaff and straw and
dust--they poured into the still morning air, catching the glint of
fresh sunlight, trailing their mottled shadows across the brown stubble.

And some grain. It rattled down the iron tube; it plunged in half-bushel
gusts into the waiting wagon-box, bright and clean and resonant, singing
as it danced on the hard boards.... Chaff and straw and dirt--and some
grain!

In a few minutes the first pair of bundle-wagons were emptied; the
drivers shouted to their horses and pulled out to the fields to reload,
while the next pair of wagons, which had been awaiting their turn, drew
into position and the procedure was repeated. Bill Powers' "outfit" was
well away on its day's run.

Gander was down again, stoking straw into his fire-box, when Powers
lolled around the side of the boiler.

"Good enough, Gander," he said. "You got 'er hummin', anyhow. Don'
forget your breakfas'. I'll stoke while you eat."

Gander had quite forgotten the pail with his morning meal which one of
the crew had set beside the engine. Why not? This was Gander's day of
romance. Not that he knew it for that--but who knows Romance when he
meets her in the daily round?




CHAPTER ELEVEN


Josephine Burge learned of Gander's appointment to the position of
fireman on Powers' outfit with somewhat mingled emotions. The part she
had played in the resignation of Dick Claus from that position was never
clearly understood by the community, and Jo offered no enlightenment.
All that was known was that Dick had developed a habit of spending his
Sunday afternoons and evenings on the Burge homestead, and that after
one such visit he suddenly threw down his stoking-fork and enlisted. The
community was disposed to credit this increase of the Allied forces to
Josephine Burge rather than to any special patriotic impulse operating
in the bosom of Richard Claus.

But whatever had been Jo's part in bringing about Dick's enlistment it
was an unexpected development that Gander should so promptly step into
the shoes vacated by his rival. Not that Gander had ever recognized in
Dick a rival for Jo's affections, but Gander's attitude toward Jo was
too ill-defined to admit of very clear thinking. At school they had
played together, preferring each other by some law of natural selection
which neither understood nor tried to explain. When Gander left school
and threw himself into the work of the farm the girl had occupied only a
small part of his thoughts until the hired man Bill had kindled his
imagination along new and dangerous lines. That spark had been quenched,
or, at least, subdued, by his curious reaction to the trust and
hero-worship of his sister Minnie during the storm that night when they
were alone in the house together. Gander was not a deep psychologist,
but he had been unable to escape the conclusion that Jo was Tommy's
sister, just as Minnie was his sister.

This new point of view kept him away from the girl during the following
years, except when they met for a few minutes at church, or on the more
rare occasions of a country picnic or other social event. He was shy in
her presence; at times she even suspected that he avoided her; yet he
seemed pleased when they met and his eyes were bright even though his
tongue was dumb. Back in his memory he carried that word of hers, "Bill,
I've always been your girl." Some day, he supposed, he would ask her to
make that promise good, for his simple mind accepted it as a promise for
the future as well as a declaration of the past. In the meantime he was
tremendously busy with other things--and Jo could wait.

She waited. When Gander did not return to the school section that day
after the storm, Jo, with the intuition of her sex, guessed that it was
not because he didn't care, but because he cared too much. Well--she
too, perhaps, had cared too much. She tried to school herself to an
attitude of indifference, an attitude which she sustained rather well in
Gander's presence, but from which she slid ignominiously in the privacy
of the prairies when she wandered them after the cattle, or when she
took long walks by herself, for she was a girl with a taste for
solitude. One thing gave her assurance: If Gander paid small attention
to her, he paid less to any one else. He was wrapped up in the affairs
of the farm.

She was accustomed to hearing her father sound his praises.

"That's a great boy, that Gander Stake, as they call him," Martin Burge
would say at the supper table, over his plate of pancakes and syrup.
"'Specially since young Jackie lit out, Gander's comin' up strong.
Drives a seeder or a binder like a man, he does, an' no nonsense about
runnin' to town two or three times a week."

"That's one to me," said Tommy, who was not without the gift of
frankness. "Well, I guess Mr. Stake knows how to get a man's work
without payin' a man's wages."

"Thomas!" his mother reproved him. "You mustn't speak ill of Mr. Stake."

"Oh, I didn't. I think he's very clever."

"Wish I had some of his cleverness," said Mr. Burge.

"Well, none of your family has run away yet, anyhow," said the
irrepressible Tommy.

Mr. Burge found this a poser. It was hard to defend the management which
had cost his neighbor a good farm-hand, and that right in the midst of
harvest. Mr. Burge cut a lusty pancake in four, cleverly doubled the
corners of one quarter in upon themselves with his fork, drenched the
mass with syrup, and downed it while he gave his thoughts an interval in
which to collect themselves.

"Jus' the same, Gander'll make a good farmer--a darn good farmer,
Tommy."

"Well, I'm glad of that--for Jo's sake," said Tommy.

"Mind your business," his sister suggested to him. But the color rushed
to her face, so she rose to replenish the pancakes from the stove.
"That's an awful hot fire, Mother," she said, when she returned with
the smoking cakes.

With the outbreak of the war Jo wondered whether Gander would enlist.
Nothing was further from her hopes than that anything should happen to
Gander, but in those early stages the risk of casualty was considered
small. The whole neighborhood shared Double F's opinion that the war
would be over in three months; but to wear a uniform and march away with
bands playing was an heroic gesture.... It was yet too early in the
struggle to see anything heroic in raising wheat. Jo was proud of
Gander, but she was not blind to his defects. He was awkward; he was
shy; the boundary of his world was little further than his father's
farm. Enlistment would change all that. Like any honest girl, she was
not satisfied that she alone should be proud of Gander; she wanted other
people to be proud of him. She wanted to see the stoop taken out of his
back, the hitch out of his gait, the drag out of his legs. Then, when
the papers began to glare with reports of atrocities in Belgium she
wanted the heroic in Gander to well up and send him rushing to arms, to
the defence of womankind, to the defence of Josephine Burge! Gander's
heroism did nothing so spectacular. He went on working fourteen hours a
day in the harvest field, associating with his father a little more
closely than before, and trying to keep the war out of his mind.

In all this it is not to be granted that Gander was essentially less
patriotic than other young men who responded to the call. Any analysis
of patriotism may lead to dangerous ground, and nothing more will be
said than that Gander was happy in his home, that he saw no occasion to
break away from it, that he was attached to his father, his sister
Minnie, his younger brother Hamilton, and, in a lesser degree, his
mother; that he loved the farm horses and machinery, and that, after
all, the war was away in Belgium, or some such place, which was in
Europe, or Asia, or some such place; Gander was not very sure of his
geography, but of this much he was sure, that the Atlantic ocean lay
between, and the British navy ruled the Atlantic ocean, so what was
there to worry about? With Gander, as with most others, it was a matter
of perspective. He was not lacking in courage, or in a spirit of
readiness to defend his home; if an enemy battalion had appeared on the
road allowance that skirted his father's farm Gander would have faced
them single handed with his breech-loading shotgun. He might even have
marched into Plainville to resist their landing in his market town. But
Belgium? Gander was unable to visualize a danger so remote.

In the meantime, his activities were so centralized upon the firing and
driving of Bill Powers' engine that the war gave him no great concern.
Its chief visible effect was the number of boys, his own age or younger,
working on the outfit. Already there had been a thinning out of the
classes from twenty-five to thirty-five years old, and youngsters not
long out of school were stepping up to take their places. Some of these
openly looked forward to the day when they might enlist, and hoped that
the war would not end too soon; but most of them, and particularly those
who were already eighteen, or nearly so, showed a reticence about
discussing the matter at all. Something inside was troubling vaguely,
and they found an opiate in work.

Gander fired for Bill Powers for the remainder of the season, with only
one incident that seems worth recording. That occurred when they were
threshing at Martin Burge's. Gander, although hired as fireman and
drawing fireman's wages, was practically engineer; old Bill gave little
thought to the power end of his plant except when moving from set to set
or along the country roads from farm to farm. Then Gander fired and Bill
handled the engine. To make a Y turn, couple on to a separator, and pull
out across the fields without a foot of wasted motion is not learned in
a day. Gander never failed to thrill with pride in his boss when, the
moment the belt was thrown, he manoeuvered the engine through that sharp
turn in the shape of a Y, backed up to the separator, calculating his
distance and momentum to a nicety at the risk of his life--more than one
engineer has been crushed to death between separator and engine as the
price of a moment's misjudgment--coupled on, and was away almost before
the pulleys had quit revolving or the last gust or straw had been blown
from the stacker. Powers was greasy, and bent, and masked such real
features as he must have possessed behind a dust-filled black stubble of
beard, but he was the only man aside from Jackson Stake in whom Gander
ever had caught a glimpse of the heroic.

It was about ten in the morning when they pulled in to Burge's. Martin
Burge had cut his pasture fence in two places to save a detour around by
the farm buildings and the consequent loss of valuable time, and Powers
navigated his craft over the bare pasture, down the side of a shallow
gulley, across its hard gravel bottom, up the other bank, through the
temporary gate in the barbed-wire fence, and into the hundred-acre
wheat-field of Martin Burge to which it gave admittance. The bundle
teams, having taken a short cut by means of a culvert which could not be
trusted to support the engine, were already in the field loading up;
their reddish-green masses rose against a background of transparent sky
like bronze tents silently heaving in the morning breeze. Now and again
the voice of a driver to his team came across the field clear above the
patter of the exhaust and the sluff of the wheels in the soft earth.

Martin Burge walked ahead, indicating the route to a favorable location
for the set; Bill Powers stood at the throttle, the steering wheel in
his hand, the front truck of his engine jerking from side to side like a
mighty caterpillar, yet following a course that was almost direct;
Gander stoking with straw from a wagon drawn alongside and with one eye
on the water-gauge and the other on the steam; behind them the great
hulk of the separator dragging heavily in the soft soil of the
cultivated field; behind that again the caboose with two or three men
riding, enjoying a brief respite from their morning labors or turning
the moments to account by drawing together rents in their overalls with
darning needles and wrapping cord. At a suitable spot Powers stopped;
the caboose was uncoupled and left standing in the field; then engine
and separator moved on again to the place indicated by Mr. Burge. Here
Powers again slacked back while the separator was uncoupled; then,
reversing his Y manoeuver, swung his engine out, around, and quickly
into place. Meanwhile two men ran out from the separator with the belt,
measuring the distance to the spot where the engine should stand, but
Powers, from long practice, had judged it almost as well with his eye.
Without a wasted motion he brought his engine to the stop, swung the
belt on to the fly-wheel with the last impulse of its dying momentum,
and shouted to his fireman, "All set, Gander. Let 'er go!"

Gander touched the whistle cord and gently opened the throttle; the
first two bundle wagons, already loaded, drew up beside the feeder; the
blades began to revolve, the spiked slats to slide up the incline, and a
moment later the high whine of the threshing cylinder deepened to a roar
as the first sheaves were gulped into its iron jaws. Gander, observing
that his engine had taken its gait, dropped down from the throttle,
replenished his fire, and walked around to the front of the boiler in a
mood of casual inspection. It was then he noticed that the pitcher on
the left-hand bundle wagon was young Walter Peters, who had brought a
team over from his father's farm that morning to reinforce Powers'
somewhat depleted staff. Walter had been one of the little boys going to
school when Gander left it; he was not yet more than fifteen or sixteen,
slim and straight and willing, but without either the weight or the
skill for a spike-pitcher. His parents were ambitious to make a doctor
of him, because (so they thought) medicine gives a much easier living
than farming, and he had been attending high school in Plainville until
called home to help with the threshing. Gander watched him for a moment,
noting that, while not altogether unskilful with his fork, he was
flustered with the responsibility of his position, sometimes getting two
sheaves at once, and occasionally missing his thrust altogether.

"Must speak to Powers about him," Gander suggested to himself. "Not
heavy enough for that job. Put him drivin' a grain team, or somethin'."
But at that moment the boy, having thrust the head of his fork under the
band of a sheaf, so that it became caught in the cord, threw fork and
all on to the feeding-table. Realizing the damage that would be done to
the machinery, and the shame which would engulf him for such a blunder,
he lurched forward frantically for the fork, now floating up the
carriers just beyond his reach; lost his balance, and himself fell on
the moving sheaf! There was a chance that the carriers would stick with
this extra weight, but the lad was light, and they swept him up toward
the knives like straw for the threshing.

Gander's decision was instantly taken. It was impossible to stop the
engine in time; before he could so much as reach the throttle the boy
would be chopped to pieces. But the great belt was rushing by within a
yard of Gander's arm. To hurl himself upon it, with his whole force
striving to run it off the fly-wheel, was the work of an instant. It
whirled him from his feet, carried him for a moment like a leaf on some
dark and rapid stream, then suddenly leapt from the wheel and fell like
a serpent writhing in the stubble. At the same instant the spike-pitcher
on the opposite wagon, who had seen the accident and had his wits about
him, threw a sheaf cross-wise straight into the blades. Choked with this
sudden load, and with its power cut off, the separator stopped like a
ship upon a rock. Some one reached a hand to Walter and he climbed
sheepishly back on to his load.

"Mustn't take a chance like that," said one of the older men, severely.
"You'll make a sausage machine of old Bill's straw-hasher."

Meanwhile Powers, who had observed the latter part of the accident, came
rushing as fast as his crooked legs would carry him to where Gander lay
entangled in the belt. "For God's sake, Gander, are you killed?" he
cried.

Gander dragged himself clear of the belt and staggered to his feet.
"Nope, I guess not," he announced, when he had rubbed some of his more
prominent protrusions. "Guess I'm all right; jus' kind o' lost my wind
for a minute. How's little Watt? Did he get hurt, at all?"

Peters, described as "little Watt" as a hang-over from schoolday
recollections, but now as tall as Gander, came up beside him.

"Thanks, Gander," he said, extending his hand. "That was awful decent. I
hope you didn't get hurt."

Gander, now feeling the more sheepish of the two, grasped the proffered
hand. "Oh, that's nothin'--I'm all right," he said. Then, as an outlet
for his embarrassment, "Come on, fellows! Give a heave with this belt!
We've lost about twenty bushels' time already!"

At noon Gander found himself the hero of the hour. He had not quite
forgotten that they were threshing at Jo Burge's home, and he drew on a
less soiled smock and raked the chaff out of his hair before going in to
dinner. Mrs. Burge and Jo were at work in the big kitchen; Mrs. Burge
poring over the stove and a side table on which great stacks of food
were piled; Jo waiting on the men. She looked neat and trim in her plain
house dress, with her fair hair drawn in a mass at the back of her head,
and the little points of freckles peering through her white skin. She
smiled at Gander as he slouched to a place at the table, but did not
speak; she was too engaged in serving hot tea into the great cups that
sat by the thresher-men's plates.

"Well, we got a hero among us," said one of the gang. "Gander, get up
and be presented with the Victoria Cross, or whatever it is a man gets
for being a fool an' livin' through it."

Gander humped himself over a full plate of beef and potatoes, while his
Adam's apple jumped from his shirt band to a sheltered position between
his jaws.

"'Twasn't nothin'," he said. "Anybody 'ud o' done it."

"That's what I read in the papers," said another. "These great men in
the war--all modest as school-ma'ams."

Gander, and some of the others, wished they would keep off the war for a
bit.

Bill Powers waited until the banter had subsided, so that his
pronouncement might have a proper hearing. Then:

"Well, all I got to say is, in thirty years' threshin', it's the
quickest thinkin'--an' doin'--I ever seen." And, having spoken, Powers
slashed into his meat with knife and fork, as though to indicate that
the last word had been said.

But it hadn't. "Shucks!" remarked another member of the gang, "I've run
that belt off, myself, as often as there's hair on Hector."

This brought Bill to arms. "You have, eh? From where? That's what I'm
askin'. From half way down to the sep'rator! Anybody can do that, when
you've got room to run, an' lots o' purchase on it. Huh! I've seen the
wind blow it off, if you give it sweep enough. But ten feet from the
fly-wheel--that's diff'rent! If he'd gone under that wheel he'd been
jus' like a fly under your foot----"

"Or in the soup," suggested another.

"I guess it's young Watt here would have been in the soup, an' cut good
an' fine at that," said the first speaker, "if that headpiece of
Gander's had been as empty as it looks. I'm for the Victoria Cross! The
presentation'll take place to-night, an' Miss Burge'll pin it on our
hero's gallant breast--won't you, Jo?"

The rapid development from "Miss Burge" to "Jo" in a single sentence was
typical of the threshers' conventions. During a visit of the threshers a
farm girl is, ex-officio, a member of the gang.

Then Jo spoke. "Maybe he'll wear a real V. C. there, some day, for all
you know." And for some reason that brought the banter to a close.

But after dinner she found occasion for one word with Gander. "That was
a brave thing, Gander," she said. "I'm very proud of you."

And what was the Victoria Cross to that?

Meanwhile the Germans were forcing their way across the Yser.




CHAPTER TWELVE


When the threshing season was finished Gander went back to his father's
farm with a pocketful of money and a promise from Bill Powers of a raise
in wages next year. The crop had been light, and, even though the
threshing gangs had been somewhat short-handed, or, to be more exact,
had consisted of a larger proportion of boys and youths than usual, the
"run" was completed by the time the first snow was flying in November.

Gander found his father nailing a hinge to the door of the cow-stable.
All summer the door had managed with one hinge, on which it teetered
forward and back in the wind, but the approach of cold weather demanded
a door that could be closed, and Jackson Stake was busy making his
repairs. He had been unable to find screws to fit the hinge, so he
nailed it up with four-inch spikes, which he drove home with a hearty
wallop, muffling the sound of his hammer under the body grunts with
which he accompanied it. He was so intent on his work that he did not
notice Gander's lank form at his side until he had driven the last spike
home.

"There!" he said, approving his job. "That'll hold 'er till there's
whiskers on the wheat." Then, looking up, "'Lo, Gander! Through?"

Gander drew his feet a step or two nearer. "Yep. Closed down the
smornin'."

Jackson surveyed his tall son, darker of complexion than ever with six
weeks' engine grease ground into his skin. He looked stouter, too, but
this may have been because he was wearing two suits of overalls, as the
most convenient way to bring them home.

"Get your money?"

"Yep."

"All of it?"

"Yep."

"Huh! Old Bill mus' be pickin' up. I was holdin' back a bit of his
threshin' money in case he didn't come through."

"Yep," said Gander. "Old Bill told me that, but I says to him, 'You
settle with me, an' Dad'll settle with you,' an' I got it right here in
my pistol pocket."

For a minute the two men measured each other, but presently Jackson's
face softened into a smile. "'S all right, Gander," he said. "You earned
it; you can keep it. Buy yourself an automobile--or some clean
underwear."

The point as to who should own Gander's wages had not troubled the boy
until the big handful of greasy bills was counted out to him. Then he
began to wonder. If he had stayed at home he would have worked for his
father for nothing, except, perhaps, some new clothes at the end of the
season. He would have taken that for granted. But money in his
pocket--to hand that over, that was different. He had been framing
arguments all the way home--and his father had capitulated without
attack.

"Course, if you need the money, Dad--" he began, but his father stopped
him.

"No, I don' need it--no more'n a rabbit needs a runabout. I guess maybe
I made a mistake with Jackie that way, an' I don' wan' to lose no second
boy, if I can help it."

Gander felt his Adam's apple becoming unruly. He was suddenly ashamed of
his misgivings.

"I'll stick to you, Dad," he said, "till the cows come home."

"Yep, I kind o' figger you will," said Jackson Stake. It was the most
intimate talk the two ever had had together, and it filled them with a
glow of domestic affection that held them in silence for some minutes.

Gander's father was the first to speak.

"Better run up an' see your mother," he suggested. "She's been missin'
you--both o' you--a lot lately. An' say, there ain't no law against a
hand-out to _her_, you know, if you're so disposed."

The boy shuffled off toward the house. He was fond, in a natural sort of
way, of his mother, but he had no sympathy with her lamentations over
his brother Jackie. Not that she often spoke of him; it was a name
little heard in their household, but he seemed to be continually present
in her mind, crowding from her life such happiness as she might have
saved out of her drudgery. Gander thought this unreasonable. Jackie had
gone--let him go. Gander counted it good riddance; he wasted no goodwill
on Jackie, who had been over-disposed to exercise the authority of an
elder brother. He came to understand, too, that his mother blamed his
father for what had happened, and Gander was a partisan of his father's.
Still, if a hand-out would help----

He found his mother baking; she seemed to be always baking. Minnie had
gone over to Elsie Fyfe's on an errand; Hamilton was out with a horse
and stone-boat hauling in fallen branches from the poplar groves for
firewood, so the two were alone in the room.

She did not look up; evidently she thought it was her husband who had
entered. The muscles of her strong arms rose and fell as she kneaded the
dough; the hair on her temples was thin and gray.

"Hello, Mother! Always bakin'!" said Gander, with an effort at
amiability.

Susie Stake looked up quickly. As her face and hair whitened with
premature age her dark eyes seemed to grow sharper and darker; now they
caught and held Gander as on two tines of a fork.

"Well for the soul or sake o' me!" she said. "I thought it was your dad.
Are you done threshin'?"

"Yep. For another year."

"Get your money?"

"Yep."

"Well, that's a wonder. I was figgerin' Old Bill Powers 'ud try to do
you out o' it."

"Old Bill don' seem to have no Rockefeller reputation 'round here, but
he came through like a Government check," said Gander.

"Well, I'm glad o' that. It'll be a nice help to your father."

"Not partic'lar. He ain't gettin' it."

Mrs. Stake rubbed the dry dough from her hands and sank on to a chair
beside the table, as though this sudden information was too weighty to
bear standing.

"You mean you ain't goin' to give it to him?" she said at length. "Are
you goin' to light out, too, like Jackie?"

"Jackie! Jackie! You're always thinkin' o' Jackie!" Gander exploded. It
was not often he spoke to his mother like this, and he was surprised to
see her face soften, just as his father's had, when he stood his
ground.

"Now you talk like a Harden," she said. "Your dad's too easy-goin', an'
too set, when he's set.... Well, what if I do think o' Jackie? He's my
son. An' las' night I saw him, in a uniform, with blood on his face----"

Mrs. Stake's mouth began to twist strangely, and Gander, not knowing
what he did, or why, crossed over to his mother and drew his arm about
her shoulder.

"There, now, Mother," he said. "I ain't goin' to light out, whatever
happens."

Her strong arm reached about his waist, and held him in a gesture of
affection.

"Minnie's got it next," she said, after a silence. "Nothin' 'll do but
she mus' be a stenografter. Bound to go to high school at Plainville,
an' then on to a bus'ness college at Winnipeg, an' I'm thinkin' your
father'll let 'er. After me--" The poignancy of her broken hopes for
Minnie filled her throat. "I always figgered Minnie'd stand by me, but
no! Says she's fed up on milkin' cows! Too much of a lady for a farmer's
daughter; that's the way with them all, when they get a bit of
eddication. Says that now we're at war, everybody should be doin'
somethin', an' I says, 'Well, how about milkin' cows? I guess the
soldiers wants butter, more'n they do stenografters,' but o' course she
wouldn't listen to that. She's like her father; when she's set she's
set, an' I reckon she's goin' to bolt."

Gander had nothing to say. But presently he reached into his hip pocket
and drew out a roll of greasy bills. He thumbed them over clumsily until
he came upon one for twenty dollars. He drew it out, folded it into a
heap, and pressed it into his mother's floury palm.

"Wha's that for?"

"For you--jus' for you."

"Why, Willie, I--you--" He felt her form trembling beside him.

"Guess I better go an' help Ham with the wood," he said suddenly, and
slouched through the door.

He found Hamilton hauling a load of short poplar poles on the stone-boat
with old Nigger, the least ambitious of all the farm horses. Hamilton
brought his steed up with as much flourish as he could muster, and
surveyed his brother.

"Well, you didn't blow 'er up?" he remarked.

"No, not yet."

"I guess you're an engineer now, eh?"

"Well, I wouldn't say that, but I can make 'er snort a bit in a pinch,"
said Gander, modestly.

Hamilton started the horse, and they drew the poles into the yard.

"Did you hear about Freddie Gordon?" he asked, when they had finished
unloading. "He's joined up."

"Hadn't heard," said Gander.

"A lot of the fellows are joining up, so Double F says, now that
threshin's over."

Gander made no reply.

"Gee, I wish I was old enough!" said Hamilton.

Hamilton was of a sturdy design, more the pattern of his father than of
his mother. He was fair, as were all the Stakes, but the Hardens were
dark. He had an old fur cap pulled about his ears, and a very holey pair
of woolen mitts on his hands, through which his bare red fingers gleamed
in the cold, but he was a very resolute-looking little figure as, his
eyes full on Gander, he repeated, "Gee, I wish I was old enough!"

Gander resented that look. "If you was maybe you'd have to stay home an'
help Dad, an' it's me that'd go snipin' Germans," he retorted.

"Huh!" said Hamilton.

Gander did not see Minnie until supper time. He spent the remainder of
the afternoon helping his father put the cow-stable in shape for winter,
and feeding and renewing acquaintance with the farm horses. When the two
men went into the house the table was set for supper, with the big lamp
which Mrs. Stake had won as a special prize at the Plainville Fair
shedding its yellow light up and down the well-laden board. Gander
observed Minnie working by the stove, and noted how tall she had grown
even in these few weeks, and how her dress seemed to be taking shape
from the young womanhood which it covered, but he took his seat at the
table without remark. Mr. Stake confided in his plate a blessing which
grew more hurried and less articulate with each passing year; helped
himself to fried eggs and potatoes, and passed the platters on to
Gander.

Gander was in the midst of his second gulp when two hands closed gently
about his neck and a fore-finger pressed his Adam's apple, much as one
might pull a trigger, and with somewhat similar effects.

"'K out, Minn! You'll choke me," he spluttered, when he had recovered
from the involuntary explosion which almost wrecked his supper.
"Shouldn't do that!"

"Big brothers, when they come home, shouldn't ignore their little
sisters," said Minnie, as her warm hands drew Gander's straight hair
down about his ears. Minnie was the one member of the Stake household
who thought it no shame to be affectionate. She leaned over and pressed
a kiss on Gander's forehead. "There!" she said.

Gander laughed off his embarrassment, but after all, she was his sister,
and he liked her. The meal was half finished before there was time for
further discussion. Farms are busy places, and the kitchen table, three
times a day, the busiest place on the farm.

"Ol' Bill have much trouble about help?" Jackson Stake inquired when the
eggs and potatoes were cleared away, and he was about to attack a second
course of strawberry preserves and toast. "This fracas over in Europe
makin' much diff'rence?"

"Nope--not to speak of," said Gander. "Lots o' men, such as they are.
Youngsters, mostly, but, as Bill would say, a good boy's a better horse
than a poor man. We made a good season's run, though, if we are
kids--most of us."

"Next year's when we'll be short of men," Minnie observed.

"It'll be all over before that," said her father.

"That's not what they're saying in Plainville. Double F was in to-day,
and he says they're talking of three years' war--says that's what
Kitchener is figuring on."

"Double F ain't much of a judge," Jackson Stake remarked. "When he first
come across with the news he was tellin' me it'd be over in three
months, sure as Sunday. Now it's three years."

"At any rate," Minnie persisted, "Double F says the young men are all
signing up, and what are we farmers going to do about next year's crop?
He's worrying over _that_ already."

"Well, it's somethin' to worry about," her father agreed. "But I reckon
it'll be over before then, and what's the use puttin' the country to the
expense o' shippin' all our young men over there jus' to cheer at the
Kaiser's funeral, an' then come back again? More to the point to stay
home an' work the farm."

"An' milk the cows," Minnie's mother suggested.

Gander took no part in this conversation, and Minnie dropped it at that
point. They were busy with thoughts of their own.




CHAPTER THIRTEEN


The following day Gander began hauling wheat to the elevators at
Plainville. During the threshing season, and owing, perhaps, to the
prospect of a rising market, Jackson Stake had hauled out only a few
loads in order to meet his need of ready cash, and had then gone on with
his fall ploughing. But now the ground was hard with frost and bleak
with a thin fretwork of dusty snow. On the frozen prairie trails the
rattle of an empty wagon could be heard for miles.

Gander harnessed a four-horse team--three old Clydesdales that had long
since lost all but a flicker of fractiousness, and young Jim, the colt,
who could be counted upon to behave himself in such a preponderance of
good company. Jim's first glimpse of the serious side of life had been
in the fall ploughing. There he bent a surprised and protesting shoulder
into his collar, marvelling the while at the strange turn in events
which had taken him from the freedom of the pasture field to the irksome
monotony of dragging a wholly purposeless device up and down an
interminable furrow. But discipline soon ground the imagination out of
his soul, as it does to other beasts of burden besides horses, and
already he accepted straining on his traces as a distasteful but
inevitable procedure.

The horses were harnessed in double tandem, two abreast, and Gander
skilfully swung the rear team to position on either side of the
wagon-tongue. He slouched about their heads and heels in long, ungainly
strides, but there was speed in his gracelessness; in a moment he had
the tongue in the neck-yoke, the traces hitched to the whiffle-trees. A
word, a touch of the reins, and the four horses moved off as one, while
Gander circled them around to the spot where the grain box had been
dropped in the centre of the yard after its previous use. Then were
puffs, and grunts, and straining of hard muscles while father and son
heaved the heavy box to position. Jackson Stake threw two scoop-shovels
into the box while Gander, already up over the front wheel, directed his
team toward a spot in the field where a straw stack raised its
mountainous dome, half crusted with snow, against the grey November sky.

"I'll have to get me some port'ble granaries," said Jackson, who, with
as much alacrity as his son, had climbed over the rear end of the box
after the wagon was in motion. "Skid 'em around wherever we want 'em."

As they neared the mountain of straw a grain bin seemed to detach itself
and stand a little to one side. It was a square box, framed of boards to
a height of seven or eight feet, and tied together across the top with
strands of heavy wire. Into this the grain had been spouted straight
from the separator. When filled with wheat it was covered with a thick
cap of straw to keep out rain and snow, and left to stand until a
suitable time for marketing.

Beside the bin were two long-haired steers, licking up stray kernels
that leaked out between the boards. Jackson Stake threw a shovel at
them, as a matter of principle; then got out, gathered up his shovel,
and, again with his surprising alacrity, clambered on to the bin. Here
the two men turned back the straw until they bared the golden bosom of
the wheat below; thrust went the shovels into that chaste embrace;
then, singing, the wheat slid into the great box, where it rattled like
nails on the wooden floor. Thrust and swing, thrust and swing, went the
shovels, while the golden tide slowly rose in the box. The men worked
on, without conversation and with the precision of machines, until the
box was full; then, when the flood lapped its very lip, they threw their
shovels on board, and Jackson Stake, straightening his great frame,
rested his hands on his kidneys in a way he had and twisted his back for
relief.

"You take 'er in, Gander," he said, "an' don' let them rogues in
Plainville rob you any more'n seems necessary."

Gander threw his folded horse-blankets across the front of the load,
settled himself into a comfortable, shapeless heap upon them, and
snapped a sharp order to his team, which tightened their traces and
swung off slowly toward the Plainville road.

It was a long, slow haul to the market town, under a sky curtained with
grey clouds and shaking an occasional threatening snowflake in the air,
by stark clumps of leafless poplars, along trails rutted smooth with the
broad tires of many wagons, through a world in which nature had already
hibernated for her long sleep until another spring. As Gander crouched
on his blankets, his cap down about his ears, his collar up around them,
he, too, might have been a lifeless thing but for the occasional
automatic word of command or suggestion to his horses. It was a great
opportunity to think, and, in his way, Gander made use of it. He
wondered what price his load would bring, and how many bushels he
carried in that heaving box. He wondered whether he would spend an hour
or two in town; maybe get a haircut at the barber's shop, and pick up
the latest gossip in the pool-room. Perhaps, too, he thought a little of
that dark cloud which hung over all the world, and even, sometimes,
wrapped its noisome mists about his heart. And when he thought of that
he thought of Jo Burge, and wondered. Gander had no definite idea about
Jo Burge. Still, he supposed that sometime--That would be the natural
thing, and Gander lived close to nature. Her beauties may fall upon
blind eyes, her harmonies upon deaf ears, but her instincts, unerring,
stir in every clod.

As he neared Plainville Gander became aware of other traffic on the
road. Now and again an automobile or buggy overtook him, pulled out on
to the rough prairie at the side, rutted with tracks made in wet weather
and now corrugated into frozen ridges, and went bumping by. Other
heavily-laden wagons in front, and still others behind, the faster teams
gradually overtaking the slower, but unable to pass, resolved themselves
into an irregular procession--the march of King Wheat into the gates of
the world.

Gander drew up in the straggling street that skirted the railway track
at Plainville. On his right a row of garages, livery stables, implement
warehouses, grocery and hardware stores, offices; on his left the huge
bulk of the grain elevators, each with its squat little engine-room from
which came the intermittent spit ... spit ... of the gasoline motor. The
air was filled with the dust of wheat; around the elevators were drifts
of chaff, in which one or two outlaw cows of the town were browsing;
from the railway track came the sound, like rushing water, of wheat
being piped into cars for shipment, first to Fort William or Port
Arthur, and later to those hiving lands of Europe, now so assiduously
engaged in a business of their own, but a business which could not be
carried on, for long, without the help of that little red kernel,
mightier than siege guns and battleships.... Gander straightened into
the attitude of a biped and awaited the verdict of the buyers.

They came presently, three of them, from the wagon just ahead. With a
great show of competition they clambered up Gander's wheels and dug
their hands into his ruddy load, sifting samples through their fingers,
turning them over in their palms, smelling them, chewing a few kernels.

"All I can see is a Three Northern," said one.

"Just what I was going to say," said another.

"You beat me to it," said the third, with a gesture of annoyance.

"Then you better get somethin' done for your eyes, all of you," said
Gander. "I can see a One Northern, and I ain't wearin' no glasses."

The three buyers laughed as though Gander had perpetrated a great joke.
But Gander wasn't laughing. His gorge was boiling within him. He had the
farmer's deep-rooted sense of injustice over the fact that whenever he
bought he had to pay the seller's price, but whenever he sold, the buyer
dictated the figure. His gorge boiled none the cooler for the
helplessness of his position.

"Take another look," said Gander to the three buyers, who, for
competitors, seemed to him to be on much too friendly terms with each
other. "It's a One Northern, or there ain't no such thing."

"No, Gander," said one who knew him. "It's nice wheat, all right, but a
little bleached, and you're lucky to get a Three out of it. Rusted, too.
I dunno but I was a little rash in offering you Three for it; may not
go any better than Four."

"That's what I was thinking," said the second.

"Yep. It's pretty risky," said the third.

"Well, I'll ship it myself," said Gander, with a show of finality. "I'll
get a bin an' ship it myself."

"That's risky, too," his acquaintance told him. "The lakes'll be
freezing up pretty soon, and if you don't get your car down before the
close of navigation you're in for a bump. Besides, I don't know whether
you can get a bin."

Gander's inquiries proved this misgiving to be well founded. Individual
bins, in which a farmer may store and ship his own wheat, were at a
premium. The alternative of loading a car direct over the loading
platform, without making use of an elevator, was out of the question; he
had no car, and no idea when he could get one. He came back to the buyer
who had made him the first offer.

"Guess I'll have to take your price, George, but it don' seem right.
That wheat's better'n Three Northern."

"You're all wrong, Gander," the buyer said, pleasantly. "I'll be lucky
if I get out on it. But I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll send a sample
to Winnipeg for official grading--or you can do it--and if it goes
higher than Three I'll pay you the difference, but if it goes lower you
pay me the difference. That's fair, Gander."

"Oh, take it!" said Gander, helplessly. This was not his world. He was a
producer, not a seller.

Gander drove his team up the gangway into one of the elevators. He
guided his four horses with a dexterity that was an art, bringing the
great load to position to an inch. This was his world. The load was
weighed as it stood in the wagon; the warehouseman touched a lever; the
front end of the wagon went up, the rear end down; a trap door in the
back of the wagon-box was opened and the wheat rushed out in a golden
stream into a hopper under the driveway. It was all over in a minute.
Gander got his ticket, good for cash at the bank, and drove on.

He put his team in a livery stable, rubbing down their fetlocks and
wiping the sweat out from under their collars before he left them, and
then went to the Chinese restaurant to get a bite of dinner. The
"Chink's place" was a comparatively new establishment in Plainville. It
rejoiced in a painted sign-board, No Sing--Wun Lung, which occasioned
much local merriment. If the owner knew the reason for the amusement he
gave no hint; but it is a good thing to have men come into your place of
business smiling. Gander patronized the slant-eyed gentleman with the
vocal disadvantages, not on account of the wit in his sign-board, but in
order to escape the tyranny of tablecloths and napkins with which the
Palace hotel insisted on encumbering its guests. Besides, the meals were
ten cents cheaper.

Gander was bent industriously over pork and potatoes when two young men
in uniform entered and took seats at the next table. He observed them
under his eyebrows. Their faces were clean shaven and their hair was
close cropped about the ears and up from the back of the neck--a fact
that recalled Gander's own need of tonsorial attention. Their uniforms
sat upon them snugly, and Gander could not but admit that they probably
looked much more handsome than he, in his overalls and smock drawn tight
over an old tweed suit which he had put on for warmth. And they
appeared to be quite happy. If they were charged with the duty of saving
the world from the Germans they evidently were not worried about it.
Gander was no eavesdropper, but he would have had to stuff his fingers
in his ears--those ears over which the hair straggled and curled--in
order to avoid hearing some of their remarks. They seemed to be talking
about girls. Yes, there was no doubt they were talking about girls.

No Sing or Wun Lung or both (no one seemed to know whether the name was
singular or plural) combined a grocery business with his restaurant, and
at this moment, as though to afford a proper setting for the military
conversation, two young girls of Plainville came in to buy a can of
salmon. Gander had no idea that the purchase of so trifling an atom of
commerce could exhaust so much time, so much giggling, so much obvious
desire to be observed. He had no delusions as to the audience for whose
benefit this performance was presented. In a dusty, fly-specked mirror
he could see his own humped profile, his shaggy locks, the long hair
about his ears and neck, the fuzz on his lips and chin....

With color rising in his cheeks Gander gulped the remainder of his meal,
paid for it, and hurried into the street. The sharp tang of the November
air was a tonic and a stimulant. He walked by an implement warehouse and
a garage and stopped in front of a barber's shop. For a moment he stood
irresolute, then plunged inside and flopped into the empty chair.

"Hair cut?" said the barber.

"Yep," said Gander. "Mow it good and short."

"Military cut, eh?"

Gander wasn't very sure. "Yep," he hazarded.

"Thinking of joining up, maybe?" the barber suggested.

"Well, not to-day," said Gander.

The barber's chair was by the window, where the light was good, and
further back were pool-tables, with several young men playing at them,
and a fringe of others seated on benches around the wall. Here, again,
Gander noticed two or three men in khaki. Suddenly another, in a smarter
uniform, came through the door, and as he did so the soldiers in the
room sprang to their feet, clicking their heels together, squaring their
shoulders, and looking generally as though they had been petrified into
an attitude of aggressive immobility.

"All right, men, carry on," said the officer, smartly, and the
petrification suddenly ran limp again. Something in the voice stirred
Gander's memory, and he studied the officer's face for a moment. It was
Andy Lee, the clothes presser! And men springing to their feet, and
clicking their heels!

"A little shampoo?" the barber suggested. "Fine to take the dust out of
the hair."

"Sure; hop to it!" said Gander, recklessly. He was in the intoxication
of his first reaction to the war. Three-quarters of an hour later he
walked out of the barber's shop, shampooed, shaved, massaged, scented,
and with the pride of his soul somewhat restored.

He made some purchases for his mother at Sempter & Burton's; then,
wishing to give his horses ample time to feed and rest, he loitered
about the elevators. The gasoline engines fascinated him. They were so
like and so unlike steam. Less human than steam, and more mechanical,
but still somewhat on the same principle. Thumping faithfully away,
without supervision; that was the remarkable thing about them. Gander
was looking forward to the day when he would persuade his father to buy
a threshing mill, and wondering whether it would be steam or gasoline.

"Still," he said, as though in answer to an argument within himself,
"when you got steam you got steam, but when you got one o' these
cha-punkers you don' know what you got."

A freight train pulled in, picked up some cars, and pulled out again.
Gander watched the huge engine struggling with its load. He caught a
glimpse of the engineer up in his seat in the cab, a lever in his hand.
That was power for you! That was life! Sometimes, in the wildest flights
of his imagination, Gander thought of himself as a locomotive engineer.

When the horses were well rested he hitched up again and started for
home. He was barely out of town when, in a vacant space, he saw four or
five soldiers drilling. They were near the road, and Gander, curious,
allowed his team to come to a stop. It seemed that four were drilling
and the fifth was giving orders. Gander gathered also that the fifth was
disappointed in the way in which his orders were being executed.

"Na-a-gh, I didn't say 'Right turn,' I said 'Left turn.' Do you not know
one side o' you from the other? Or will I have to tie a string on your
fingers? A little silk bow, maybe. Now try it again, and see if you can
all turn the same way, for once.

"Left--turn!" The sergeant's voice snapped through the cold air.
"Quick--march!... Form two-deep! ... Form--fours! Na-a-gh, I didn't say
'Left turn'; I said 'Form fours.' As you were! _As-you-were!_"

The sergeant's voice indicated, as only a sergeant's voice can indicate,
the hopelessness of instilling intelligence into heads so ill-designed
to receive it. He explained this in a monologue of some length, while
Gander's Adam's apple hopped boisterously about, for had he not at this
moment, in spite of the khaki, recognized the bucolic figure of Freddie
Gordon? Gander chuckled outright. So this was war? Strutting about on a
vacant lot, like a flock of mating prairie chickens! Being told you
don't know one foot from another--and proving it! Taking the lip of that
fresh guy, and not saying a word back at him! Ha!

At this moment Freddie Gordon, glancing toward the road, recognized the
humped figure on the wagon, and Gander, with the most innocent of
intentions, sang out cheerily, "'Lo, Fred! How's she goin'?"

Freddie twisted his mouth as though to speak, but before any sound had
been emitted the sergeant intervened. "Silence!" he roared. "Silence in
the ranks! You're not gawkin' now on the street corner, me-lads,
remarkin' on the weather. Shun! As you were! Shun! As you were! Shun! As
you were! Put some gimp into it! With the help o' God I'll make soldiers
of you yet." The sergeant's voice suggested an imprecation rather than a
prayer. "And _I'll_ take care of your conversational duties for the time
bein', me-lads. Shun!"

The sergeant surveyed his four "rookies," now galvanized into a
convulsive attitude supposed to represent attention. Suddenly his voice
fell from its note of autocratic command to one of amiability. "Stand at
ease! Stand easy! Now I'll just interview our visitor."

He came over to the wagon where Gander, despite a sudden impulse for
flight, remained immobile.

"Well, me-lad," he said, in a quite friendly manner, "you seem
interested. Perhaps you were thinkin' of joinin' up?"

"Not partic'lar," said Gander.

"It's a great life, and you're a likely lookin' chap."

But Gander was irritated by what he had seen and heard. It clashed with
all his ideas of democracy. When Gander worked for his father, or Bill
Powers, he counted himself as good a man as the boss. So did the boss.
But here was a boss who said things to his men--well, if Bill Powers had
said them to _his_ men they would have given him directions to his
ultimate destination.

"Do you have to learn that new-fangled square-dance before you can kill
a German?" said he.

"It's discipline, me-lad; discipline. An army is built on discipline."

"It may be what you call it, but it looks to me like a new kind o'
square-dance--an' I ain't much of a dancer," Gander retorted. "Giddap!"
He chirped to his horses and left the astonished sergeant standing by
the road.

As he wound his slow course homeward through the closing night Gander
chuckled more than once over his smart repartee. "I ain't much of a
dancer," he would say to himself. "That got him. He didn't know what to
say."

But that was all on the surface. Down underneath was a gnawing sense--a
sense that he was running away from something, that he was a fugitive,
taking refuge on the farm! He actually experienced a feeling of escape
from danger as he rumbled over the ridge beyond the school and the light
in Double F's kitchen window came into view.

"But I can't do anythin' else," he argued with himself. "I promised
both Dad and Mother I'd stick to 'em, an' I guess that's my job."

He felt the air cold on his ears and neck, and turned his collar closer
around them. From that he fell to thinking of the girls in the
restaurant, and of how obviously they had ignored him, playing their
little patter to the two men in uniform. And up through the grey night
came a picture of Josephine Burge--Jo of his old school days, of his
herding days, of the threshing gang where she had said, "Maybe some day
he'll wear a real V. C."

His happiness over the discomfiture of the sergeant seeped from him, and
at supper he was more silent than usual. His father attributed his gloom
to the after-effects of a tonsorial spree which had cost him a dollar
and a half.




CHAPTER FOURTEEN


The first year of the war was the hardest for Gander. Before another
season's crop was being threshed the world--the Allies' world, at any
rate--had awakened to the quite obvious fact that the war must be won by
wheat. Growing wheat became a patriotic duty into which Gander fitted
like a cylinder nut into a socket wrench. He could grow wheat, and none
of that "form fours" nonsense about it. True, there were still some who
refused to see in the growing of wheat the highest expression of
service; some even who were frank enough to suggest that the prospect of
a high price had more to do with the sudden increase in acreage than had
any patriotic motive. But Gander avoided argument and kept on with his
ploughing, his seeding, his harvesting and threshing. He, who had been
reared on the plains, with himself for a companion, more than ever
receded within himself. He avoided company, he avoided discussion, he
avoided trips to Plainville. As a matter of custom he continued going to
church at Willow Green, but even there sometimes found eyes that bored
him through, and sent him home in a tempest of self-excuse.

One of the difficult times was when Tommy Burge enlisted. The Burges
gave a party for their soldier son, and Gander, as one of the nearest
neighbors and friends of the family, must, of course, attend. He
willingly would have denied himself that pleasure; not even the prospect
of dancing with Jo Burge could balance the disadvantages under which he
would be placed. But he felt he ought to go; he owed that much to
Tommy, and he could cover up a little by taking his sister Minnie as his
guest.

"Well, Minn," he remarked with forced casualness at noon that day,
"how'd you like to go to Burges' dance to-night?"

Minnie, now a girl of fifteen or sixteen, and beautiful even to her
brother, blushed pink under her bronze hair.

"I'm going," she said. "With Walter Peters."

Peters! The boy whom Gander had saved from the separator! Oh! So he must
go alone.

It was a June day, and Gander worked in the summer-fallow until seven
o'clock. Then he unharnessed, fed, and watered his team; had his supper,
and went up to his room to dress. As he wrestled with his razor the idea
of attending the party became more and more repugnant.

"Darn it all, I don' want to go," he at last confessed to himself. "It's
goin' to be a hot night, an' I'm tired, an' I guess I ain't much of a
dancer, anyway." The answer he had given the sergeant came to his mind,
and he smiled, a little bitterly. There would be a number of fellows
there in uniform, and he--he never would be missed. Yes he would! Jo
would miss him, and Tommy....

He sat down on his bed, dangling one bare foot over the shoe that lay
beside it. He had no stomach for the thing. Why did they have to have a
dance, anyway? Why couldn't they just let his friends drop in----

He was still sitting thus when Minnie, her shoulders bare, her bronze
hair hanging about her white neck, passed his door. She stopped; held
him in her eyes a moment; then came in.

"What's the matter, Gander? Aren't you going?"

The setting sun was blazing through the window, disputing with Gander's
little oil lamp possession of the room. In the mottled light his face
was a picture of distress.

"I--I don' think so," he said. "I ain't feelin' very gay, to-night.
Guess I been workin' too hard. An' I ain't much of a dancer, anyway. You
tell 'em, Minn. Maybe I'll run over Sunday."

The girl's hands dropped on her brother's shoulders; she turned his face
to hers.

"Gander," she said, "I know what's the matter--and so do you.... It
isn't so very easy for me, either." There was a little gulp in her
voice. She withdrew her hands from him and switched out of the room.

On Sunday he went over to the Burge's, but Tommy had already gone
forward. Jo received him at the door.

"It's stuffy inside. Would you like to walk?" she said.

"Yes--if you would."

They walked out over the school section, now studded with flaming tiger
lilies, and if both of them had memories they kept them to themselves.
Jo was a tall, straight woman now; not bent with work, as Gander was.
The freckles still peered through her white, transparent skin. Gander
thought of that day, and of the hole in her stocking that shone like a
silver dollar.

"Sorry you couldn't get over the other night, Gander," she opened their
conversation.

"Yes," he agreed. "Sorry, too. But I ain't much of a dancer." He hadn't
meant to use that phrase again. It just slipped out.

"You always seemed to me a good dancer, Gander. ... Tommy was sorry,
too."

"Yep.... I didn't know he was goin' so soon, or I'd ha' come, anyway."

"He's gone!" she breathed, almost in a whisper. Suddenly she swayed so
that Gander caught her in his arms. He supported her, helplessly,
wondering what to do. A tremor was running through her frame; she seemed
at the point of sobbing. But presently she straightened up, erect, and
withdrew herself from his arms.

"I'm all right, Gander," she told him, smiling a little wanly into his
face. "Just a little silly.... I should be very proud.... I _am_ proud."

Her head was back now, and the summer breeze was fingering her fair
hair. "I _am_ proud," she repeated.

"Yes, I suppose so," said Gander, not knowing what else to say.

They walked on, charted only by some strange instinct, until they
reached the grove of willows where they had lain in the shade that hot
day of the cattle herding. Here the girl paused, toying with the leaves
at her feet; turning them over with her toe, as though looking for
something. Gander stood beside her, mute. Suddenly she turned about and
seized his shoulders in her hands. Her lips were trembling, but her eyes
were straight on his.

"There's only one thing could make me prouder, Gander," she said. "You
know what it is."

"You mean I should join up?"

She nodded, pressing her lips together hard.

"I'm not trying to tell you what you should do, Gander," she added. "You
must settle that for yourself. But _that_ is what would make me proud."

"Well, I suppose," said Gander. "But there are other things, too. They
want wheat, an' I'm helpin' to raise it. Besides, I promised my father
an' mother not to leave 'em."

"Did they make you promise that?" There was a new note of challenge in
the girl's voice.

"Well, not exactly," said Gander, in whose veins honesty flowed like
blood. "But, you see, Jackie is gone, an' they worry over that a lot, so
I told 'em I'd stick with 'em."

"Hamilton is coming along," Jo argued. "My dad and mother had only
Tommy."

Gander did not answer. What could he say to that?

She had dropped her hands from his shoulders, but still stood close to
him, her eyes on his. "Gander," she said, "tell me this. Do you really
_want_ to go?"

Gander found himself being cornered, and he had no gift of argument. But
he could be stolid. His strength was the strength of immobility.

"No, I don't!" he blurted out.

"Are you afraid?" He had not known that Jo's voice could cut like that.

"Oh, I dunno," he answered. "Guess I could take a chance with the rest."

Her tone suddenly softened. "No, I know you are not afraid," she added,
gently. "A boy who could do what you did--that day at the
thresher--isn't afraid."

Gander grunted. "Nothin' to that," he said.

"Then why is it?" she insisted.

Gander considered for a moment. "Well, I'll tell you, Jo," he answered.
"I don' know very much about war, but I know somethin' about farmin',
an' I figger this is where I belong. An' I ain't much for a crowd; I can
get along with two or three, but in a crowd I'm out of it. I guess it's
bein' on the farm like I have, I been alone so much----"

"You mean you're shy?... Gander, I believe you are." She laughed a soft,
teasing laugh, the first she had laughed that day, and for a moment
Gander had an impulse to belie his own confession. But he conquered the
impulse, and so justified her conclusion.

"You would get over that," she went on. "It would do you good. And
they'd straighten you up, Gander. Straighten those shoulders of yours.
Put some gimp into your step. I've seen them marching in Plainville,
and"--she colored frankly, now, but faced him still--"and pictured you
in uniform, and thought how good you would look, straight and tall, for
you _are_ tall, Gander, when you straighten up----"

"Oh, I guess I'm all right," he interrupted, sulkily. He had no desire
to hear his defects analyzed.

"It would do you good," she repeated. "You'd get over--_that_--in a
week. And, besides, all the girls like to have their--their
fellows--doing their bit."

The appeal of that suggestion was not to be lightly dismissed. But
Gander still held his trump card. He played it.

"Besides, I got too much spirit to be a soldier," he said.

"Too much what?"

"Too much spirit.... I'll explain." Then he told her of the day he had
seen the recruits drilling on the outskirts of Plainville. "Struttin'
like prairie chickens, they were," he said, "an' that fellow bawlin' 'em
out like nobody ever bawled me out an' got away with it--or ever will,"
he added belligerently. "Jumpin' on Fred because he went to speak to me.
If I'd been Fred I'd ha' hit 'im a poke in the eye."

She was so long in answering that for a moment he thought she had found
his argument beyond reply.

"So that's it?" she said, at length. "You're too good to take orders?
Too big a man to be told what to do? If everybody was like you, who'd
stop the Germans?"

"Well, I guess I could stop my share, if it came to that," he retorted,
"an' without doin' a square-dance in front o' them."

She was angry now. "Better men than you are doing the square-dance, as
you call it, Gander."

"Meanin' who?"

"Never mind."

"Dick Claus?"

"What if I do?"

Gander's fire was up, too. His was a slow fire, but suddenly it blazed
up as though swept by a prairie wind. "Well, if you're goin' to be his
pardner, you ought to learn his dance," he cried. "See--I'll show you."
He seized her by the arm. "Form fours! Form two-deep! Shun! As you were!
Shun! As you were!" He suited grotesque movements to his commands,
jerking her about until she wrenched herself from his grasp. "That's the
way to lick the Germans," he explained.

She ran from him a few steps, then turned and faced him, her cheeks
pink, her pale eyes ablaze. She had twitted him with his shyness, but
she had no need to twit him now. Something new had broken out in Gander.
She read it in his eye, in the twist of his face, in the pose of his
body like an animal set to spring. A horror of fear swept her. Her
cheeks went suddenly white again, and she tried to run, but she seemed
held in a vice. He was coming toward her, this new Gander, this man she
never had seen before; coming with slow, menacing strides across the
grass. For a moment he held her in his spell; then, with a scream, she
regained control of her limbs, and fled across the prairie like a deer.

Gander gave chase, but he was no match for Jo in a trial of speed. He
followed her with long, ungainly strides, up and down the ridges of the
school section, with little hope of catching her, and with no idea what
would be the outcome if he did. Something wild had taken possession of
him and egged him on in his madness. Yet even as he ran and marvelled at
her speed he recalled that day when, a little girl, he had rescued her
from the prisoner's base and led her back triumphantly to safety. They
had been friends then. They were friends yet. Of course they were
friends. Of course.

That thought seized him. "Jo!" he called. "Oh, Jo! Wait a minute!" But
if she heard him she seemed only to run the faster.

As she swept down the slope of a gentle hill her speed was her undoing.
Something gave way; her skirt wrapped about her feet, and she fell
headlong in the grass. In a few seconds he had overtaken her, and was
down on his knees beside her.

"Jo!" he cried. "Jo, are you hurt? Speak to me, Jo!" But she lay as
motionless as death.

A great fear suddenly gripped him about the chest. He threw his arms
around her, turned her over, raised her face from the ground. A tiny
trickle of blood was making its red way across her forehead, now whiter
and more transparent than ever he had seen it. He called her name
again, but there was no answer; she lay limp in his arms.

In genuine alarm he looked about for help, but the prairie was empty of
all except themselves. A hundred yards away a pond lay like silver in
the afternoon sunlight, and the sight of water brought an idea which
stirred him to action. Gently he laid her again on the grass and started
on a run for the pond. Half way there he remembered that he had nothing
with which to carry water when he reached it. For a moment he paused,
bewildered; then hurried back, raised the girl in his arms, and began to
carry her. She was not light, but Gander was strong, and in memory he
never knew whether she weighed more than a feather. Her head fell back,
and was swinging free; he supposed that must be uncomfortable, and
perhaps dangerous, so he raised her higher, and drew one of her limp
arms about his neck. Her head now rested against his; he even could feel
that trickle of blood against his cheek....

At the pond he laid her down, and, carrying water in his hands, poured
it on her face. Presently she opened her eyes.

"Are you hurt, Jo?" he asked, gently and contritely. "You're not much
hurt, are you?"

Her eyes looked into his like a child's. "Where am I? How did I get
here?" she asked. "Oh, it's you, Gander."

Suddenly recollection leapt up within her. She thrust out her hands as
though to shove him away.

"Go 'way, go 'way!" she cried. "Don't touch me! Go 'way!" There was such
an abhorrence in her look that Gander shrank before it.

"I won't touch you," he pleaded. "But I'll help you home. You've been
hurt."

"Go 'way! Go 'way! I never want to see you again. I'm all right." She
arose unsteadily to her feet and drew her loosened skirt about her.

With her first step she staggered, and Gander rushed to her aid, but she
shoved him away with her hands. "Go'way! Go home! I never want to see
you again!"

The girl moved off across the prairie, at first slowly, but quickening
her pace as she regained control of her muscles, while Gander stood as
one rooted to the spot, watching her through a flood of self-abasement.

When she disappeared over a ridge he turned and slowly made his way
northward to his father's house.




CHAPTER FIFTEEN


After the incident with Jo Burge, Gander became more than ever a
creature of his father's farm. He ploughed and harrowed early and late,
and found his companionship with his horses and machinery. From even his
father and mother he withdrew as into a shell.

As the months went by and the war, instead of drawing to an end, grew
steadily more pressing and more furious, Jackson Stake and his wife
thought much and spoke little of Gander. They had no desire that he
should run the risk of battle, and they could ill afford to spare him
from the farm, but they had a feeling which would not down that in some
way the Stakes should be represented, not only in the wheat field, but
on the fighting line. Such comfort as they could they took from the
thought that maybe Jackie was there, and they read the casualty lists,
which now filled columns in the newspaper, with mingled hope and
fear....

Not that they were anxious for Gander to go, but it would have been a
solace to their pride if he had _wanted_ to go, and he showed no such
inclination. He worked in the fields all day, and sat about the stables
or the blacksmith shop during noon hours and in the long, still summer
evenings. He had learned to smoke, and the glow of his pipe, moving
about like some disembodied spirit, would come up through the darkness
to the room where his father and mother were preparing for bed.
Sometimes Jackson would sigh as he saw that sullen point of fire and
thought of the strange, stubborn, faithful shame that moved behind it;
and then his wife would sigh, but whether for Gander, or for Jackie, or
for herself, or for the mystery of life that perplexed and baffled her,
her husband never knew. ... Meanwhile Gander played with his dog, and
affectionately cuffed the muzzles of his friendly horses, and went on in
the deepening furrow of his circle, round and round.

Not so Minnie. "I'm fed up," she announced one night after milking her
eight cows as usual. "I'm through. There must be something in life
besides cows, and I'm going out to find it."

"Where did you think you would find it?" her father asked her. "In
Plainville?"

"I'll start in Plainville," she said. "I'm going to the Plainville High
School, then to Winnipeg to learn stenography."

"That takes money," her father reminded her.

"I know. And you've got the money. I helped you earn it."

"But suppose I don't give it to you? Your mother needs you here."

"I know," the girl answered, more gently, but her firmness was unshaken.
"I know, and I'm sorry, but I must go. I really must. You see, it's _my_
life, and I've got to live it, and no one else can. And I'm going. If
you won't help me I'll--I'll help myself."

With mixed emotions Jackson Stake looked on this child of his, yesterday
a baby, now almost a woman. Her eyes were brown, like his mother's had
been; her hair was dull gold, deepening to bronze. He harrowed his head,
once also bronze, and still with a ruddy hue running through its
thinning locks.

"You're a Stake, Minnie," he said. "Go ahead. I'll pay your way."

"And who's goin' to help me about the house?" Mrs. Stake demanded. "An'
the everlastin' cows an' pigs an' chickens? I declare to hope I'm run
off my feet as it is."

"Yes, that's so," Jackson agreed. "Guess we'll have to hire you a
woman--if the crop comes off," he compromised.

So Minnie went to town, and the farm became a place more remote than
ever.

In the third year of the war two events of importance touched Gander's
life.

The first was the purchase by his father of a Ford car. Crops had been
good and prices unprecedentedly high, and the farmer's bank account was
bulging. He was in a preferred position for making money, with his land,
stock, and equipment acquired when prices were low, and with two farm
hands of his own--Hamilton was now doing a man's work in the fields--and
no war-time wages to pay.

"A car?" he scoffed, when the dealer first approached him. "One o' them
rantin' automobilly-goats? No, sir! Give me a good team, that goes _an'
comes back_, an' I'll scare the grease out o' them wind-broken
go-humpers so fast you'd think it was a hired man comin' to dinner!"

The salesman was quite undaunted by Jackson's figures of speech.
"They're a great time-saver on the farm, Mr. Stake," he suggested. "Why,
with one of our machines you could skip into town in twenty minutes, and
save your horses----"

"An' feed it on hay, I suppose?" Jackson interrupted. "No, sir! You see,
with a horse, I stoke him right on the farm, hay an' oats an' that kind
o' stuff, but a gas wagon takes gas, an' they do say as John D. is quite
comfortable fixed already. No. I might be on the market for a
manure-spreader this fall, if you think you could rig it up that
way----"

But a week later, when Jackson's team shied so sharply they broke a
wagon tongue as a new Ford went whizzing by with Fraser Fyfe at the
wheel, he came home and discussed it with his wife.

"Might's well have one, it seems to me," he argued. "They're gettin' as
common on the highways as coppers on the collection plate."

"I could do with a new sewin' machine," said Susie Stake.

"Yes, I suppose."

"Or a little engine to run the washin' machine."

"Yes, that 'ud be handy."

"Or a woman to help about the house--_if the crop comes off_."

Jackson laughed, but he felt the cut. And he went out and bought a car.

Within a week Gander had ferreted into its inner-most parts, without
destroying any vital organs. He knew every gradation of its most
whimsical mood before his father could distinguish between a cylinder
knock and a flat tire.

The other event was the death of Tommy Burge. The telegram was delayed,
and the first intimation received by the Willow Green community was the
finding of his name among a half column of casualties in the daily
paper. There it was Thomas Burge, just like any other name. But it
seemed different to the Willow Green people. He was the first of their
casualties, and all of a sudden the war jumped from France to Willow
Green! There it squatted, horrible among the peaceful farms, licking its
chops....

Jackson Stake showed the paper to his wife.

"Tommy Burge!" she exclaimed. "Little Tommy Burge!... Poor woman, I must
go over and speak her a word in her trouble."

"Yes, do," her husband agreed. "I'll take you in the car."

As they skirted the fields, again ripening for harvest, Jackson and his
wife wrestled hard with one disturbing thought. At length the woman
spoke:

"Jackson, I feel like a hypocrite," she said. "Me carryin' comfort, when
I--when we----"

"Yes, I know. If only Gander--But he's needed on the farm. How could we
spare him from the farm, Susie?"

"The Burges spared Tommy." Mrs. Stake was in no mood to excuse either
her husband or herself. "I'm only prayin' that maybe Jackie----"

"Yes, maybe he is. Likely that's where he is."

Suddenly the old farmer's face began to twist, and the car wobbled in
the prairie trail.

"Suppose you was to find _his_ name--there--to-morrow?" he said.

"I'd be a proud woman," she answered. Susie Stake drew herself up more
erect, and her black eyes flashed as they had not flashed for years.

The news had preceded them to the Burge homestead. Martin Burge met them
at the gate, and wrung their hands without speaking. But he seemed
older, and his form was all humped up.

Inside the house they found Mrs. Burge in bed, recovering from a
fainting spell, and Jo attending her. "It's Mr. and Mrs. Stake, Mother,"
the girl announced.

The woman's wild eyes seemed at first not to recognize her neighbors.
"Oh, yes, Mrs. Stake," she said, after peering at her as though she were
a stranger. "It's thankful you must be, Mrs. Stake, that there's none of
yours at this awful war. What did ever my poor Tommy do that he--that
they--Oh, God, it's not fair, it's not right! If I could put a mother's
curse on those who made the war I'd--I'd----"

"Hush, Mother," said Jo, leaning over and stroking her hair with her
fingers. "I'd rather have Tommy there than--some--where they are."

"You're thinkin' of William," said Mrs. Stake. "An' I'm not blamin' you
for feelin' bitter. But I've lost a boy, too, an' I know what it is.
We're hopin' he's there, doin' his part. Must I give two?"

For a moment Mrs. Burge made no answer, but moaned like one crushed
under physical pain. Mrs. Stake came near and stood beside her.

"It's sorry for you I am, my good neighbor," she said. "We've seen this
country from the wilderness to what it is, and we've seen many a trouble
between us, but never like this. An' to bring our wee boys into the
world! We never thought, Mrs. Burge--I'm thinkin' we'd ha' died in it,
if we could ha' seen ahead!" Their hands were gripped together now, and
the chasm between them had been bridged.

"But it's not fair!" the woman moaned. "It's not fair! It's not just!"

Jo had been going about her work, apparently the most composed of all.
But suddenly she ran out of the house, weeping. "Nothin's fair, nothin's
just--any more!" she cried.

On the way home Jackson Stake suddenly broke into unprecedented
profanity. The car swerved, and, horrified, his wife seized the wheel.
"Why, Jackson, whatever do you mean?" she cried.

Jackson brought the car to a stop and then, looking into his wife's face
with a calm more terrible than his sudden anger, said, "Susie, I was
just thinkin' o' the price o' wheat. Blood money, Susie, every dollar of
it!"

The next morning, as though it had been but a moment later, he took up
that thread again. "But we have to go on with it," he argued. "They must
have wheat. Gander, don't you think we could handle that school section,
if the Gover'ment puts it up for sale?"

"I reckon we could, or part of it, anyway."

"Martin Burge an' me often spoke o' buyin' that section between us. Kind
o' figgered it would come in handy for you an' Jo. But I guess Martin
ain't hardly able to handle it now."

As Tommy's was the first death from the Willow Green district a memorial
service was held in the school house. Later, the harvest of war became
too plentiful for that. For Tommy's service the little frame building
was crowded, and many stood out of doors. Gander was there, sick at
heart, but unsurrendered. He was doing his bit, he told himself a
hundred times; he was doing his bit. No man was working harder in the
fields than he, and wheat was the thing to win the war. Besides--"Form
fours!" He heard that derisive voice, he saw those seemingly senseless
antics, and his spirit hardened within him. No! No! Not even for Jo!

He caught a glimpse of her as she came out from the service, whiter than
ever, but with a new dignity in her carriage, with a great pride in the
way she held her head. Jo had never spoken to him since that wild
episode in the field. He wondered if to-day she would relax; he even
pictured her coming to him and holding out her hand. In his own dumb way
he knew how empty the world was, and forever would continue to be,
without Jo Burge. Already it had driven him back deeper into the shell
of his seclusion. He wanted to tell her what a fool he had been, and
that he never really meant her any harm.... She was coming toward him,
and his heart thumped in his ears, while his persistent Adam's apple
teetered in his throat. She was so close he could see the blue veins in
her forehead, and the freckle-points peering through her white skin. Her
hair almost brushed his face. Suddenly he knew he was ready to do
anything for Jo; yes, even to enlist, for Jo. But if she saw him, or,
perhaps, because she saw him, she inclined her head slightly away and
passed without any sign of recognition. He went home angry and ashamed,
more than ever to lose himself in the routine of the farm.

The harvest that year was too much for Gander and his father, even with
the staunch help of Hamilton, now a boy of sixteen, whose concern in
life was divided between Elsie Fyfe and a fear that the war would be
over before he was old enough to enlist. As a source of additional labor
Jackson Stake succeeded in hiring in Plainville a farm hand answering to
the name of Grit Wilson. Grit was a silent humorist, with a slumbrous
twinkle in his eye and a smile enclosed between heavy elliptic creases
that bracketed his mouth. He was just the person needed to turn Gander's
thoughts from Josephine Burge and to bolster up his sagging self-esteem.

As their acquaintance ripened they discussed the war. "Looks to me you
ought to be about military age," said Gander. "Ever had a poke at the
Heinnies?"

"Sure, I'm military age; over eighteen and under sixty, and they're
crowdin' 'em in on both sides of that figger now, if you're likely
lookin'. But I done my bit."

"Been in France?"

"No; never got that far. But I got my papers; flat feet, they call it.
Took 'em a year to find it out, an' I don' know it yet, but I ain't
quarrelin'. In the army you do as you're told, an' if an officer says to
you, 'Wilson, you got flat feet,' you don' argue about it; you go home.
An' here I am."

"I suppose you can do all that chicken-dance stuff?"

"What you mean, 'chicken-dance stuff'?"

"Form fours!" Gander shouted the order as he remembered it from the
drill that day on the vacant lots adjoining Plainville.

"Sure, I can form fours, but not all by myself. You'll be orderin' me
into battalion formation next. Try me on 'Shun'."

"Shun!" Gander shouted, and the new hired man sprang to a military
attitude, as though hit by an electric shot. His shoulders came back,
his heels together, his waist-line shrank inward.

"Real Kaiser stuff," said Gander. "Now we got an army of our own.
To-morrow mornin' we'll attack the barley. Do you form fours for that?"

"It ain't so bad when you get used to it," said Grit, puzzled at the
bitterness in Gander's voice. "An' the girls, they fall for you, hard."

Gander grunted, and Grit avoided the subject for the time. He
entertained a pleasant and apparently harmless philosophy about women.
He regarded them from a distance, but with much quiet amusement. Women
to him were like a picture show, to be looked at, laughed at, and
forgotten.

By the time harvest was over Grit had become a fixture on the Stake
farm. From his own abundant unconcern he innoculated Gander, and,
although Grit was a dozen years the elder, the two became close cronies.
It was from Grit that Gander learned to laugh at the world. And every
time he laughed at the world he felt that, in some way, he was getting
even with Josephine Burge.

In the summer of 1918 Dick Claus came home, checked out for
tuberculosis. The doctors hoped he would be all right when he got his
lungs full of prairie air, and his father deeded him a half-section of
land--a generosity which had the double merit of providing for his son
and at the same time reducing his own income tax.

The marriage of Richard Claus and Josephine Burge took place in
September.




CHAPTER SIXTEEN


Peace had returned. The oppressive drag of the war was suddenly cut
loose, like a horse breaking from his whiffle-tree. For a few days the
horse ran wild, to the damage of himself and all adjacent property; then
Reason--or Habit--bridled him again, and he fell back into his furrow.

For Gander the furrow was that unending routine which encircled his
father's farm. It was a routine from which he had no desire to be
disturbed. Several times the war had threatened to shoulder him out of
his furrow, and he made the war his enemy on that account. Minnie and Jo
had tried to prod him out of it, and had succeeded in prodding
themselves out, instead. He stuck to his furrow. His life was on the
farm, where he left other people alone, and asked only that they do the
same to him.

It was the easier to stick to his furrow when he travelled in double
harness with Grit Wilson. Grit laughed at the world, and laughter gives
a pleasant sense of superiority. Gander could not have worked out any
theories of philosophy about it, but he knew that it was a very
comforting thing to laugh at the world. It placed the world at such a
disadvantage.

True, there were times--times when he met Jo Claus at church at Willow
Green, or shopping in Plainville, or at some country picnic in the
district, when Gander was not so sure of his mirth. Since her marriage
Jo had unaccountably affected to forget that there had been any
unhappiness between herself and Gander; she greeted him again as a
friend of her school days, without any suggestion that he ever had been
more, or less. If Dick knew anything he gave no sign.

"Lucky dog, Gander, old boy," said Dick, when the two met at Willow
Green. "When the next war comes I'm going to raise wheat, or make
munitions."

There was no apparent bitterness in Dick's remark, and Gander found it
hard to answer. Dick was tall, and straight, with a fineness about his
features that no one seemed to remember from the old days. But it was
pitiable to hear him cough.

"Must come over and see us sometime," Dick continued. "Jo is often
speaking about you."

Gander thanked him, but did not accept the invitation. It might not be
so easy to laugh at the world from Jo's doorstep....

That evening, as Gander sauntered in the dusk along the trail which ran
through the poplar groves, thinking a little of Dick and Jo, a ripple of
laughter caught his ear. It arrested him; he could not place the voice.
There was music in it--music even to Gander, whose scales all were
written in the solid earth, whose gamut was the range of experience on
his father's farm. He shuffled quietly away from the road and obscured
himself in a group of poplars.

Three people were walking along the trail; he just could outline them in
the dying light. There were Hamilton and Elsie Fyfe, but the second
girl--who was she? She was chatting gaily, and Gander heard that
rippling laughter again, now within a few feet of his place of
concealment. They passed by, and he waited until they were well out of
sight before moving onward again toward the house.

It was not in Gander's nature to be casually disturbed about women. Jo
had been his one love; all others moved on the stage of his life almost
unobserved. Not that that stage had been overcrowded; there were not
more than a dozen eligible girls in the Willow Green district, but some
of these would have regarded Gander's attentions without marked
annoyance. Gander had not thought of any of them seriously. Jo had been
his, but she had slipped away; that had been the price of his four years
of safety. Well, some others had paid another price. Walter Peters,
Tommy Burge, for example. Gander had accepted his fate as final; it had
not even occurred to him to suppose that he could transfer his
affections. He had taken it for granted that he would just go on--and
on.

But something in that laughter had dug into strange, unused cells in his
being. It was happy, spontaneous laughter--laughter without any ring of
bitterness. When Gander laughed it always was in self-defence, as a mask
behind which he could take shelter, or at the discomfiture of some
person or thing. Laughter was not much heard on the Stake homestead, and
it nearly always was at people--not _with_ them. This laughter was
different, and it stirred Gander more than he knew or understood. He
must question Hamilton.

Not, of course, too obviously. He allowed the breakfast opportunities to
pass without comment. If Hamilton had anything on his mind he carried it
easily, plunging into his porridge and its following course of pork and
potatoes with his usual gusto and effectiveness. During the forenoon
Hamilton and Grit plied their plough-shuttles up and down the fields
while Gander busied himself with grinding the valves of the Dodge car,
which, as a result of war-time prosperity, had displaced the more
humble Ford. When the teams came in from the field at noon Gander set
the windmill running; its pleasant clank ... clank came down from above
as its bright blades slashed the sunlight under the impulse of the
prairie breeze. The horses crowded to the trough and as each drank his
fill he made his way straight to the stable and to his own stall to
investigate the contents of his oat box. Finding it empty, he thrust his
nostrils into the air in protest; then, enticed by the fragrant hay, he
plunged into his manger, drawing great wisps between his facile lips and
champing with satisfaction.

At the door of the stable Gander met Hamilton and Grit coming out
together, and stepped aside to give them room. "Two is comp'ny; three
ain't," he observed. But Hamilton made no answer. Gander's first decoy
had not drawn fire.

A few minutes later Gander followed, past numerous obstacles in the
yard, to the front of the house, where Hamilton and Grit were crowding
over a wash bench, much as their horses had crowded at the trough.

"You don' need washin', Ham," his brother told him. "You was slicked up
last night enough for a week."

A basin of graniteware sat on the bench, and a leaky barrel, half full
of rain water, stood at the corner of the house. Grit had left the basin
partly filled with the proceeds of his ablutions. With a swing of his
arm Hamilton sent the dirty water spraying over the yard with a
scientific exactness that included Gander in the circle.

"Sorry, Gander," said Ham, with mock apologies. "You should either come
in or stay out."

Gander found no ready answer; Hamilton's allusions had been too
indefinite. He washed in silent ill-humor.

Once inside, all hands attacked the meal vigorously and without
formalities. With the passage of years and the increasing pressure of
farm activities Jackson Stake's grace before meat had become more and
more hurried and confidential, until now it was employed only upon those
rare occasions when they had visitors. The men slumped into their chairs
and helped themselves from well-laden platters. They rushed on with
their meal, as though it were something to be disposed of with the least
possible delay, and at the first sign of a pause Mrs. Stake dumped great
helpings of rice-and-raisin pudding into plates just cleared of meat and
potatoes.

They were in the final stages of the pudding course when Jackson Stake
himself touched the fuse that was to work havoc with Gander's furrow.

"That's a lively lookin' piece, that niece of Double F's," he remarked
to the company in general. "Elsie had better be watchin' out."

He ended with a benevolent smile at Hamilton, and the boy's color flowed
up his fair face into the roots of his hair. "Oh, I guess she's all
right," he answered, non-committally.

Gander tried to bury his interest in his plate.

"What's her name, Ham?" Grit demanded. "Make us all acquainted."

"I'll introduce you--when she asks me to," Hamilton retorted, with a
dignity that, in all the family, was peculiar to himself, and Minnie.

Gander turned over in his mind that afternoon this meagre information as
he worked on the car. He was surprised that he should be interested in
this strange girl, and his surprise was mingled with a certain
boldness--a certain sense of adventure. A hundred times he recalled the
outline he had seen of her in the dusk among the poplar groves, and each
time that outline seemed to become more enticing. Mingled with it was
the outline of Jo Burge; mingled with his happiness was a sadness
inseparable from Jo Burge. Without knowing or understanding it Gander
was still, at heart, faithful to his first love, and this new experience
had in it all the allurements of the illicit. He had felt that, in a
sense, Jo must be his, always. It was an ownership which he never would
be able to assert, and yet it was a pleasant thing to tuck away in his
heart. He knew--don't ask him how--he _knew_ that although Jo had
married Dick she had wanted _him_. He had nursed that thought, found
comfort in it, when no one but himself knew he harbored it at all. It
was a delicious secret.

And now that another affection came knocking at his heart he was caught
between two fires. Could he give up that secret love? Would it be quite
honest to Jo? Gander felt these questions pressing vaguely in his mind,
but he did not stop to answer them. He only knew that he wanted to meet
that girl with the rippling laughter--then he would see.

"Huh!" he told himself. "Like as not--" But he couldn't finish the
sentence.

He completed his work on the car and took it out for a trial spin. Its
renewed life seemed to feed life back to him through the steering-wheel,
the switch, the gear-shift, through every contact. The hiss of the air
in the carburetor, the almost noiseless rhythm of the motor, were music
in his ears. Before he knew it he was speeding down the highway that
divided his father's farm from that of Fraser Fyfe.

The school section, redolent with memories of Josephine Burge, lay to
the southeast; he could see the bluffs of willow and poplar green upon
its higher ridges. Under one of those bluffs he and Jo had rested that
hot day--that day when he wondered (and he still wondered) whether she
had been asleep. Down one of those slopes he had chased her in a madness
he never had understood. Somewhere behind those fields he had carried
her in his arms.... And mingled in his memories of her everywhere was a
new joyousness, and something which had to do with laughter.

He drove by the school. Even at the distance of the road he could see
one or two wistful faces turned toward the windows, envying him his
liberty. He remembered how he had rescued Jo, that first day at school,
and how she had fought for him, burying her little hands in Pete Loudy's
hair....

He circled the country to the south. The high tide of spring, merging
into early summer, was in the air; pennants and spirals of dust marked
the slow drag of husbandry on the distant fields. The snow water still
lay, bright as quicksilver, in the prairie ponds; about its edges the
grass grew a more luscious green; wild ducks were nesting under its
emerald canopy. The sky faded into infinite blue distances, bearing on
its bosom white puffs of lazy cloud.

Eventually Gander's circle brought him back to the school. Between the
school and the Stake homestead the road crests a ridge; Gander thrilled
to the power of his car as it raced up the incline. As he swung over the
top his brakes brought him up with a jerk. A few yards ahead a girl was
bending over the grassy strip in the centre of the trail, in the act of
picking some prairie flower which had braved the hazard of many horses'
feet. The nose of the car was almost touching her when it stopped.

"Well, I pretty near scored off you," he said, annoyed that she made no
move to get out of the way.

She was standing erect now, facing him, with a bunch of flowers in her
hand. She wore no hat, and her dark hair, massed about her head, made
her face appear very small and winsome.

"Didn't you see me?" she asked. "I was here first." And then sunshine
seemed to break from her parted lips, and her voice trilled off into a
ripple of laughter. It smote Gander like a blow; his Adam's apple jumped
into his throat. This was she, undoubtedly--Double F's niece! And he
didn't even know her name!

Still, she had given him a fright. "I might have killed you," he
blurted.

She laughed again. "Oh, you are much too good a driver to do anything
like that. Aren't they beautiful?" She was holding her flowers toward
him.

"Lots of 'em on the prairie," said Gander. Flowers were nothing to him.
Then, with sudden boldness, "Better get in and I'll drive you home, or
wherever you want to go."

She came around to the side of the car, and as she did so he saw that
she was small, as small as Jo, and lighter on her feet. There was more
spring in her step. She might have reminded him of Minnie, but Minnie
was fair, with bronze hair and brown eyes; this girl was dark, with
black hair and black eyes and a round, smooth face of olive-brown skin.
She wore a light dress of some pinkish material, white stockings, and
little black shoes--much too little, thought Gander, for the country
roads.

She raised one foot to the running-board; then she paused. One hand
rested on the car door, the other held her treasured flowers. Gander
thought he never had seen hands so small and fine. "Not much use for
farmin'," he had told himself afterwards, and pondered that point rather
deeply.

"You see, we have not been introduced," she explained her hesitation. "I
don't know the country very much, but in the city we--_nice_ girls
expect an introduction."

"Oh, that's all right," Gander assured her. "Everybody knows me. They
all call me Gander; Gander Stake."

"Oh, then, I know you, too!" There was something about her eyes most
enticing to look upon. "You are Hamilton's brother. _He's_ a nice boy.
Will you open the door, please?"

Gander knew of no reason why she should not open the door herself, but
he did not make an issue of it. For a moment she stood up in the car,
and the prairie wind swept her light skirt across his knees. He was
conscious of his greasy overalls.

"I'm all grease--been fixin' the car," he warned her. "Don' sit too
close."

"Oh, I won't," she answered.

Her manner piqued him. "I didn' mean _that_," he explained.

"Neither did I."

She was much too smart. She was too quick with her answers. For the
first time his slow mind began to catch a glimpse of how slow it was. He
was afraid to speak lest her reply would place him at a disadvantage.
He felt like a mouse under the eye of an agile but tolerant cat; safe
while he remained quite still, but sure to be pounced upon the moment he
moved.

Gander gave her a sidelong glance from time to time. She was engaged
mainly in burying her little nose in the prairie flowers. Unconsciously
Gander increased his speed. The speedometer hand crept up to
thirty-five.

When it became apparent that he was going to drive on in silence she
opened conversation.

"The country is beautiful, isn't it?"

"Oh, I dunno. What?"

"Why, the grass, the trees, the flowers, the fields, but most of all,
the sky. In the city we don't seem to see the sky."

"Lots of it out here," Gander remarked.

She laughed, and to Gander it seemed that he had jumped across a great
chasm, and landed safely on the other side. They were getting along.

"I suppose you have lived here all your life?" she tried again.

A bit of burlesque humor flashed up in Gander's memory. "Not yet," he
answered.

Again she laughed, and Gander felt as though a short-circuit were
charging him through the steering-wheel. No; it was coming from beside
him; he knew it was coming from the passenger at his side. How dainty
she was! How small, and how clean! He was tremendously conscious of his
greasy overalls, and a bit uneasy about the cushion on which she was
sitting. That pink skirt-- He wondered if he should mention his
misgivings. But, while he wondered, they arrived at Fraser Fyfe's gate.

"It doesn't take long, with a car," he remarked, with a supreme effort
to make conversation.

"Not when you drive so fast. But I suppose you are in a great hurry.
Farmers are very busy people, aren't they?"

Her words tantalized Gander. She seemed to be poking verbal fingers at
him.

"But I'm not in a hurry," he protested. "I've all afternoon. Let's go
for a drive--somewhere else?"

"That would be nice, but--not to-day. Elsie will be looking for me. I
said I would be only a little while." For a moment she sat, waiting for
him to open the door. When he made no move she opened it herself, and
got out. With her unengaged hand she brushed particles of dust from her
dress, giving him an opportunity to speak.

Gander's heart was thumping, but now was the time. He summoned all his
courage to his aid.

"If I call you up some day, will you?" he asked, almost choking on the
words.

She flashed a look at him from her dark eyes, dancing under long black
lashes. Her lips parted; her teeth were smooth and regular and strangely
white against the olive brown of her skin. Gander thought he never had
seen any one so beautiful.

"Thank you for the ride--and the company," she said. "I think the
prairie is very beautiful, don't you?"

As he drove home alone Gander wondered whether or not she had answered
his question.




CHAPTER SEVENTEEN


Gander mechanically backed his car into its garage. Then he sat for a
long while, the steering-wheel held in a tight grip, thinking.

With Gander, any thinking that broke new ground was laborious effort,
and his thoughts to-day were breaking new ground. They were at first
much too confused to have any definite trend, but gradually certain
points began to emerge. For example, he had not learned the girl's name.

It took half an hour for that fact to crystallize, but when the thought
had finally taken shape it landed on him with the impact of a
prize-fighter's fist. She had got the information she wanted, without
evasion or delay, but she had not so much as told him her name! He felt
a sort of helpless resentment, and he condemned his slow wits for
refusing to function when he stood most in need of them.

"I'm a dub," he said to himself. It was an important conclusion.

Gander's standards of comparison were such that he had not often
suffered by them. When the girls in the restaurant had giggled for the
obvious edification of the two men in uniform--that had been one
instance, and his hurt pride had sent him to the barber's shop for
tonsorial adornment. But usually he felt that he could invite
comparison. With Jackie gone he was the elder son; he was practically
manager of the farm. He could run a steam engine. He could take a car to
pieces and put it together again. He could drive a team of four, six,
or eight horses. He knew every oil-hole in a binder, mower, or seeder.
He was strong. He could take his turn on a pitchfork with the best of
them. He could shoot and ride as well as the average. With all these
things in his favor never before had it occurred seriously to Gander
that he might make a poor showing in any company.

Yet this strange girl had left him with just that impression. It was
unpalatable, and he choked on it a bit, but it had to be swallowed. He
had made a poor showing with her. He couldn't analyze it, he couldn't go
over their conversation item by item and check up the scoring pro and
con, but in some inductive way he knew that she had had the better of
it. She was too quick for him.

He had an indefinite sense that he had been acted upon, rather than
acting; that she was the superior force. Absurd although it appeared, he
gathered the idea that in some way she was stronger than he. He almost
wished that he had had an opportunity to show his physical strength. If
the car had turned over, for example. Suppose it had pinned her under!
How he would have swung it up, his muscles knotted like iron! He would
have raised her in his arms, he would have run with her to the nearest
house! She would be but a feather's weight to him. And he would set her
down, and when she opened her eyes----

It was Gander's greatest stretch of imagination. It stirred him so that
he got out of his seat, out of the car, walked two or three times about
the garage. That would show her his strength! He felt his pulses
throbbing within him. The walls of his furrow were beginning to crumble.

In the garden to the west of the house he saw his mother working, her
form doubled over in a gingham dress faded drab with age. He felt a
sudden surging of his heart toward his mother. He shuffled over to her,
down between rows of currant bushes greening with their spring foliage.
She did not hear his footsteps in the soft earth; she was bent over,
setting out cabbages.

"Couldn't I do that?" he interrupted her. She looked up quickly, her
sharp eyes piercing him, as though she suspected some kind of treachery.
She could not recall that Gander ever before had offered her a service.
He was playing a joke on her. But he held his ground, steadily.

"I thought you was busy with the car?" she parried.

"Through with it. Could help you a little, if you like."

"Why--why--Willie?" Her old face began to twist. It recalled the day he
gave her the twenty-dollar bill.

"That's all right, Mother," he said, with strange gentleness. "I'm goin'
to give you a hand. I'm goin' to help you, once in a while."

Still with misgivings, she showed him how to set out the tender plants.
Gander crouched on his knees, setting each little stem in place,
pressing the soft moist earth about the root with his hands, while his
mother watched in a silence and wonder through which happiness was
beginning to break like sunshine through a cloud.

Presently, out of this new experience, she felt a disposition to talk.

"You was out with the car?"

"Yep. Tryin' her out."

"Where'd you go?"

He briefly sketched his course.

"See anybody?"

Gander hesitated. He was shy about mentioning the girl, and yet he felt
an impelling desire to talk of her.

"Yep. Double F's niece. Out pickin' flowers. Gave her a ride home."

The cabbage plant trembled in Gander's hand; he felt the color tingling
in his ears.

"You better not be takin' up with the likes o' her," his mother
cautioned him.

"What's wrong with her?" he demanded, sharply. He had an impulse to let
her plant her own cabbages.

"Oh, nothin' as I know. A very nice girl, no doubt. But these city
girls--they ain't cut out to be a farmer's wife. Did you see her hands?"

"I did," said Gander, defiantly. "An' they looked good to me."

"For plantin' cabbages? Willie, don' be silly! There's good girl's
aroun' Willow Green, if you're thinkin' that way. There was Joey
Burge----"

Gander sat back on his heels. "Jo's married," he said.

His mother nodded. "Yes. You could ha' had her, but you was too slow.
Let her slip away on you. An' if you couldn' catch Joey, you'll never
get in sight o' that young minx at Double F's."

In his heart Gander believed his mother was probably right, but he was
not prepared to admit his deficiencies.

"Don' be too sure," he said, and went on planting cabbage. But that
evening, in the after-glow of sunset, he found himself wandering over
the fields, dividing his thoughts between Jo Claus and the little
olive-skinned city girl he had picked up on the trail. He watched the
light climbing up the sky, touching tatters of cloud into golden flame.
She had said the sky was beautiful. For the first time Gander watched
it--and wondered.

But other events were soon to demand a share of his thought. The
following day he took his turn in the fields, and when he brought in his
team at noon a young man, little older than himself, was waiting at the
water trough. Something in his look suggested Dick Claus; he had that
same fineness of appearance, and with it a self-confidence in meeting
strangers which is not often acquired in the furrow.

He came forward pleasantly, and his evident desire to be agreeable put
Gander on his guard. That was the way with life insurance agents and
other people who had something to sell.

"I'm Cal Beach," he announced. "The new hired man."

Gander surveyed him doubtfully, but Grit, whose head at that moment
emerged from among the heaving shoulders of the horses, flashed him a
look of good-humored interest.

"Welcome to our city," he hailed the new arrival. "We need an extra
man--to do the work."

Gander hesitated. "Didn' know Dad was figgerin' on hirin' any more help.
However, he's the main gazabo. What can you do?"

"Not so very much, I'm afraid. I can drive a Ford----"

"'An' it takes a good man to do that,'" Grit chanted from a popular
song.

"----and horses a little, and I'm middling strong, and--I've been
through university."

Gander had noticed, drawn up by one of the portable granaries, an old
Ford, dog-eared and weather-beaten, which he now associated with the
visitor. Still, Gander was prepared to admit that many a good man, at
some time in his career, had driven a Ford. This new-comer was guilty of
a more serious offence. He had gone to a university. Worse than that, he
boasted of it!

"An eddicated smart-Aleck," said Gander to himself. "He'll last on this
farm about long enough to crank that old road-turtle o' his." Then
aloud:

"Sounds all right, all but the last. Don' know as what they learn you in
the university'll help much. A man on a farm don' need no D. D.'s, or
whatever it is, after his name. What he wants is horse power an' savvy.
Well, we'll see. Go down to the barn an' throw some hay in the mangers."

Something in Gander's tone recalled to him that episode on the vacant
lots adjoining Plainville--the ordering of the men about by the drill
sergeant. Gander had taken the same attitude. He was "breaking" his man.
But, to Gander's surprise, Beach showed no resentment; on the contrary,
he swung off smartly to the stables to carry out his instructions.

"Huh!" said Gander. "Not much spirit there. About two days on the
farm'll fix him."

At the door of the stable Gander came upon a little boy of eight or nine
years, sun-burned and touzled, with threads of hay hanging about his
hair and shoulders.

"Hello, who's the kid?" said Gander. "Another hired man?"

"Yes, sir," the boy answered, respectfully.

"What's your name?"

"Reed, sir."

It was the first time Gander ever had been called sir, and his Adam's
apple plunged violently with the shock. It was a wholly unprecedented
experience.

Gander's heart warmed somewhat to the child.

"Reed what?" he questioned, more pleasantly.

"Reed Beach."

Gander stroked the back of his long neck meditatively. "You don' mean
he's your daddy?" he said, indicating Cal with a jerk of his head.

"He's my Daddy X."

Gander turned this singular reply over in his mind, as though to
discover what lay beneath it. Then:

"An' have you been through university, too?"

"Not yet, but I'm going to. Have you?"

"Not so slow," thought Gander. "He's some kid." He ran his fingers
through the boy's hair with a friendly scuffle.

"D'ye ever get hungry?"

"Yes, sir."

"Hungry now?"

"Yes, sir, a little."

What a bright kid he was! And how pleasant that sir sounded!

"Well, let's go an' eat. C'mon, Cal."

Mrs. Stake did not join the men at their meal, but waited on the table.
She seemed to-day even more straight and stern than usual; the prospect
of two extra mouths to feed was an additional grievance which she bore
with heavy tread from the table to the stove, and back again.

Notwithstanding the exigencies of eating, Gander managed to give some
quiet attention to Cal and Reed during this their first meal in the
Stake household. He noticed that both of them apparently were under the
impression that knives must be used only for cutting--a limitation that
surely would place them at a disadvantage in the tri-daily scramble at
meal time. They ate with apparent relish, but Cal, at least, controlled
his haste. Gander laid this to design on Cal's part; he probably would
drag out his meal hours as long as possible. Well, he knew a cure for
that.

Gander and Grit consumed amazingly big meals in an amazingly short time,
and as each cleared his plate he got up and went out. They met in the
shade of the blacksmith shop, where they were accustomed to smoke an
after-dinner pipe.

"I don' reckon the kid is his," Grit declared, after some minutes of
silence. "He's too young to have a kid like that."

Gander took his pipe from his mouth and shook his head sagely. "You can
never tell," he said. "An eddication is a great thing."

The two cronies snickered at this suggestion, but Gander went on more
seriously:

"No, I don' think he's his, that way. Fact, I asked him--the kid--right
there in the door of the stable, I says, 'Is he your daddy?' an' he
says, 'He's my Daddy X.' Now what do you make o' that?"

"I tell you what it is," said Grit, thumping his pipe into his palm.
"It's a mystery, that's what it is. You mark my words, it's a mystery."
His slumbering eyes were alight.

"Well, he's a nice kid," Gander conceded, the soothing effect of Reed's
deference being still upon him.

It was presently time to hitch up for the afternoon work. Gander got his
four horses out like Company on Parade, while he snapped the reins to
their bits and affectionately cuffed the muzzles curled up at him as he
went by.

The new hired man came over from the windmill, where he had been talking
with Jackson Stake.

"Will you show me how to do that?" he asked. "Let me get the system of
it into my head. I'll savvy if you give me a chance."

It was the word savvy that won Gander. This was language he understood,
and which brought the two men, so to speak, face to face. Besides, it
showed that Cal recognized his inferiority. Gander, for all his
democracy--or, perhaps, because of it--responded instantly to obeisance.
He purred like a cat when his fur was stroked the right way.

"Now you're shoutin'," he said. "See, it's easy--" He led Cal through
the labyrinths of lines, showing him the order in what looked like a
chaos of leather. Then he chirped to his horses, and they were on their
way.

Their road lay along a narrow lane between two sagging wire fences, with
moist, ploughed fields on either side. As the two men walked together
behind the team, with the little chap holding Cal's hand, Gander
initiated them into some of the mysteries of the farm and of the
neighborhood. He mentioned Minnie, and even as he did so the thought
struck him that Minnie would find a peculiar interest in this new hired
man. They were likely to have much in common. Well, he would see.

Gander hitched his team to the seeder, making every movement with quiet,
rapid efficiency, and inwardly amused at Cal's abortive attempts to be
of service. The field was a mile long, and when the end was reached
Gander thrust the reins into Cal's hands. With a few instructions the
new man picked up the work readily, and after a round or two Gander was
content to let him go by himself while he enjoyed a quiet smoke in the
shade of a willow bush at the end of the field and wondered about a
number of things, including Cal, and the boy, and Minnie, and Jo Claus,
and another girl whose name even he had not learned.

That evening Gander found excuse to visit the home of Fraser Fyfe. He
went to borrow a clevis, and that notwithstanding the fact that three
unused clevises were hanging in his father's blacksmith shop. As he came
up the path he saw two girlish figures in the garden, and Gander, who
scarcely knew a rose from a tulip, developed a sudden interest in
flowers.

"Why, here's Gander!" cried Elsie Fyfe. "Hello, Gander; you don't often
come to visit us?"

"Not as often as some," said Gander, significantly.

Elsie blushed winsomely through a new crop of freckles. "Perhaps you'll
do better," she hinted, slyly. "Have you met my cousin?"

The dark girl had paid no attention to Gander's presence; she was
diligently setting out geraniums, using a great kitchen spoon for a
shovel. But at Elsie's words she turned toward him.


"I think we have met--at least, we have travelled together," and her
voice trilled off into a little ripple of laughter. Then, as though
repentant, she stuck her spoon in the ground and moved toward Gander,
flicking specks of earth from her fingers daintily as she came.

"My cousin, Geraldine Chansley," Elsie announced. "Commonly called
Jerry, for short."

The girl's little hand sank softly in Gander's sun-burned fist, but it
sent a tingle through his fingers that ran up his arm and agitated the
prominent feature of his lean neck.

"Sounds tom-boyish, doesn't it? Elsie shouldn't give away my
failings--to strangers."

Gander thought she looked very small and pretty before him. He could
have lifted her with that outstretched hand, and yet he was caught in
some dumb kind of fright. He choked for words. He was filled with a
surging for which he had no expression.

She was ready to help him out. "Are you fond of gardening?" she asked.

The question loosened his tongue a little. "Well, not partic'lar. My
garden--you couldn't plant _it_ with a spoon. Wheat. Two--three hundred
acres."

"It must be wonderful to run a big farm like that." There was real
admiration in her voice.

But Gander's panic was again upon him. "Yep," he admitted, "but it keeps
you awful busy. Jus' come over to borrow a clevis. Is your father about,
Elsie?"

And without waiting for an answer he lurched off through the rows of
currant bushes to Eraser Fyfe's red painted barn.




CHAPTER EIGHTEEN


The two new-comers on the Stake farm had been allotted one of the
portable granaries in which to sleep, and their first act had been to
scrub it thoroughly. That, in itself, stamped them as unusual people.
Gander paid the place a surreptitious visit while Cal was in the fields
and Reed at school, and denounced it as being effeminately clean. That
sort of thing was all right in a house, where there was a woman to keep
the dust on the jump, but a he-man never troubled about such matters.
Look at their threshing caboose--Bill Powers' threshing caboose! Gander
smiled at the droll thought of Cal squirming in one of Bill's
over-occupied bunks.

"An' they're he-men, every one o' them," said Gander to himself. "Not
like this fellow Cal----"

He stopped at that. It didn't ring true, and Gander, whatever his
faults, was a believer in the truth. Generations of Puritan ancestry had
woven a fibre into his character that still held taut on most of the
fundamentals.

And Gander was fair enough to admit that Cal, in spite of his
eccentricities, was measuring up to his standards of a he-man. Cal had
followed the team continuously since his first initiation in the
oat-field; was on the job in the mornings without being called, and in
the evenings, when Gander and Grit thought it no shame to be tired, Cal
still had the energy and spirit for a game of ball with Ham and Reed.

Gander stepped into the granary, for a closer study of the habits of
this mysterious man. What he found was simplicity and order. The bed on
the corner of the floor was as neatly made up as if his mother had done
it; the clothing, not in use, was hung on nails about the walls; even
the spare tire from Cal's old Ford occupied a place especially prepared
for it. Cal had built a little shelf, on which were two or three books.
Gander lifted one, and, with difficulty, spelled out the name.

"M. A-n-t-i-n-i-n-u-s," he made it. "Some Dutchman, I guess. Well, he
won't learn much about hitchin' a team in that."

It was on Cal's first Saturday night on the Stake farm that Gander had a
further glimpse of the man's peculiarities. Gander had gone to town with
the Dodge, with the excuse of bringing Minnie home, but in reality in
response to that prairie mood which sends every young man into town on
Saturday evenings. There the more vigorous play football or baseball
until darkness falls; then they line the sidewalks, jostling each other
playfully; commenting on the young women who, of necessity or a desire
to be observed, thread their ways among them; occasionally breaking into
innocuous rowdyism, and, once in a great while, into a fight. Main
Street, Plainville, was Gander's Broadway, and the Broadway of all the
other youths of the district. Although cruder it was no more sinister
than its great prototype, and it contained as much humanity per
individual as any street in the world.

During the years of the war Gander had resisted that prairie longing to
spend his Saturday evenings in Plainville. No doubt the psycho-analyst
would find in that suppressed desire the explanation of his sullenness,
his aloofness, his occasional unbalance, such as had ostracized him
from the company of Joey Burge. But now that the war was over, and the
recruiting posters had been taken down, or were flapping in tattered
remnants from neglected walls and fences, Gander again felt at ease to
move about among his kind.

He found Minnie completing some household purchases at Sempter &
Burton's general store, and they drove home through the closing twilight
at a speed that rolled up the Plainville road like the belt of Bill
Powers' threshing machine. When Gander was driving a car, especially in
the gloaming, the road suggested a belt which he was winding up beneath
him. Sometimes he thought of that incident when he had saved the life of
young Walter Peters, and Jo Burge had hotly predicted that some day
he--Gander--might wear a real V. C. For a year and a half Walter had
been sleeping somewhere in France.

"If it comes to that," Gander argued to himself, "I suppose I could
claim some credit for him. I gave his life to his country, in a way."

As he thought of these matters he unconsciously speeded up his car,
until Minnie brought him to earth. "What's the rush?" she shouted in his
ear.

"It's all on your account," he told her. "'Thought you'd be anxious to
see the new hired man."

"So I am," she said, with a touch of that coquetry in which Minnie was
something of an artist.

"You've heard about him, then?"

"A little, over the 'phone. A man and a boy, I think?"

"Yep. Cal Beach, D.D., an' a little gaffer that calls him Daddy X."

"D.D.? No? Not a preacher?"

Gander slowed up to enjoy his sister's curiosity. "Sure," he said. "A
kind o' preacher. Oh, you'll like him, Minn. An' such a swell
housekeeper! He'll be puttin' lace curtains on the granary, next. Him
an' the boy sleeps in the other granary."

"Perhaps he'll set a good example to Grit and you. Your room, until
Mother clears it up, looks like the swath of a cyclone. But tell me
about the boy. I want to hear about the boy."

Gander, not subtle enough to detect his sister's move to cover her real
interest, plunged into a discussion of Reed.

"Well, he's a nice little shaver," he admitted. "About eight or nine,
with a bright face and good manners. Mother's all set on him already.
She's got him goin' to school, an' to-day he's off playin' with Trixie
(the immediate successor of Gyp) over the prairie huntin' flowers an'
gophers."

"But what is he? Cal's--Mr. Beach's--son, or what?"

"That's the mystery, Minn; that's the mystery. That's what's got us all
beat."

"But what does he say?"

"He don' say. I asked him if Cal was his daddy, an' he says, 'He's my
Daddy X.' Now what do you make o' that? What relation is a Daddy X? I
tell you it's a mystery."

By this time they had reached the trail which leads in from the highroad
to the Stake farm. The windows of Fraser Fyfe's house were yellow with
light. Somewhere behind those windows, or perhaps in the garden-- Gander
wondered if his sister had not heard of Elsie Fyfe's cousin. He was
eager to talk about her, but too shy and self-conscious to introduce
the subject. Gander was not in the habit of taking much notice of
girls; if he mentioned Jerry Chansley to Minnie his quick-witted sister
would understand, and undoubtedly subject him to her nimble ridicule.
And yet, to have a confidant--Minnie, to whom he could talk--seemed
almost worth the risk. Twice his lips were shaped for a mention of Jerry
Chansley, and twice his courage failed him, until now his undivided
attention was required to guide his car around the sharp curves between
the poplar groves which sheltered the farmstead from the western wind.
As he stopped near the house he was surprised to see a glow of fire at
the door of Cal's granary. He ran a pace or two in that direction; then,
seeing the forms of Cal and Reed sitting unconcerned in the circle of
light, he turned back, wondering.

"What's the smudge for, Dad?" Gander demanded, as he entered the door
with an armful of parcels.

Jackson Stake was enjoying his bedtime smoke beside the kitchen range.
For his greater comfort he had discarded his boots and was resting his
feet, on which his heavy woollen socks sagged in rolls and creases, on
the cover of the ash-pan, drawn partly open to permit of convenient
expectoration. He answered Gander's question without missing a puff.

"No smudge," he said. "Bonfire."

"Bonfire? What's the celebration?"

"No celebration." Puff. "Just a notion." Puff. "Cal an' the kid."

"My land," Mrs. Stake exclaimed, sharply, "can't you let the boy have a
fire, if he wants it?"

The readiness with which Gander's mother came to Reed's defence nettled
and surprised him. Mrs. Stake was a lonely old woman, although Gander
knew her only as his mother, which is often a very partial
acquaintanceship. The boy was winding strings about her heart.

"Sure! Let 'em have a good time," Gander retorted. "If they set fire to
the granary or the horse-stable we can all go out an' cheer."

"They won't set fire to nothin'," said Jackson Stake. "Cal'll watch to
that."

As Gander went out to put the car away he reflected on the fact that
this strange man and boy already had won for themselves champions in the
Stake household. His mother bristled at any question of Reed's
privileges, and even his easy-going father limbered up in defence of
Cal. They were strange people.

"Minnie'll fall for that guy like a boot on a bedroom floor," Gander
concluded, as he thought the matter over.

Later in the evening he saw his sister down by the fire, sitting with
Cal on one of the cushions of the old Ford. Gander did not mean to be an
eavesdropper, but he happened to wander into their vicinity, in the
shadow of the granary. All he could gather was not very conclusive. It
seemed that Cal had been telling Reed a story, and Minnie had made
herself one of the party.

Gander studied his sister, as she sat there in the glow of the fire,
with the unillusioned eye of a brother, and even so he had to admit that
Minnie was more than ordinarily attractive. She had thrust her slim
ankles out toward the smouldering coals, and Cal would be more, or less,
than human if he failed to take note of their neatness and their
coquetry. Gander had many times suspected that Minnie was beautiful; now
he knew it. The curve of her arm, the color of her cheek, the sparkle
of firelight entrapped in her hair--in all these Gander saw Josephine
Burge. When Gander really was stirred he thought of Josephine Burge. Or,
more recently, of Jerry Chansley.

They were chatting happily, in the subtle thrust and parry of young
people trying out each other's armor. Gander listened for some minutes;
even caught his own name in the conversation; then, with a strange
tingling in his cheeks, slipped away to his bedroom.

"I didn' mean to spy on 'em," he defended himself, "but I have to think
o' Minn. He's got a halter-shank on her already." But a little later,
"No, by gum! It's Minn that'll be leadin' him 'round on a rope, before
he knows it."

Insofar as the duties of the farm would permit it Sunday was observed by
the Stakes as a day of rest. It was not until eight o'clock next morning
that Gander and Grit, hungry with their long fast, filed in to the table
in the living room. The familiar whine of the cream separator filled the
air, and when Gander glanced toward the corner in which the machine
stood his eye was arrested by the unprecedented sight of Calvin Beach
turning the handle, while Minnie, with an apron pinned about her,
superintended the operation.

"She's got a snaffle hitch on him already," said Gander to himself. He
grinned at Grit, who returned the grimace, the elliptic parenthesis
about his mouth almost meeting in a genial circle of amusement.

After breakfast they discussed the incident together as they lounged at
the sunny side of the horse-stable.

"I mind once a place where I worked where they useta run the churn with
a mastiff," said Grit, "but this is the first time I ever seen a cream
separator hitched to a D.D."

"He'll soon get fed up on that," Gander prophesied. "It's no job for a
man." A touch of annoyance had crept into his voice with a realization
of the possible effects of Cal's misdemeanor. The new man had, at least
by inference, suggested that turning the cream separator was a masculine
occupation. After many arguments Gander had thought that point
definitely settled, but now his mother undoubtedly would seize this
precedent to re-open the subject. He fancied he could hear her saying,
"Well, when Cal's here, he turns it----"

"Not while that pretty sister o' yours is around, I guess not," Grit
broke in on him. "Did you see their heads, almost touchin' each other,
when she was emp'yin' the milk?"

"Shut up, Grit!" said Gander, sharply. He had little relish for Grit's
unexpected perspicacity.

"You can't be too kerful with them mystery men," Grit continued, quite
unabashed. "We've got two mysteries here now. Three times--and out!"

At that moment Cal, clean shaven and dressed in his Sunday clothes, came
around the corner of the building. His presence gave a new twist to the
conversation.

"We was jus' sayin'," said Grit, "that you ought to rig up the Ford to
run that milk buzzer. That shouldn't be hard for a man with a
eddication."

"A D.D.," Gander added, more specifically.

The new hired man insisted upon retaining his good humor, and after some
conversation, in which he seemed to argue that the women on the farm had
too much to do, or some such heresy, went off by himself for a ramble in
the fields.

"Queer duck," Gander commented, when Cal was well out of hearing, and
Grit tapped his head with his finger, significantly.

The whole household attended church at Willow Green in the afternoon.
Gander drove the Dodge, with his father and mother, Hamilton, Grit, and
Reed. It seemed that Cal and Minnie had elected to walk. They passed
them on the way, swinging along on the grass by the side of the road,
their hands not far apart. That much Gander had noticed, even while his
chief attention was reserved for Fraser Fyfe's Ford. Yes, there she was,
all right. Jerry. He saw her with Elsie at the door of the church, the
centre of many eyes, for this was her first public appearance at Willow
Green. The young farm lads would be having remarks to make. Well, let
Gander hear them, that was all; just let him hear them....

After the service Gander, on the pretence that one of Fraser Fyfe's
tires was going slack, found occasion to approach the enchanted circle.
Mrs. Fyfe, ample and warm, although it was only May, occupied the
greater part of the front seat; her husband crowded himself into the
remaining space by the simple process of closing the door. It was one of
Mrs. Fyfe's whims always to ride in the front seat, so that she could be
of immediate assistance to her husband in case of emergency. Elsie and
Geraldine were seated behind, looking very cool and fresh in their
spring hats and dresses.

"Think your off front tire is down a bit, don't you, Mr. Fyfe?" Gander
ventured. "Looks a bit flat."

Double F studied the tire for a moment with much absorption.

"Does look a little flat at the bottom," he observed at length, "but the
rest of it is all right. Guess it'll do till we get home. Want a lift,
Gander? Jump in!"

Gander glanced at his own car, where he saw his father had taken the
place of honor at the wheel.

"Well, might do that, too," he agreed, "if you ain't crowded."

"Crowded nothin'! Sit over, girls, an' make room for Gander. By the way,
you know my niece, Miss----"

"Yes, thank you, Uncle; we've met." It was Jerry who spoke. And she
smiled at Gander, and sat over, not too far, making room for him beside
her.

Gander never knew just how that afternoon was passed, except that it was
the most eventful day of his life. He stayed at Double F's for tea, and
in the evening, when Elsie's attentions were monopolized by Hamilton, he
went walking with Jerry. They took the road to the lake, and, when they
reached it, stood for a long while skipping stones on the water, or
watching the deepening hues of the mirrored sunset. Jerry had an eye for
color. The prairie sunsets charmed her, she admitted. And Gander had an
eye for Jerry. She charmed him, but his courage failed him short of
confession. She seemed so far beyond him that he hardly dared let
himself dream-- It had been quite different with Jo. He never had
thought of Jo as being beyond him. This girl, with her fine face, her
small hands, her careful speech, was a new revelation. For all his
self-esteem Gander could hardly think it possible that she might care
for him. For the first time in his life he began to regret that he had
not gone to school more regularly; that he had not read books; that he
had nothing to talk about!

Darkness was deep about them as they walked homeward, and she took his
arm, drawing him gently out of his shyness. Then, when she had loosened
his tongue a little, she asked him if he never had thought of going to
the city. "At least for a winter," she said. "It would do you good."

"But I thought you liked the country?" he answered.

"So I do; its beauty, its quiet, its peace. They make it very lovely. I
wouldn't ask you to leave the country altogether. But for a few
months--it would do you good."

"How?" Gander was interested. He wanted to know. But she had not the
heart to tell him. She wanted him to know that he was clumsy and
ill-kempt and uninformed, and she couldn't tell him those things. But he
had intelligence, too; he had some sterling quality that appealed to her
more than she cared to admit.

She could say only, "It would do you good. My brother has a garage
business, and you are handy with machines. Some day if you decide to
come, I will speak to him to give you a job. Then you can spend your
nights at a technical school, and brush up--all those things you have
neglected so much, Gander."

So that was it. He had known it in his heart all along. He wasn't good
enough for her. He should go to school again, like a child. It was all
right for him to dumbly realize this for himself; it was another thing
to be told it by her pretty, tantalizing lips; to hear his defects
suggested by that voice which seemed always on the verge of laughter.
Only, to-night it had been serious enough. Gander was too inexperienced
to appraise that seriousness at its real value. All he saw was her
attitude of superiority. It was like the sergeant, drilling his raw
recruits. "Form fours!"

They were at Fraser Fyfe's gate, and Gander was holding his indignation
well in hand. He listened quietly in the darkness while she sketched to
him the advantages of contact with many people. "That is what you lack
here, Gander," she said. "You don't see enough people. New people give
you new ideas, and make life more worth living. Don't you see? They draw
you out. I know you have given me new ideas, and perhaps I----"

"Yes," he interrupted. "You've gave me new ideas, too. You make it quite
clear I ain't good enough for you. Well, let me make one thing clear,
too; I ain't asked you yet!"

"Gander!"

"Yes, Gander! You think because you're from the city, an' have been to
school more'n I have, an' wear fine clo'es, an' have pretty little clean
fingers, I ain't good enough for you. Perhaps I ain't. But I ain't asked
you. An' when I want you I won't ask you--I'll take you, see?" Something
of the mood in which he had terrified Jo Burge on the school section was
upon him; even the figure of Jo herself was floating before him,
confusedly floating in and out between himself and Jerry. He had thrust
his face close to hers. "When I want you I'll take you," he repeated.
"Like this!"

He had thrown an arm about her; he drew her slim body to his. He crushed
her weak efforts, holding her fast, until his lips found hers. For a
long minute he held her. Life seemed to seep from her; her little frame
went limp in his arms.

With a sudden fear he let her sink in the grass and, turning, almost ran
through the poplar groves to his own home.

The next evening he learned from Hamilton that Elsie's cousin had gone
back to the city.




CHAPTER NINETEEN


Cal's arrival proved to be but the beginning of changes on the Stake
farm. Cal had a perfect mania for changes. After his day's work was done
in the fields, and he should have been content to rest and smoke, he was
busy piling up the firewood that lay in a heap in front of the house,
hauling gravel to fill mud holes in the yard, straightening into neat
rows the farm implements and vehicles. He even dragged the pig pen from
its convenient location near the well out on to a sod knoll behind the
farm buildings. With the aid of a team and skids he lined up the two
portable granaries and the blacksmith shop, making a sort of street,
which Gander and Grit appropriately christened "Beach Boulevard."

In all these operations Cal had the active support of the little boy
Reed, and sometimes of Hamilton, but Gander and Grit held aloof. They
regarded these changes with suspicion. That an ignorant, college-bred
man, who knew not so much as how to hitch a team when he came to the
farm less than two weeks before, should take such liberties was nothing
short of presumption. Gander would have told him so with engaging
frankness, but it was evident that Cal had the advantage of the
knowledge and consent of Jackson Stake, who never before had been known
to care whether the buildings were in line or out of line, or whether
the wood was piled or left where it fell from the saw, or whether the
water trough slopped over and made little ponds in the yard for the
convenience of the ducks and geese and the family sow.

"I tell you, it's a mystery," said Grit. "I said that all along. Wait
till we see what we see next."

Gander tried to keep his annoyance within bounds, and the ache which he
carried in his heart--the double ache, now; one for Jo Claus and one for
Jerry Chansley--made it no easier. It was plain that he was being ousted
out of the premier position on his own father's farm and supplanted by
this mysterious man and boy who had come over-night from nowhere. He had
heard his father boasting of Cal to Fraser Fyfe, and he had surprised
his mother sitting in "the room" with Reed on her knee, singing to him
one of the lullabies she had sung to Gander twenty years before. His
Adam's apple had seemed to swell until it almost choked him at that
sight. It tugged at something in his throat and whisked Joey Burge into
his vision for a moment or two. Still, he didn't mind Reed; he liked
Reed. But Cal! The man was always genial and good humored; he gave no
occasion for a quarrel, but he was deep, deep. There was something
behind all this.

On Sunday--the Sunday after his walk with Jerry Chansley--Gander had a
hint of what that something might be. Minnie was home for the week-end,
and in the sunny morning she spoke with Gander in the yard.

"Well, that's a change," she remarked, with undisguised approval.
"Begins to look civilized."

"Oho!" said Gander to himself, recalling how often Minnie had protested
against the haphazard methods of the farm. He had set it down to
something in her which he called pride--a reprehensible kind of pride,
which concerned itself with appearances, and with what people might
think. This fellow Cal was like that, too; shaving in the middle of the
week, and washing before every meal. And Cal had brought Minnie out from
town the night before in his rickety Ford. The two were as thick as
thieves already....

But Gander's attention, for the time at any rate, was almost immediately
demanded by another and more surprising development. His missing brother
came home! As unheralded as he had gone, young Jackson Stake returned
one Saturday morning in June. He had caught a ride from Plainville as
far as the road which led into the Stake homestead; then he turned in
along the trail through the poplar groves, following twists and turns
unchanged through all the years of his absence. Only, the trees were
taller, the dapple of leaf-shadows on the trail was darker, the ruts
were a little deeper than when, as a youth of eighteen, he last had
walked that road before. When he entered the farmyard he was struck with
a sense of neatness and prosperity; the Dodge car, the portable
granaries, the orderly arrangement of the machinery and vehicles
arrested his attention.

"Looks as if they had struggled along without me, after a fashion,"
Jackie commented to himself as he took in the surroundings. "Wonder if
the old man'll fall on my neck, and kick me."

Gander was tinkering with something about the pump under the windmill
when he saw a stranger approaching; a tall, dark man of thirty or
thereabouts, stouter than Gander and dressed in a suit that still gave
signs of good material. He wore a celluloid collar and a tie pierced
with a cheap but resplendent pin. Over his arm hung a raincoat, but he
apparently was unburdened by any other baggage.

"Lookin' for a job, or a hand-out," Gander remarked to himself. Then,
aloud, and politely enough----

"Well, how's she goin'?"

The stranger regarded him for a moment without reply. He had picked up
some local information from his driver on the way from Plainville, and
had no doubt that this tall young man was Gander, the direct descendant
of his little brother Bill. He took a chance:

"Well, Gander, I see you don't know me. I'm the prodigal son."

Gander studied him with narrowing eyes.

"So you're Jackie," he said, at length. "I thought you had been killed
in the war."

"That was a good idea," said Jackie. "A fine idea. But, you see, it
didn't happen--to either of us."

The tone in which he said "To either of us" did not escape Gander's
notice, but he had no immediate answer.

"Well, here I am," Jackie continued. "Your long-lost brother, and what
are we going to do about it?"

"You can settle that with Dad," said Gander, curtly. "I didn't know he
had sent for you."

"Oh, you didn't? Well, neither did he. But--we'll see," and he went off
toward the house.

The return of Jackie was the last thing Gander had expected, and for a
number of reasons it annoyed him. It demolished the subterfuge behind
which his self-respect had taken some protection, that the first-born of
the family had been a sacrifice to the war. He resented the ready sneer
which Jackie had thrown at his own neglect to become a war-time
casualty. Besides, he disliked Jackie. In childhood Gander had been the
younger son, to be cuffed and ordered about by his big brother, and it
was against his nature to take orders. And he was deeply attached to his
father. Now Jackie would try to worm in between----

"He'll come back now an' sponge on Dad," said Gander, bitterly. "Try to
get into his good graces, but it was me that stuck to him when he needed
help. Dad'll not forget that."

He took some comfort from the confident hope that his father would be
true to him against the devices of his elder brother. In that moment the
possible rivalry of Calvin Beach became a very secondary matter. Jackie
was his own flesh and blood, his father's natural heir.

The inheritance of the farm, until that moment, never had crossed
Gander's mind. He looked upon the farm as the common possession of his
father and himself, with Hamilton, Minnie, and his mother holding
secondary interests. That his father would one day die was a contingency
upon which he never had dwelt. Jackie's unexpected return put a new face
on the whole situation. For the first time Gander began to realize that
his father was growing old. It might not be so many years----

The bitterness of these reflections, and of the sinister motives which
he attributed to Jackie, so enveloped Gander that he found it hard to
treat his brother with any degree of civility, and there were times when
he was near bringing disgrace upon the family by a physical outburst. He
held his young blood in check on his father's account.

There was one ray of hope. Jackson, senior, had laid down the law that
if Jackie remained he must do his share of work on the farm. During the
summer season work was not pressing, and was left mainly to Grit and
Cal, but harvest would be a time of hard labor and long hours, with
Jackson, senior, playing no favorites. Gander looked forward with some
confidence to his brother's disappearance about the time the stooking
would commence.

He was puzzled, however, by a friendship which had sprung up between Cal
and Jackie. They often were together, and once or twice he had surprised
them in deep conversation. Jackie also seemed to have taken a fancy to
Reed. As he thought these things over Gander came to the conclusion that
these three had somewhere known each other before. There was something
behind all this. Perhaps their meeting on the Stake farm was not such a
chance affair as it seemed.

Although he suspected the two of being involved in something that was
not apparent on the surface, Gander's attitude toward Cal was much more
friendly than toward his brother. Cal had recently become self-absorbed
and less genial than in the early days of his apprenticeship on the
farm, but his goodwill toward Gander was too obvious to be doubted.
Perhaps this was a reflection of his growing intimacy with Minnie, but
in any case it made him easy of approach on the matter that was
troubling Gander's mind.

He seized the opportunity one evening after supper as Cal hunted for a
chain to attach to his plough, now that he was busy with the
summer-fallow. Gander helped him explore among the weeds for some
minutes, then suddenly shot a question at him.

"How're you hittin' it off with this big brother o' mine?" he asked. "I
see you an' him together quite a bit."

It may have been his imagination, but Gander was quite sure that Cal was
startled by that question. His answer did not come so readily as usual,
and when he spoke he kept on hunting among the weeds, instead of looking
Gander in the face.

"Oh, all right," he said. "I really haven't seen very much of him."

Gander put that down against him. If it wasn't quite a lie, it wasn't
quite the truth. He had seen them together too much for that. It was
plain that Cal was holding something back.

"Ever see him before?" Gander persisted.

"No--never." There was no hesitation about this answer, and it left
Gander more mystified than before. He decided on a new tack.

"Jackie seems quite taken up with Reed, too," he remarked.

Cal's interest could not be feigned. He stopped his hunting and looked
Gander sharply in the face. "Do you see any sign of that?" he demanded.

"Oh, see 'em around together now an' then."

Then Cal came partly out of his shell. "I wish, Gander, you'd try and
keep Reed away from him, as much as you can, without saying anything
about it. Will you do that for me, like a good fellow? And don't say
anything about it, to anybody?"

More mystified than ever, Gander gave his promise.

"Sure, I'll do that, if I can. I like Reed. Fine kid. You know, Cal,
you've never told us about Reed. Who he is, or anythin'?"

"Haven't I?" said Cal, and again Gander doubted his sincerity. "Oh, I
guess it was Minnie I told. Well, there isn't much to say about it. He's
my sister's son. She's dead, and I've raised him since he was a little
baby."

"Father dead, too?" Gander persisted.

Cal's answer did not seem to come quite so readily. "Killed in the war,"
he said, shortly.

Gander turned these things over in his mind for a minute or two.
Then----

"But Reed would be quite a chunk of a boy before the war, and you say
you raised him since he was a little baby?"

Cal turned on him, almost angrily. "So I did. Gander, why are you
grilling me like this? Do you think I'm lying to you?"

"Oh, no. Nothin'. Jus' was wonderin' about the boy," said Gander, but
the incident left him more puzzled than ever.

So passed the days and weeks on the Stake farm; outwardly tranquil,
while the warm earth suckled the young crops, and Cal's black
parallelogram of summer-fallow widened with every day's labor. But
underneath was a sense of unrest, like a storm brooding in the heat of a
still afternoon. Suddenly the storm broke, lashing the fields, but
without clearing the atmosphere.

It was a Saturday morning, again, when Gander, feeding his horses in the
stable, noticed that Cal's team had been unattended. Big Jim was
whinnying in disgust and surprise before his empty manger.

"Ho, Grit!" he called. "Seen anythin' o' Cal?"

"No, I ain't," said Grit, as he came up and helped Gander and Big Jim
contemplate the absence of hay and oats.

"Never been late before," said Gander.

"Nope. He was out buzzin' somewhere las' night in that fly-trap o' his,
him an' the boy. Maybe slep' in."

"Well, let him sleep," said Gander, generously. "Grit, you feed up his
horses."

"Where's Cal an' Reed?" said Mrs. Stake, when their places were vacant
at the breakfast table.

All present looked at each other. "Saturday mornin'," said Jackson
Stake, with sudden inspiration. "No school, an' Reed's sleepin' in."

"That don't account for Cal," said Jackie.

"Sleepin' in, too, an' I don' blame him," the farmer retorted. "He does
more work in a day than you've done since you 'returned to the parental
roof,' as the Plainville _Progress_ had it."

But Mrs. Stake was not so readily satisfied. "Maybe he's sick," she
said. "He ain't been lookin' jus' the best lately, nor eatin' hearty at
all. Gander, go out an' see."

Gander gulped the few remaining spoonfuls of his porridge and then did
as he was directed. It was high morning, seven o'clock under a cloudless
sky, and if Gander had known Browning's great apostrophe it would have
stirred in his soul as he strode across the yard to Cal's granary. But
Gander's feelings had no outlet in poetry, and his reflections were to
the effect that there was but one cure for Cal's kind of sickness. "In
Plainville last night, I guess," he commented. "Up till all hours with
Minnie."

Finding the door of the granary closed, Gander confidently addressed the
wooden panels.

"Cal! Oh, Cal!" he shouted. "Seven o'clock. Hooraw!"

No answer.

Gander raised his voice. "Cal, you've slep' in! Roll out! It's seven
o'clock!" But there was neither voice nor sound from within.

With a sudden foreboding Gander opened the door. It revealed the room,
stark empty. Everything was gone except a little table Cal had built, a
lamp which he had borrowed from the house, and one or two trinkets not
worth moving.

Gander beheld the scene as though it were a tomb. Then, suddenly
recalling that he had not noticed the Ford in the yard, he rushed out
into the open air. The old car was gone.

It took him a moment to realize the situation. Cal gone! Reed gone! The
old Ford gone! Without a word! A sudden thought that perhaps the car had
broken down, and they had not returned from Plainville, had to be as
suddenly dismissed. The complete clearance of their effects from the
granary showed premeditation. He started toward the house, then turned
again to the granary. Perhaps he would find a clue.

He did. Secured under the lamp was an envelope addressed to Jackson
Stake, Sr. Without compunction Gander tore it open. It contained a small
sum of money, but not a word.

Gander replaced the money, folded the torn end of the envelope, and
slowly retraced his way to the house.

"Well, I guess we got a real mystery on our hands now," he announced, as
he stood silhouetted against the sunlight in the door. "They're gone.
Both of 'em."

"Gone!" The voices around the table joined in chorus. But Mrs. Stake
repeated, in a tone in which incredulity mingled with alarm, "Gone! Not
gone? Reed's not gone?"

It was young Jackson Stake who suddenly broke out in laughter. "Gone? Of
course they're gone. Birds of passage. What did you expect?"

His father silenced him with a bang of his great fist on the table.

"They're not gone!" he shouted. "Broke down, or somethin'. We'll be
hearin' from Cal on the 'phone any minute. Gander, get the Dodge ready
to go out for him."

"Well, my guess is as good as yours," said Jackie, "and I guess the next
time you hear Cal there'll be wings on him."

The old farmer opened his mouth as though to answer violently, then
suddenly dropped into a tone of wheedling curiosity.

"Say, you seem to know a lot about this," he addressed Jackie. "Let us
all into the secret."

"No secret," Jackie replied. "Simple enough. Cal got out when the
gettin' was good."

For a moment Gander attached no significance to Jackie's remark; then
suddenly his backbone tingled and the blood went rushing to his head.
His hand fell on Jackie's collar.

"Look here, you--you--" he hissed. "If you mean what I think you mean
I'll knock you so far it'll cost you a dollar to send a post card home."

"Oh, I heard that speech years ago," said Jackie. "You'll have to brush
up on your bright sayings, Gander."

"Here, cut it out!" said the farmer, who, for all his amiability, had
the rigidity of Gibraltar in a pinch. "Cut it out. I tell you they've
broke down somewhere an' 'll come buzzin' in here one o' these minutes
draggin' that peradventure o' theirs behind 'em."

Gander had now cooled down enough for reason. "I'd like to believe it,
Dad," he said, "but the facts is against you. Everythin's gone out o'
the granary, clean as your plate. But he left this."

He handed his father the envelope, and the old man counted the money
slowly, as though working his way out of a puzzle.

"Well, I guess he's gone," he said at length, in a sort of stunned
voice. "I had paid him in advance a little on his wages, an' this looks
like the difference. I guess he's gone. There ain't nothin' missin'?"

In the same breath he apologized for that reflection on Cal's honesty.
"Of course not," he answered himself. "Nothin' crooked about Cal. If
there was he wouldn't ha' left the change.... But why did he go, without
a word?"

Mrs. Stake, grimly pacing between the table and the stove, was almost in
tears. "My little boy, my poor little boy!" she kept repeating.

"I'll let you into a secret," said her husband. "Cal an' Minnie had come
to an understandin'. He spoke to me about it, an' I wasn't makin' no
kick----"

"Do you call that a secret?" Jackie interrupted. "Everybody knew that."

His father fixed him in a gaze of scorn. "Oh, did they? Say, you seem to
know so much, why not tell us all about it?"

"Well, I suggested one answer. Perhaps----"

But Gander had had an idea, and was struggling with his Adam's apple.

"What you doin', Gander?" Jackson Stake asked him. "Swallowin' a
tonsil?"

"I'm goin' to Plainville," said Gander, with decision. "Right off. But
everybody leave the telephone alone. We don' want this peddled over the
country until we know the facts."

"That's good sense," his father agreed. "No 'phonin'. An' you beat it
into town an' see what Minnie knows about it."

"If he can find her," young Jackson added.




CHAPTER TWENTY


For all his confidence in Minnie, Gander had been seized with sudden
misgivings. In spite of its repugnance--or, perhaps, because of
it--Jackie's suggestion was infecting his thought. Suppose--He refused
to suppose. With his mind in a turmoil he rushed the car into the yard,
down the trail which wound through the poplar groves, and away dragging
a cloud of dust along the highroad to Plainville. Into the sleepy
prairie town he swept in disregard of the painted notice which
threatened vengeance on all who exceeded fifteen miles per hour, and
brought his car up in front of the office of Bradshaw & Tonnerfeldt.
Without knocking he flung open the door and found Minnie taking
dictation from Mr. Bradshaw.

"Why, Gander! What's wrong?" the girl cried, caught by her brother's
excited appearance.

So she was here, anyway. She knew nothing about it. That might be
good--or bad.

"Maybe nothin'," he answered her, trying to control his agitation.
"Maybe a good deal. Can I talk to you a minute, Minn?"

Mr. Bradshaw sent them into his private office, and there Gander told
her of Cal's disappearance.

Minnie went white with the impact of the news. "Oh, Gander, it can't
be!" she cried. "Surely--he must have gone only on some little trip;
he'll be back by night; perhaps he's back now. He wouldn't go--he
couldn't go--altogether--without leaving a word!"

The girl's limbs were trembling under her as she slowly sank into a
chair. Gander was not reassured by his sister's distress, but his
loyalty to her revived in her presence. He essayed some clumsy words of
comfort, while an unanswered question was battering at his heart.

Presently Mr. Bradshaw announced through the door that Miss Stake was
wanted on the telephone. She pulled herself together and hurried to her
desk. "This will be news," she had said to Gander.

It was. It was young Jackson on the line, with the information that
Annie Frawdic, the school teacher at Willow Green, also had disappeared.
It seemed Cal had been visiting at Ernton's, where Annie boarded, the
previous evening. That much had been established. Annie had told Mrs.
Ernton she expected friends to call for her in the night. In the morning
she was gone. Straight case----

"I don't believe--I don't believe--" was all Minnie could fight back
into the telephone. Then suddenly the room swam, something smashed, and
the next she knew was the feel of water on her face.

"She's coming to; she'll be all right," she heard Mr. Bradshaw's
reassuring voice. Then she began to know that she was lying across a
desk, with her head downwards, resting on a chair. She struggled into a
more dignified position.

"I'm all right," she protested. "I'm all right. Gander, what has
happened? Oh!" With a stab consciousness came back upon her.

"I don't believe it," she murmured again. She walked over to a window,
and for a moment her eyes fled across the undulating prairies, now rich
in the midsummer green of their growing crops. She did not believe that
Cal had deserted her. There would be an explanation; she would hear
from him soon. And in any case she must play the game. Minnie had
quality in her; she was a Stake. Her fair skin, her bronze hair, the
curves of her lovely figure, were not all she had inherited from her
father's side. She had his amiability, his cheerfulness of disposition,
but also she had that rigidity of Gibraltar in the face of storm.

Without seeing the prairies, heaving green into their absorption with
the infinite blue beyond, Minnie feasted upon them and restored her
soul. Presently she walked with steady step back to her desk, and took
up her note-book and pencil.

"I am ready, Mr. Bradshaw," she said. "Thank you, Gander, for coming in.
You're a dear boy. And give them all my love at home."

Her composure, now that the shock was over, did much to set Gander at
ease, and, as there was nothing else to do, he withdrew from the office
of Bradshaw & Tonnerfeldt and drove, more soberly, home again.

But before leaving the town, from force of habit he called at the post
office for the mail. There were one or two papers, a circular offering a
bargain in farm paint, and a little envelope. He was in the act of
stuffing all into his pocket when the address on the envelope caught his
attention. "Mr. Gander Stake," it read, "Plainville, Manitoba."

Gander spelled it out, over and over again, driving slowly as he held
the envelope between this thumb and the steering-wheel. A letter was an
unheard-of incident in his life. His first impulse was to connect it
with Cal, but his instinct gave him better guidance. This letter was not
from Cal.

He drove until he was well out of town; then, in a spot where there was
little traffic on the road, he stopped. He opened the envelope
carefully with his knife, as though afraid he might hurt something
inside, and drew forth a single folded sheet of note paper. The hand was
fine and regular, and even Gander found it not very hard to read:

"Dear Gander--You were very rude, and I should not write you at all, but
I just want you to know that my offer stands. When you begin to feel how
much you need--all I told you about--come, and bring this letter. It
will put you in line for a job. J. C."

J. C. Jo Claus! The name darted into Gander's consciousness. Strange he
had not noticed the coincidence before!

"Well, I ain't out of a job," he said, tossing the letter from the car.
But a hundred yards further on he stopped, went back, and picked it up
again. A second time he read it, thinking how wonderful it must be to be
able to write so much like a copybook. He noticed now a faint perfume
from the sheet. After all, it was the first real letter ever he had had.
Feeling foolish and guilty he tucked it away in the inside pocket of his
coat.

When he was almost home Gander delivered himself of a reflection. "Old
Bill was right," he said. "You have to treat 'em rough."

When Gander reached home it was to report that Minnie had known nothing
at all of Cal's disappearance. It had been a blow to her, but she had
pulled herself together and gone back to work. "Minnie's a brick," said
Gander. "She's got as much sand in her as a stucco house."

The theory advanced by Jackie that Cal had gone away with Annie Frawdic,
the school teacher, was not readily accepted, and as the day wore on
evidence accumulated against it. True, there had been some indications
of friendship between Annie and Cal, but Annie was known to be somewhat
prodigal with her affections. It also was true that Cal had been at
Ernton's the night before, and had sat late with Annie in the maple
grove which protects the buildings from the west, while Reed and Jimmie
Ernton played that they were Indians encamped about the smudge-fire in
the yard. But Jimmie was quite positive in his testimony that Cal and
Reed eventually went home.

That evening Gander determined to drive over to Ernton's and make some
inquiries on his own account, but where the Ernton road turns in from
the highway his intention weakened, and he continued on a purposeless
course through the farming district to the southeast of Willow Green.
The long twilight was full of the odor of growing wheat; the tinkle of a
cow-bell, or the sound of voices, came up from amazing distances as
though it were near at hand. Mother Wild Duck, piloting her fluffy
brood, paused on the white surface of a prairie pond to watch the car
speed by.

But Gander had no thought for any of these things. He was concerned
about Cal, and about Minnie. He was concerned about that intangible
sense of ill-omen which had brooded over the Stake homestead, and of
which to-day's events had been the first fruition. How much did Jackie
know? There was something between them. And Reed? He remembered his
mother's pacing up and down, with a cry of bereavement on her lips, "My
little boy--my little boy."

There was also the letter to think about. He had been telling himself
that he had forgotten Jerry Chansley. He had lost his head over her for
a little while, but he had "taken it out on her"--that was how he
justified his outrageous behavior--and it was all over. And now came the
letter, to stir within him again something he did not understand. At
first he had been disposed to resent the idea of being offered a "job"
by a girl. But as he wound over the still prairies in the light of the
long summer evening he realized that it was more than that.

"She wants me near her," he said at last. "That's it."

And even as he reached this comfortable conclusion his thoughts would
turn again to Josephine Burge. Since her marriage to Dick he really had
been trying to dismiss her from his mind; Gander belonged to the old
school to whom marriage still is marriage. Only--she wouldn't go! He
told himself he was through with Jo; told himself so definitely that he
avoided her apparent efforts of conversation when they met at Willow
Green. No use keeping the old fire burning when its heat gave torture
instead of warmth. And he had told himself that the flame was stamped
out, only in a moment like this to find it burst up again within him. It
is in the hour of crises that we return to our fundamentals.

The long twilight had settled into summer darkness when Gander turned
his car toward home. He was humming along the country roads, solacing
his soul with the pleasant purr of machinery, and as his engine hummed
he thought of Jo--a little--as he had done in the days gone by. He
wondered how she was getting along with Dick, and whether she was,
really, as happy as she seemed. It was neighborhood news that Dick was
in a bad way with his lungs. Gander had heard the opinion casually
expressed that another winter would finish Dick, but never had stopped
to think just what significance that fact might have for him. He
sometimes wondered how, in his precarious health, Dick kept the farm
going at all.

"I might run over an' give him a few days' work, now that we ain't so
busy," said Gander to himself, and the thought came out of a heart clean
of any ulterior motive. "Ought to give him a hand, I guess. He's like he
is--on my account."

It was the first time Gander had admitted so much. Never until to-night
had he held himself to answer for doing less than his share in the great
struggle that had made of Dick a piece of wreckage and had sent Tommy
Burge and Walter Peters and a million others headlong into the unknown.
If it were true that they had

    "Bade the world 'Good Morning'
    When the world had said 'Good Night'"

Gander knew nothing of it; all he knew was they were dead. But that
seemed not so very dreadful now; not so very, very dreadful. It was, at
least, a way of escape. What was the use of living without--without----

"Yes, I'll have to go over an' give him a lift," said Gander. "Should
ha' done it long ago."

He felt better for this resolution and was almost happy again. Suddenly
his headlights cut across the figure of a woman on the road. She stepped
aside to let him pass, but not quite out of the circle of light. It
limned her face against the darkness, and he saw--Jo Claus!

Gander brought his car to a stop a few feet beyond her. "Come on, Jo;
have a lift?" he called back.

"Oh, it's you, Gander?" he heard her say. He had backed up; he had
opened the door; she was stepping in beside him.

"Thanks, Gander; that's good of you," she said. "But what's the matter?
You're out of your beat a little, are you not, to-night?"

He could not see her so well now that she was seated beside him, but her
voice was the same, only there was a sadness in it, a sort of
resignation, which he had not known before. It touched his pity. Things
were not so good with Jo. Her appearance of happiness at Willow Green
was a mask, a camouflage----

"Oh, jus' rovin' around," he tried to explain. "Nowhere in partic'lar.
In fact--where am I?"

"About half way between Martin Burge's and the place that I call home,"
she told him.

Yes, Gander had his bearings, now. He had not been lost. He knew the
country so well that he travelled it subconsciously. Now why had she
said "The place that I call home?"

"I was just walking across," she continued, "when you happened along."
He knew that she had turned to look at him in the darkness.

They could not be more than a few hundred yards from her door. They
would be there in a minute. Gander reached a quick resolution.

"Jo," he said, "will you go for a ride with me? I want to talk to you."

She hesitated. "Not far, Gander," she conceded. "Dick will be expecting
me."

"I'll come back whenever you say," he promised, and took a cross-road
running south.

For some distance they spun along without speech. Gander was conscious
of a thrill of adventure; a sense of impropriety that was very enticing,
especially as he knew, and Jo knew, that it was quite all right. Jo
trusted him; after all, Jo trusted him. That was what made him so very
happy. But what would she think if she knew--about that other J. C.?

"Haven' seen much of you, lately, Jo," he ventured, when it became
apparent that she would wait for him to speak.

"No. Often wished you would come over, Gander. Dick would be glad to see
you."

"Strange thing, Jo,"--he was laughing now, with happiness--"strange
thing, but I was jus' thinkin' o' that, when I caught up on you, there.
Had jus' said to myself, 'Must go over an' give Dick a few days' help
with a team.'"

Her hand found his arm, and although the pressure was but a
featherweight it went tingling to his fingertips.

"That would be very kind of you," she said. "Only, I don't know--Dick
might not like it. No"--she seemed at once to have sensed his
recoil--"not that. But Dick is proud. He won't admit defeat. Oh, Gander,
you have no idea of the bravery of that boy!"

This was not exactly what he had expected. "He has a good booster in his
little wife," he remarked.

"He should have. He's a good boy. Fighting away on the farm, when he
should be in bed, or away somewhere on a holiday, camping out, perhaps,
under the green boughs--Oh, I know what he needs, Gander. And I can't
give it to him."

Gander's inherent generosity surged within him. "Jo, can I help? I'm not
much of a cashier, but Dad's got some kale, an' he'd come through if I
asked him."

The pressure of her hand tightened a little. "That's kind of you again.
Very kind, indeed, Gander--after--after all--" She hesitated, and he
knew what was in her mind. "But, you see, that would be like helping
with the team. He wouldn't have it. He would call that defeat, and he
won't admit defeat."

They ran on in silence, each busy with thoughts which remained
unexpressed. Presently she motioned that they turn toward home. "Dick
will be waiting for me," she said.

It was not until he had turned his car that the day's events in the
Stake household crushed back into Gander's mind. For half an hour the
stimulating presence of Jo Burge had swept him clear of that perplexing
problem. Should he tell Jo? Yes! She must learn of it, anyway; why not
from his own lips? So he told her briefly of Cal's disappearance.

"I don' know what to make of it, Jo," he concluded. "We always used Cal
well, and there ain't any reason--there shouldn' be any reason--for
this."

"I wouldn't worry," said Jo, and he was struck by the maturity with
which she spoke. This was no longer the child of his school days, the
girl of his adolescence; this, beside him, was a woman, schooled in the
responsibilities of the world; accustomed to facing difficulties without
panic. She seemed to mother him now. "I wouldn't worry," she said. "He's
likely one of these rovers; he roved in, and he roved out again. After
all, don't you think, Gander, they are the wise people? Here we are, you

and I, tied down to our farms; it doesn't matter how sick we get of it,
there's the unending routine. But Cal! He kisses his fingers to it, and
flits away in the night!"

She sighed, and Gander took an unpremeditated plunge. "Would you--flit
away like that, too--Jo, if you could?"

"If I could, perhaps. But I can't. I've got Dick. He needs me. Oh,
Gander, you've no idea how much he needs me! So, you see, I can't."

She answered as though Gander had been urging such a course upon her.
And he hadn't. He had merely asked a question. Was it her own heart she
was answering? Gander wondered, but had not the courage to inquire.

He reverted to the other matter in his mind.

"I'd like to believe what you say, about Cal, but I'm not so sure. The
fact is, Jo, he an' Minnie have been pretty good friends. I guess they
were plannin' to make a match of it. He told Dad as much. An' now he
lights out without a word to Minn; she didn' know a thing about it."

"Oh, I'm so sorry!" said Jo. "Minnie's a fine girl, and this will hit
her hard. But she'll get over it. We all do. Over everything."

"Do we?"

"Yes." She said the word with finality, as though all things were
settled.

They were nearing Jo's home, and Gander felt that he had not managed to
make clear his real misgivings. But how to make them clearer he did not
know.

"So you think there's nothin' strange about Cal lightin' out?" he
blundered. "Jus' get engaged to a girl an' then beat it? You think
there's nothin'--nothin'--suspicious--about that?"

"Suspicious? It's not things that are suspicious, Gander, nor actions;
it's people. And that depends on the kind of person you are. Now, I'm
not suspicious. If I were perhaps I wouldn't have gone with you for a
drive, Gander. A suspicious person might----"

"I know what you're thinkin'. You're thinkin' about what a--what a fool
I made o' myself, that day. Jo, I'm awful sorry. I've been sorry ever
since."

"I know." Her words were tender and quiet, as though nothing now could
make any difference between them. "And for a while I was frightened of
you, but I'm not--any more. And I wouldn't worry over Cal and Minnie.
Perhaps he got engaged without intending to; just sort o' stumbled into
it, and took the first chance to stumble out again. It's not very
heroic, but it's quite natural. And maybe, after he's thought it over
for a few days, he'll change his mind again. We do that kind of thing,
Gander. Look out you don't find Cal back, Ford and boy and all, in your
farmyard one of these mornings!"

They were now stopped at Jo's gate, and there seemed nothing more to be
said.

"Won't you come in?" she asked him, when they had sat a minute or two
without speaking. "Dick will be glad to see you."

"No, not to-night, I guess. Maybe some other time."

"All right, Gander. Any time. And thanks so much for the ride--and the
conversation."

She gave him her hand, and he held it a moment, as an old friend. Then
she disappeared up the path that led to her house.

Gander drove slowly home, a mixture of emotions. Jo had changed so much,
and yet, in some ways, not at all. She had taken on responsibilities,
with her invalid husband and all the work of the farm. He had noticed
that her hand was as hard as his; not like Minnie's, or Jerry's. But how
wise she was! She had set his mind at rest, and filled his heart with a
peace it had not known for years.

"And she's so good to Dick," Gander commented, as he rehearsed their
conversation while he guided his car along the prairie trails back to
the Stake homestead. "She's a reg'lar mother to him."

A mother! Yes, that was what she was. Caring for her sick boy. But a
wife? Gander wondered.




CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE


The days went by without any word of Cal or Reed. The summer-fallowing
on the Stake farm was finished, and Gander and Grit, Hamilton, and
Jackson Stake were now busy in the fragrant hay. Young Jackson still
stayed about the farm but took little part in its labor; in spite of the
conditions laid down by his father he spent most of his time fishing in
the lake, shooting gophers, or roaming over the prairie. Once or twice
he drove the Dodge into Plainville and brought Minnie home for her
week-end visits on the farm. The girl seemed in need of these holidays;
she was paler than Gander could remember having seen her, and her brave
pretence of light-heartedness was more pathetic than frank dejection.

Then suddenly one day in mid-week she came tearing home in a hired
automobile. Gander knew nothing about it until he returned to the house
at noon, when he found his father and mother in a state of unusual
excitement. Mrs. Stake's black eyes had a flash of moisture in them, and
there was a nervous spring in her step as she walked the endless
treadmill between the table and the stove.

"Well, there's word o' Cal," said the old farmer, who never for a moment
had lost faith in his runaway hired man. "Minnie's had a telegram."

"An' Reed's sick--that's why," his wife added. She was caught between
concern over the boy's illness and relief that at last something
definite had been learned.

"Yes, an' Minnie's gone to look after him; Jackie's took her in the
car."

By degrees it came out that Minnie had had a telegram from Cal, dated
from somewhere in Saskatchewan, saying that Reed was dangerously ill and
appealing to her for help. The train connections were bad, and Jackie
had volunteered to drive her out.

"That ain't like our son an' heir," said Gander. "There's more in this
than'll come off with shavin'."

"Well, it's one good turn he done, so let him have the credit," his
father retorted.

"Maybe when Reed's well enough to move they'll all be back," ventured
Mrs. Stake. "We'll give him a room upstairs----"

"But why did they light out?" Gander wanted to know. "An' so far?
Couldn' they get sick nearer home?"

"Minnie'll find all that out, don' you fear," Jackson Stake assured him.
"The mystery is about to be eloocidated, as the Plainville _Progress_
would say."

In a few days came a brief note from Minnie with the news that they had
found Cal and Reed, and the boy was down with typhoid fever. "It's a
case of nursing," she said, "and I am doing the best I can." Other notes
followed from time to time, reporting Reed's progress toward recovery,
but without a word of explanation of Cal's strange behavior.

"For a girl that's got an eddication Minnie can take longer to say less
than anybody I know," Gander grumbled. "This mystery is clearin' up like
the beginnin' of a steady rain."

But at length came a letter from Minnie; a real letter, with news. Mrs.
Stake read it to her assembled family, between the fried pork and the
raisin pie one day at noon, while the harvest stood waiting in the
fields.

"My dear Mother," she began, then paused to wipe her glasses with her
apron, in a fruitless effort to remove a mist that had gathered
somewhere else. "My dear Mother--At last I have a breathing spell and,
fortunately, note paper, which Cal has just brought from town. Now if I
had my typewriter you might expect a real epistle. It is a hardship to
have to write with two fingers after you have learned to pound it out
with ten.

"Picture me, if you can, in the country home of a certain Mr. Mason, who
is enjoying a holiday somewhere in the East, and who is expected back
shortly. Mr. Mason's residence is about the size of Cal's old granary,
with a low roof that lets in the heat in daytime, when you don't want
it, and lets it out at night, when it wouldn't go amiss. Alongside of me
is Reed, bundled up in an easy chair which Cal made out of the staves of
an old barrel. He's thin and white--Reed, I mean--but out of danger,
thanks to a competent nurse, so Dr. Thompson says. He has had a racket,
poor little chap, but he's worth all the fight we've made for him. All
the time now he is wondering when we are going back to see Grandma.
When he was delirious he would talk about no one but Grandma, and one
night he tried to sing that verse of yours about 'Borne on the night
winds, voices of yore come from that far-off shore.'"

Mrs. Stake coughed and wiped her glasses again. "I'll have to be gettin'
these glasses changed, Jackson," she said. "They don' seem to fit me
like they did." Then, resuming----

"When Cal came out here he fell in with this Mr. Mason, who wanted some
one to take charge of his farm for a few weeks, so Cal took the job. I
guess the water wasn't very good, and the first thing he knew Reed was
down with typhoid. So then he sent that telegram. This is a sparsely
settled district, and there was no chance of getting help nearer at
hand. When Jackie and I drove up we found Cal on the shady side of the
shanty--it's just a shanty--doing the family washing. He was a picture!
But the house was spotless--you remember how Cal used to keep his
granary----"

"Too much Cal in this," Gander interrupted. "Cal! Cal!----"

"California," Grit added, brilliantly.

"Well, what of it?" Jackson Stake demanded, impatiently. "Go on,
Mother."

"----used to keep his granary?--it was just like that. _Perhaps_ he was
glad to see us. But the first thing was to look after Reed, and that is
what I have been busy with, right until now.

"I suppose you are wondering when we will be back. Well, it all depends
on Mr. Mason. Cal cannot leave the stock, and besides, the crop is
coming in, and he'll have to start the binder in a day or two. It will
be some time, at any rate, before Reed is able to travel. And Jackie has
left us. He's a bird of passage, as you know, and one night, when Cal
was in town, Jackie said to me, 'I'm going to hit the trail again,' and
away he went. Cal followed him with the car, but Jackie beat him to The
Siding, where he boarded a freight train, and----"

"Then Minn an' Cal's up there alone," said Gander. "That ain't quite the
thing----"

"Shut up, Gander!" The interruption was from an unexpected quarter; the
silent Hamilton had spoken. "Minn's a nurse now, and a nurse can
do--most anything, and it's all right. I mean----"

"Wisdom from our young son," Gander retorted. "Who told you that? Elsie
Fyfe?"

"Well, what else is she goin' to do?" Jackson Stake wanted to know. "Get
up an' leave the little sick boy? If you got a nickel, Gander, for every
fool remark you could pay the national debt. Go on, Mother."

"----he boarded a freight train, and we haven't seen him since. But
we're hoping that by the time Mr. Mason is back Reed will be well enough
to move, and then, home we come! I guess I'll have to drive the Dodge
alone, or else we'll hitch the Ford behind."

"I bet they'll hitch the Ford behind," said Grit Wilson, with subtle
humor.

"Of course," Mrs. Stake continued reading, "we haven't all the
accommodation here that we could use, but we get along. Cal sleeps in
the old Ford, drawn up within calling distance in case he should be
needed. The other night it rained a downpour, and I know he was soaked,
although I offered him the hospitality of one end of the shack. In the
morning I told him he was very chivalrous----"

"Shiverous? What's that?" Grit inquired.

"From gettin' wet. Cold rain," Gander explained. "Go on, Mother."

"----and he said--well, I may as well tell you, Mother, that Cal and I
have come to a complete understanding. I hope you and Dad will be
pleased; it cannot be altogether a surprise to you."

Mrs. Stake laid down the letter and took off her glasses. "Minnie--it
seems like yesterday she was just a baby in my arms." The thin old face
began to twist, and Jackson Stake got up, blustering, from the table.

"Get off to the fields, you fellows!" he commanded. "Hangin' around like
the washin' on the line! 'S all right, Mother. They'll make as fine a
pair as ever--Get off, I tell you!"

"We haven't had our pie yet," Hamilton protested.

"For the soul or sake o' me, so you haven't!" Mrs. Stake exclaimed, as
she found safety from her emotions in serving fat wedges of raisin pie.
"I clean forgot."

There was a moment's pause from conversation as the pie disappeared
amazingly. Then Gander, gulping his last crumb, returned to the matter
on his mind.

"But she don' say why he went away," he reminded them. "The mystery's as
deep as ever...."

Bill Powers' threshing outfit was humming in the wheat-fields when Cal
and Minnie came back to Jackson Stake's. Reed was almost himself again;
a little wobbly, like a calf, as Gander said, but rapidly getting back
on his feet. Cal dropped into the work of the farm as though he never
had left, and Minnie returned to her typewriter in Plainville. But in
the late autumn Cal made negotiations for a strip of land down by the
lake, considered of little value because it would not grow wheat, and
commanded only a burst of scenery and a few acres of standing trees.
During the winter months he cut down and hauled logs to a spot which he
had cleared close to the beach, and there, in the early spring, he built
his bungalow, Jackson Stake and Gander lending a neighborly hand.

In May Cal and Minnie were married. Mrs. Stake's table groaned under the
wedding dinner, and the guests groaned around it before the feast was
finished. Then Cal and Minnie, with Reed in the back seat, took their
honeymoon trip in the old Ford along the rough timber trail which leads
from the Stake farm down to the lake. Hamilton had slipped out of the
company and gone down ahead, and when the bridal party arrived there was
a blazing fire in the boulder fireplace which almost filled one end of
the bungalow. But the boy had slipped away again, as quietly as before.
Slowly he tramped the trail back to the farm, thinking of Elsie Fyfe.

Gander was surprised to find how much he missed Cal, and Minnie, and
Reed. He doubted the possibility of anyone making a living by writing
for magazines, as Cal proposed to do, and had every expectation that
before long he would be back working on the farm for Jackson Stake. In
the meantime he found excuse as often as seemed reasonable to spend an
hour or two down at the bungalow.

In those days Cal and Minnie puzzled him a good deal. They were
admittedly fond of each other. To be admittedly fond of a member of
one's family had always been regarded by Gander Stake as a mark of
weakness. True, there had been moments, back in those war-ridden days,
when he had put his hand on his father's shoulder, but never for more
than a moment, and always shame-facedly. And Cal and Minnie were brazen
about it! Also, although the whole country was a-rush with seeding
operations, they lived in a disgracefully leisurely fashion, remaining
in bed until seven in the morning, and spending hours sitting by the
lake or rambling through the trees on the little estate. There were
times, it is true, when he found them at work--or at what they called
work--Cal dictating and Minnie pounding her typewriter, but these were
rare occasions; mostly they seemed to have nothing to do. They would sit
and look at the sunset on the lake with something in their eyes that
puzzled Gander beyond words.

Perhaps it was some of these things, or all of them, that turned
Gander's thoughts, in spite of himself, more and more toward Josephine
Claus. Jerry Chansley had become only a memory. He had not answered her
letter, partly through shyness, and partly because he was ashamed of his
bad writing, and she had not written to him again. But he knew now that
what he had seen in her for the moment had really been Josephine Claus;
always it was Jo--the same Jo. Jerry had been merely a brief deflection
in his constancy to Jo.

He had kept track of Dick during the winter; learned that he had had
rather a bad time of it. Much of the work of the farm was falling to Jo,
and it was known in the Willow Green district that Dick's father was
having to help out financially. Others in the community began to feel
that the responsibility lay partly on them as well. Among them Jackson
Stake.

"I hear that Dick Claus is behind a bit in his seedin'," he said one day
to Gander. "In fact, ain't gettin' much done but what others do for him.
We're pretty well through an' I was thinkin' you might give him a day or
two with a team an' drill."

Gander's heart thumped. It was what he had been thinking of all spring
and had not had the courage to mention. Gander tried to show no
enthusiasm.

"Do you suppose he would like that?" he asked, remembering what Jo had
told him. "Perhaps he'd think we were meddlin'----"

"Well, what if we are? He meddled for us--that's how he got his lungs
as full o' holes as last year's underwear. Now you hitch up to-morrow
mornin' an' go over an' meddle a little for him. An' take along a few
bushels o' seed, jus' in case he don' happen to have any ready."

Early next day Gander's four-horse team, hitched to a seed-drill, with a
wagon dragging behind, pulled into the yard on Dick Claus' farm. The
morning was warm and sunny, as is the habit toward the end of May, and
Gander was warm and sunny inside, too, albeit his Adam's apple was
performing gymnastics within the narrow limits of his thin neck, and he
had some misgivings as to how his visit would be received. Dick was
proud. Well, the Stakes were proud, too, after a fashion, and this was
their way of paying a debt.

As Gander was waiting in the yard, wondering how he should announce his
errand, Jo herself came up from the stables. She was carrying two pails
of milk; her head drooped forward, and her eyes were on the ground. She
was almost beside him before she was aware of his presence.

"Oh, Gander!" she exclaimed, when she saw him. "Where did you come from?
You gave me quite a start."

"Oh, jus' blew in with the weather," said Gander, nonchalantly. "Cows
seem to be doin' pretty well, Jo?"

"Not so bad, Gander. Well, they should, in May, if they're ever going
to. The cows and the hens--they're our mainstay, Gander."

"How about the crop? Fact is, Jo, I came over to give a little lift with
the seedin', if I can."

She had set down her pails and raised her head. The lines were
beginning to deepen about her mouth and eyes, and Jo was only
twenty-three--not more than twenty-four! It was yesterday that, in her
little calico dress, he had rescued her from prisoner's base! Something
tugged chokingly at Gander's throat. He had liked Jo, always, but this
was more than liking; this was--sympathy, he told himself. Her dress was
rough and drab, with a button missing at the neck; her hair was none too
tidy; her whole attire suggested haste and over-work. This was not the
Jo of the days he had known; not even the Jo of the afternoon church
services at Willow Green; this was the real Jo--Jo Claus, at home, at
work, with the responsibilities of her sick man and her profitless farm
dragging down upon her. Yet, under that white, fair skin were the same
little freckle spots shining through; the hair had its same old lustre;
her brave little smile was more bewitching than any coquetry.

"Jo!" Gander exclaimed, and there were worlds in his one word.

"I must see Dick," she answered him, hastily. "He has not been so
well--he is not able to do much about the farm. Father has put in most
of the crop, but, what with not having Tommy any more--" She left the
sentence unfinished and hurried to the house.

In a few minutes she came out again, and it was apparent that she had
herself in hand. "Dick isn't up yet," she said, casually, "and I haven't
got the house in shape for visitors. It'll be better at noon. But I told
him what you had come for, and he asked me to say it was a real
neighborly thing. There's no ploughing ready, but he thought you might
stubble-in some oats or barley at the low end of the farm. You'll find
seed in the granary----"

"I brought some oats with me, jus' in case you might be short."

"You shouldn't have done that, Gander. But you can keep track of the
bushels, and we'll pay you--when we can."

"I don' want no pay, Jo; I don' want no pay from you--or Dick." Gander
noticed that the horizon had suddenly gone blurry. How wonderful she
was!

"You'll be in for dinner at twelve?" she said, as he started his team.
"Dick will be able to see you then."

Gander had not thought of that. "Well, yes, I guess," he agreed.

All morning he worked in a strange intoxication. He told himself he was
glad to be able to do this for one who had suffered in the war. In his
heart he knew he was delighted to be serving Jo. And there was so much
that might be done! A glance about the farmyard had shown many spots
where a man's muscle and management were needed. It was a shame he had
not come sooner. He must make up for it. There would be
summer-fallowing, and haying----

The forenoon was gone before he knew it. Gander brought his horses into
the yard, watered, and stabled them. Then he went up to the house.

The ground floor of Dick's house consisted of a single room, which was
used for kitchen, dining, and general living purposes. At one end a
stairway led to the upper story. Jo was busy preparing dinner as
Gander's shadow fell across the door, but Dick rose from his chair and
welcomed him with his hand.

"This is good of you, Gander, old man; just like a Stake," he said.
Gander took his hand. It was slender and soft; not like Jo's. Dick was
even more frail than he had expected. Gander shook hands gently, as
though afraid of breaking something. Then Dick asked him if he wanted to
wash, and Jo hurried with a basin of hot water to a bench in a corner of
the room. With a deftness that was almost sleight-of-hand she whipped a
soiled towel from its nail and hung a clean one in its place.

The meal was rather difficult. It was so hard to find anything to talk
about. Dick was interested in the progress of seeding in the
neighborhood, but Gander's mind was whirling around two different
centres--Dick and Jo. He noted how she waited on him, and how he
accepted her services. There was tenderness between them, somewhat as
between Cal and Minnie; yet not quite the same. Gander's intuition
sensed the difference, but his mind was unable to analyze it.

After dinner Dick invited Gander to smoke, and began talking about the
old school days at Willow Green. He recalled many a prank of those happy
times; he seemed bent on making Gander feel again that they were just
schoolmates together. Meanwhile Jo worked with her dishes at the end of
the room; her body bent over a table, her back toward them. As Gander
glanced toward her he saw a hole in her stocking; it may have been the
shape of a silver dollar, and the white skin shining through....

"Remember the day I blew up the ink bottle?" Dick was saying. "I see the
marks on the ceiling yet, once in a while, when I get over to church.
Say--I've heard a few explosions since, but never anything that made
such consternation."

He laughed with the memory, then quickly drew a handkerchief and pressed
it to his lips. Jo, warned by instinct, was at his side in a moment. One
hand slipped around his head; the other drew the white cloth from his
fingers. As she folded it over Gander noticed a slight stain of red.

"Mustn't over-do yourself, Dick," she was saying. She was like a mother
brooding over him. "Perhaps you had better lie down again. Gander will
be back in the evening. Then you can talk."

"I'm all right now," he insisted, but weakly enough. "Gets me once in a
while, Gander. Some day--Oh, I'd be all right if I could get about a
little. I'm very useless, Gander. Just a load on--everybody."

"Hush, Dick," she murmured. "You mustn't say that."

And Gander, awkwardly remarking that by this time his horses must have
finished feeding, got up and resumed his work at the lower end of the
farm.




CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO


For three days Gander worked on the Claus farm, until he had finished
"stubbling-in" all the land that was suitable to that treatment. These
days gave him time to observe Dick and Jo, and to evolve in his slow
mind a conclusion that seemed inescapable. Jo was mothering Dick; she
was giving her life to Dick; but she liked to have Gander about the
farm!

If he had doubt in the matter it was Jo herself who set it at rest. On
the third afternoon, as he was nearing the end of his job, he saw her
coming across the fields. She was waiting for him at the end of his row
when his horses came swinging up, their great heads nodding, their
harness straining with the drag of the heavy drill.

He went over to where she stood in the shade of a clump of willows. She
seemed flushed a little, perhaps with her walk across the fields, and
with the weight of a basket which she had set down at her feet. But her
hair was drawn neatly beneath her hat; her dress, although cheap, was
fresh from the ironing-board, and there was something like a smile on
her wistful, troubled lips.

"It's pretty warm for May," she said, "and I thought you might like a
cool drink, and a sandwich or two."

"You shouldn' have bothered, Jo," he protested. "I was all right."

Her eyes looked full in his. "You're not bothering at all, are you?" she
demanded. She motioned to the grass and they sat down together. She
poured him cold water from a bottle and fed him thick sandwiches of
bread and ham. Gander remembered a time she had brought him water, years
ago, and his face still stung with that recollection.

Gander did not dally over his food. With him even such a lunch as this
was to be taken seriously and with despatch. When he had finished he
stretched himself approvingly.

"That's good, Jo," he commended. "Puts a little pep in a fellow in the
middle of the afternoon. Now I'll get along."

"You'll finish easily to-night, won't you?"

Gander measured the unseeded distance with his eye. "Yep. Ought to make
it in a couple o' hours."

"Then what's the hurry? I mean," she added, confusedly, "you can stay
and chat a minute?"

He settled back on the grass. "Yes, if you like."

Her hand fell on his arm. "I just want to tell you, Gander, how much
we--how much I--appreciate what you are doing for us. You've been a real
friend."

"Oh, that's nothin'. Anyway, it was Dad that sent me."

"But you weren't hard to send, were you, Gander?"

She was looking into his face, and there was no misunderstanding. Her
hand had slipped down to his and he clasped it in his palm.

"No, Jo," he said. "I'm not hard to send--where you are."

They sat for a minute in silence, gazing across the green prairies into
an infinite sky where puffs of white cloud floated like swans on a
transparent sea.

Then said Gander, swallowing hard: "I thought, Jo, you wouldn' ever
want me to come near you again, after what--after I'd been--such a
fool."

Her fingers tightened a little on his. "We're all fools, sometimes," she
answered.

Then he took a great plunge. "Do you mean, Jo, that if you had
everythin' to do over again, you'd do it diff'rent?"

She waited a minute, and when she spoke she seemed to choose her words
slowly and carefully. "I'm not saying that, Gander. I don't suppose we
ever know what we really would have done if we hadn't done what we did,
if you understand. But Dick is a good boy, and I--I----"

"Do you love him, Jo?"

"He's my husband, and I love him, and will serve him--to the end."

There was a sadness in those last words which stirred all of Gander's
latent sympathy. She would serve him--to the end. Jo would do that,
because she was faithful and true. But love? Gander was not so sure.

"Can't anythin' be done for him?" he asked. "Couldn' we--is there
nothin' more that we can do?"

She shook her head. "He could go to one of those Government hospitals,"
she said, "but he won't. Says it wouldn't really make any difference,
and he wants to stay at home and help with the farm, although this
spring--well, you can see for yourself. He worries, too, on my account."

She turned her head from Gander now, and he, with a lump in his throat,
waited for her to speak again.

"I don't want you to misunderstand me, Gander," she went on. "I said
we're all sometimes fools, but what I've done I've done. And I won't go
back on him, Gander, ever."

She turned toward him again, and Gander saw how bravely she was fighting
the tremble in her lip. "I won't go back on him," she repeated, as
though in self-defence. Then for one moment her fortitude gave way. "But
oh, Gander," she cried, "I made a mistake!"

Tears were welling in her eyes, and Gander felt his own head swimming.
He would have comforted her in his arms, but she drew gently away. "No,
no. Gander, I have said too much. I didn't mean----"

"You see," she went on again, "he has done so much. He has made such a
sacrifice. For you, for me, for all of us, Gander. For you, Gander--have
you thought of that?"

"Yes, Jo; yes, I have."

"Of course," she continued, more cheerfully, "he has a pension for
partial disability. Might have had more, if he had pressed for it, but
Dick has always made light of his trouble. With his allowance, and what
we are able to do on the farm, and what some of our friends"--here she
glanced into Gander's face a moment--"do for us, we get along."

They sat together in silence for some minutes, each with many thoughts
but without words. Then she brushed a few crumbs from her dress, took
the basket in her hand, and arose to her feet.

"Must be getting back, Gander," she explained. "Good-bye."

"Good-bye, Jo." He said it solemnly, as though they were parting for the
last time, and turned to his seeder.

When he had finished the field Gander drove straight home, without
stopping at the house. He did not want to be embarrassed by Dick's
thanks. Besides, he was wrestling with an idea in his mind.

He took the first opportunity to consult Cal about it. He found him down
by the lake, thumping on Minnie's typewriter, which he had set up in the
shade of a cottonwood tree.

"Hello, Gander!" Cal called cheerily. "I'm learning to ride this
velocipede myself. Can you read that?" He drew a sheet from the machine,
and Gander puzzled over it for a moment.

"Looks a good bit like a code, I admit," said Cal, "But Minnie is
getting able to follow it in places. As a matter of fact, you may not
know it, but that is a very learned article which I am writing for a
magazine on The Industrial Assimilation of the Ex-Soldier. That's a good
title, Gander, and I expect to get the price of an acre of wheat out of
it."

"Never could understand how you manage to get paid for--words," Gander
confessed, frankly. "But I've jus' come to swap a few with you myself.
Somethin' along the line of that--whatever it was you said."

"Yes?" said Cal, curiously. It was not often that Gander came to consult
him.

"You know Dick Claus?" Gander began. "Him that got his lungs all busted
up in the war?"

"I've heard of him," said Cal. "Trying to work a farm, under
difficulties, isn't he?"

"Yep. Fact is, I've been helpin' him out with a little late seedin' for
the last day or two. He's pretty well up against it, Cal. Not able to
carry on. I was--that is--I was wonderin' if we couldn' do somethin'
about it."

Blushing for his generous thought, Gander seated himself on a stump
beside Cal's tree and got out his pocket knife to whittle. The shavings
curling from a dry branch restored his confidence, and he went on:

"I've been helpin' him out for a day or two, an' kind o' gettin' the lie
o' the land. Went to school with Dick, an' with his wife. Jo Burge she
use' to be." He paused. Even the mention of her name was delicious on
his tongue. "Well, he's goin' to snuff out one o' these times, an' I
thought maybe we could make it as easy for him as possible."

"You think he can't pull through? Why doesn't he go to a sanitorium?
There are places where he could have special attention for his trouble.
I don't know how much they could do for him, but it would be worth
trying."

"He won't go. Thinks it's no use, an' besides, he won't leave Jo."

Cal puckered his brow. "What do you suggest?"

"I'm not much of a suggester, Cal, but I got the idea that maybe if he
was down here by the lake, where things are pleasant an' quiet, an' away
from the worry of the farm, it might go easier with him. I was wonderin'
if we couldn' arrange that, Cal?"

Cal turned the idea over in his mind for a minute. "Maybe," he said.
"What about his wife? Would she come, too?"

"No, I suppose she'd want to stay on the farm. Pretty near have to, to
keep things goin'. But she could run down here every little while----"

Cal looked at Gander quizzically, and Gander wondered how much he knew,
or suspected. His answer gave no light on that question.

"It's up to us to do what we can," Cal continued, "and I suppose it
could be managed. Minnie's a real little nurse, let me tell you, and if
we could get Dick away from his worries it might do him more good than
you imagine--more good than you imagine." Gander did not like that
repetition, but Cal went on briskly, "I'll talk it over with Minnie and
see what can be done about it."

The outcome was that Cal and Gander built a little shelter, just large
enough for a bed and table and, as Cal said, "room to drop his boots,"
in a grove of leafy trees close to the bungalow. They made the roof
water-tight and screened the walls against mosquitoes, and Cal, out of
the depths of his inventiveness, arranged a bell that would ring in the
house when pulled from Dick's bedside.


Persuading Dick to make the change was no easier than they had expected,
but finally, with Jo's urgings added to their own, and Gander's promise
to bring Jo down to see him at least three times a week, he consented.
He looked a fine patient when, after bumping down the hill in Gander's
car, he settled to rest in the clean white sheets which Minnie had
provided.

"This is wonderful of you boys," he said. "I do believe I'll feel better
here."

"You'll be as right as rain," Cal assured him. "In a month or two you
won't know yourself."

The month or two wore away. Gander, faithful to his promise, drove over
to Jo's house three or four times a week and took her down to visit the
patient at the lake. Once in a while she stayed all night, sitting by
Dick's bedside and encouraging him with reports of the progress of the
farm until he fell asleep, and then keeping her vigil until the light of
dawn began to filter through the haze hanging across the lake. In the
morning Cal would drive her home in his old Ford. But generally she
went back with Gander the same evening, after darkness had settled down,
and they wound their way across the fragrant prairies in the still
warmth of the summer night.

On these drives Gander found himself peculiarly hampered for speech.
There was a joy in Jo's presence which he dared not try to explain, even
to himself, and which kept his lips sealed. When she praised him, as she
did on every occasion, for his generosity and his kindness, he turned it
off with a nervous laugh and a declaration that it was nothing. And
when, at the door of her house, she would give him her hand and say good
night, Gander again had no words that could sound above the thumping of
his heart.

It was an evening in July, with blue thunder-clouds gathering in the
west, and the air heavy with the smell of heading wheat. They had gone
to the lake early, for Gander had wanted a swim, and had found Dick out
of his arbor and resting in the sand down by the water. He was brighter
than usual; the lake breezes or the setting sun had whipped a dash of
color into his cheeks; his long, thin legs straightened under him, and
with the help of his stick, held him steady and erect when they came up
beside him.

"You see, Jo, I'm on my feet; I'm on my feet again!" he cried. "I'm
going to make it, Jo; I'm going to make it!"

He held out his arm, and drew his wife's face to his. "I believe I'm
going to make it after all," he whispered. "I'm getting stronger, and I
seem to be able to fill my lungs again."

Gander would have drawn away, but Dick caught him with his eye. "Don't
go, old man," he said. "It is you I have to thank for this; you, and
Cal, and Minnie--yes, and Reed; his little, wise, boyish talk has made
me young again."

But Gander slipped away to have his swim, and to think.

Later in the evening he sat beside Dick's bed, his hand in Dick's, while
the little wrist watch on the table ticked the minutes busily away.

"It's a wonderful thing to have been boys together," Dick was saying.
"To go to school, to grow up, to go through--all these things--and still
to be--together."

"Yes," said Gander.

"I have often thought, as I lay here in this quiet place, of all these
things," he went on. "Gander, when I came down here I didn't expect to
go back. Now I do. Gander, don't imagine I don't understand. I do. I've
seen some brave things--some brave men--but nothing braver than this."

His eyes closed, and the slightest film of moisture glistened on his
lashes. Then he sank quietly into his pillow and lay so still and white
that Gander found himself in the grip of a fear which suddenly deepened
into panic.

"Jo! Minn!" he cried, leaping to his feet.

"What is the matter, Gander?" said Dick, opening his eyes.

"No--nothin'. You're all right, are you, Dick?"

"All right, but tired. Now I'm going to have a sleep. Good night,
Gander."

Gander stretched his legs along the sand beach that skirts the lake.
Around a little jutting point of land he came upon Cal, trolling in a
bay.

"Our patient seems to be picking up, Gander, don't you think?" said Cal,
as he drew in his line. "Better spirits to-day than he has shown for a
long while. Seems really to have made up his mind that he may get
better."

"Yes, I was talkin' to him," Gander answered, briefly, wondering why he
could not bring more enthusiasm into his voice.

"Trouble about it," Cal went on, "is that that may be a good sign, and
it may be a bad one. It all depends."

"How do you mean, 'It all depends'?"

"You know how a lamp flickers up before it goes out? It may be that. Or
it may be really settling down to a steady flame. We should know in a
few days."

The drive home that night with Jo was even more silent than usual. She
sat very quiet, as though lost in thought, until they reached her door.
The night was dark, and Gander could sense, rather than see, her
presence at his side.

When he had stopped the car she remained in her seat, and he waited for
her to speak.

"Gander," she said at length, "I believe--I hope--he's going to get
better, after all."

"Yes, I think so. I hope he is," said Gander.

She arose slowly, and slowly stepped down from the car.

"Good night, Gander."

"Good night, Jo."

During the days that followed Gander watched that flame of which Cal had
spoken with fascinated interest. Would it flicker out, or would it
settle down to a steady glow? Every evening found him at the lake, and
every evening seemed to see Dick a little stronger than before. Hope,
most wonderful of all medicines, had returned, and was surging in his
veins. Hope and gratitude. His gratitude he lavished on Gander,
overwhelming him with appreciation. He talked continually of their
boyhood days, and of his rich good fortune in having such a friend.
Afterwards Gander would slip away in silence, lonely and ashamed.

One evening when Gander had brought Jo down to see him Dick was
particularly vivacious. He was planning that he would be able to help a
little in the harvest; by winter he would be as good as ever.

"That sister of yours, Gander--she's wonderful. You're all wonderful.
You pulled me out of No Man's Land as sure as did ever any soldier in
the trenches. Only you won't get any V. C. for it."

Gander's thought flew back to the day of the accident at Bill Powers'
threshing mill, when the men had jestingly suggested a V. C. for him,
and Jo had come to his defence. Jo had been true to him always. Always.




CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE


Gander turned from Dick's company, and from Jo's, to stroll alone by the
side of the lake. Life was pressing in upon him. Never even to himself
had he admitted what he feared--or hoped?--might be the outcome of
Dick's illness. He acknowledged only one wish in that connection. And
yet--something was filling his throat; his stomach was gone; there was a
vast desolation within him.

Presently he found a flat stone, and sat down. He was unaccountably
tired. The desire to smoke was upon him, and he drew his pipe from his
pocket, filled it with tobacco, and felt for matches. But without
success. He usually could count on his right vest pocket, but not
to-night. Through pocket after pocket he went in that sudden mild panic
which assails every smoker under the threat of no matches. Finally his
search produced, not matches, but a crumpled and badly soiled envelope.
He studied it for a moment, curiously, wondering from where it had come.
Then, all at once, he knew!

With something akin to a great tenderness he drew the note from its
battered covering, and spelled it out again in the mauve light which
flowed up from the lake in reflection to the sky overhead. Yes, Jerry
had been a strange but tender incident in his life. She must have cared
for him, a little, at least, or she would not have written that note.
Perhaps, even yet----

Light footsteps sounded on the gravel, and in confusion he stuffed the
letter back into his pocket. A pair of soft hands folded quickly over
his eyes and held him in a friendly vice.

"You're moody, Gander," said Minnie's voice. "You're worrying."

There was a tenderness in her tone which told Gander his sister had
sought out this hour to talk with him.

"Oh, I'm all right," he answered. "Kind o' tired, to-night."

She sat down beside him, her hand on his.

"You're making long days of it, with your work on the farm, and looking
after Dick--and Jo."

"Oh, it's not that. I'm all right."

"Gander, are you sure? I've wanted for weeks to talk to you, and
to-night, when I saw you go away by yourself--I followed. You don't
mind, do you? I only want to help."

"Help what?" he said, his eyes on the ground. "I'm all right."

"I haven't been spying, Gander," she went on, disregarding his manner,
which invited no confidence, "but I couldn't help seeing things. They've
been so evident. And I'm sorry for you, Gander."

"Sorry for me? Why?"

She slipped her arm about his neck and turned his face to hers, and as
he looked into her deep brown eyes Gander knew what she was about to
say.

"Because you are in love with Jo Claus!"

"I'm not--I tell you I'm not!" He sprang to his feet. "Minn, I tell you
that is not true! I never--" Then, as though his strength had suddenly
seeped from him he sank beside her again. His head rested between his
hands; his body shook with the paroxysm of a stifled sob.

"Gander!"

Her arms were both about him now, steadying her brother.

"Yes, Minnie, it's true," he confessed, almost inaudibly. "I can't help
it. It's been that way--always--ever since we were little children. I've
not done anythin' wrong, Minnie, but I can't help what I feel--in here!"
He struck his breast with his hand. "I've tried to play fair. I've done
the best I could--for Dick."

"Yes, you have. Every one must say you have been very noble. _Dick
knows._ Don't imagine he doesn't know. But it's turning out differently
from what all of us--including Dick--expected. And now what are you
going to do about it?"

"Do about it? Nothin'. What can I do about it?"

She held him close to her for a minute, weighing Gander's disposition,
his reserve, his independence, his rejection of all discipline,
wondering how far she could go. Then--

"If I were you, I would get out, Gander. The world is big. If you get
out you may forget--at least, you will get away from the edge of the
precipice. If you stay here you will always be in danger of slipping
over."

She was not prepared for his retort. "Is that why Cal got out?" he
demanded.

He felt her body stiffen, and knew he had struck a vulnerable point.
Well, this was a good time to strike. _She_ was not sparing him.

"Is that why Cal got out?" he repeated. "Nobody has ever told us yet why
he beat it, like he did. Nor who that boy is. You know, Minn, and
you--you don' dare tell!"

"Don't ask me that, Gander," she breathed. She was on the defensive now.
"It is better not. Believe me, I could explain, but it is better not."

"Well, you don't hesitate to dig into _my_ affairs," he answered.
"Suppose I dig a little into yours? Who is Reed, and why did Cal sneak
out at night like a coward?"

"Cal is no coward!" There was fire in Minnie's voice. "You wouldn't call
him that!"

"I didn't say he was a coward; I just said he acted like one. Now if you
can put it in a different light, go ahead. I'm listenin'."

The girl was silent, and both of them, for long minutes, gazed with
unseeing eyes over the rose-colored waters of the lake. At length she
spoke:

"Gander, I had decided I never would tell, but if it will help you, in
your fight, to know what another man did in his, then I will bring you
that help. But it must be a secret of honor between us. Is it?"

"All right; shoot!"

Minnie settled herself to a more comfortable position. "Reed is the son
of Cal's sister, Celesta," she began. "Celesta died when Reed was born.
She never had been married."

Gander stirred, but did not interrupt.

"Cal promised he would bring the boy up as his own, with no knowledge of
the shame that surrounded his birth. That is why he let Reed call him
Daddy X; x, the unknown quantity, you know--or perhaps you don't. And
all went well until they came here, and until Jackie came."

"What had Jackie to do with it?"

She paused for a moment, as though she could not trust herself with the
next revelation. Then, almost inaudibly, "Gander, Jackie is Reed's
father!"

"What!"

"It's true! I didn't know until I went West, to nurse him up in that
little homestead shanty in Saskatchewan. Then----"

"Then Cal told you?"

"He did not. Jackie told me. You see, he had been plotting against
Cal--plotting ever since he knew. But when Reed was sick, and Jackie was
there, all of a sudden he grew very fond of the boy. And one day, when
Cal was away, he told me the whole story--the whole sordid story. That
night he disappeared. I think he had seen things in their true light,
and for Reed's sake he disappeared. Just as, for Reed's sake, Cal left
here, that the secret might be safe."

She stopped, and it was a long while before Gander spoke. "Then Mother
is Reed's grandmother?" he said at length. Even in such a moment it
seemed to her strange that that should be Gander's first reaction.

"Yes."

"Does she know?"

"No one has told her. But something--deeper than words--must have
carried it to her heart. Do you remember how she took to him from the
first? How she used to hold him on her knee, and sing that little hymn
about 'Voices of yore, Come from that far-off shore?'"

"Yes--yes. And it was for him that Cal ran away?"

"For him--yes. To save Reed, and to keep his promise to his dead
sister."

Gander had risen to his feet. "I'm sorry for what I said, Minnie.
Sometimes it is the brave man that runs away, isn't it?"

Minnie's eyes were wet, but her voice was filled with a great happiness.
She had reached her brother's heart--that strange, loyal, proud, distant
heart which so few could reach.

"Yes," she repeated, holding him again in her arms, "sometimes it is the
brave man who runs away. There are _some_ good men, Gander.... I have
often thought life is like a thresher, pouring out its cloud of straw
and chaff and dust, and a little grain. A little hard, yellow, golden
grain, that has in it the essence of life, Gander!"

       *       *       *       *       *

A bank of cloud was gathering in the west, threatening rain, and
presently Gander and Jo took their way homeward. Once or twice their
road was lit up with a blaze of lightning, and when they reached the
house a few big drops were splashing in the dust.

"Won't you come in?" she asked him. "Until it blows over?"

"Oh, I guess I better keep on a-goin'," he told her. But he went in.

She lighted a lamp and drew the blinds to shut out the storm. Then she
motioned him to a chair.

"Make yourself at home. You have something to smoke?"

He felt mechanically in his pocket and found pipe and tobacco. His heart
was pounding above the lash of the rain on the windows.

"Dick is getting along," she said, when his pipe was going.

"Yes."

They sat for a long while in silence, wondering how far they might
interpret each other's thought. At length Jo got up and started a fire
in the stove. She set a little supper before Gander and herself. Gander
ate as one who chokes on morsels. His throat was full.

"You don't say much," she chided him.

"No. Too busy thinkin'," he answered.

The storm, instead of blowing over, increased in intensity. The rain
lashed on the windows and against the thin board walls of the house. And
the little clock up on the wall ticked on, its chatter drowned in the
roar of the elements.

At midnight Gander sprang to his feet.

"I must be goin', Jo," he said, hurriedly. "No idea it was so late."

"You can't drive over those roads now," she protested. "They're running
in water. It isn't safe."

"Oh, I'll make it."

"It isn't safe, Gander. You can stay for the night as well as not. I'll
fix Dick's couch up for you and you'll be comfortable enough. You can't
go in that."

As though to prove her words she opened the door. The wedge of light
from the lamp penetrated a few feet into a slanting storm of rain. A
flash of lightning disclosed two rivulets of water flowing down the road
which led through the yard. For a moment they watched it together; then
she closed the door.

"You see, you can't," she said.

"Jo, I must. What will people say?"

"If they haven't said already they needn't start now. I'll be up early
and make your breakfast, and you can get away at the peep of dawn. Then
you will have daylight, anyway."

She arranged sheets and blankets on Dick's couch in a corner of the
living-room. Gander could see her tucking them deftly into place;
patting them tenderly, he may have thought. But he smoked on in silence.

It took Jo a long time to arrange everything, but at last it was
finished. Then she lighted another lamp, and paused for a moment beside
Gander's chair.

"Good night, Gander," she said.

"Good night, Jo."

Then she went up the stairs at the end of the room.

Gander waited until he could no longer hear her moving about on the thin
boards which creaked with every pressure of her foot. And even after he
went to bed he lay awake for a long while, thinking, listening to the
splash of the rain, to its drip and gurgle from the eaves, to its
drumming on the windows, its patter on the board walls. It brought back
in memory that night in the old house on the farm; that night when
Fraser Fyfe came plodding across the flooded fields to see how he and
Minnie were faring through the storm. With a start it came to Gander
that then, too, Jo had been the centre of his imaginings. Years ago--and
she was still the same Jo. But now she was Dick Claus' wife.

Slowly and in order he recalled the incidents of that night. How he had
counted himself a coward, until Minnie had praised him for his bravery.
How she had crawled into his arms for comfort and protection....

He lay for a long while, thinking....

And, while his thought circled many fields, always it came back to one
centre.... As he lay there, fighting through a mist that was not of the
rain, for the first time in his life he looked Gander Stake in the
face.

"You haven' made much of it, Gander, have you?" he demanded, bitterly.
"Not very much of it. You wouldn' take discipline--I think that's what
they call it, that 'Form fours' stuff--and here you are.... Here you
are." Then, with a bitter jest at himself, "And where are you?"

Minnie's revelation about Cal and Reed came back to him. How little he
had guessed! And the honor of the Stake family----

That was a point that hurt. The honor of the Stake family!

And here it was involved again, in him.

Slowly he began to see that there was only one way. Minnie was right.

Upstairs Jo Claus was sleeping. Or was she? He remembered that day on
the school section, and wondered if she had been sleeping then....

There was only one way. It came to him slowly, but when he saw, he saw.

"Gander," he said at length, "now you will take your medicine, and you
will take it from yourself. Form fours!"

He got up and drew on his clothes. It was still raining, although not so
violently. There would be light as soon as the clouds lifted.

He touched a match to the lamp; found an old envelope and a pencil.
Then, in his wobbly hand, he scrawled a little message.

"Dear Jo," it read, "I forgot to tell you that I have to leave on the
mornin' train for the city. I've got a good job in a garrage. I like
workin' about machines. Hope the oats will come all right, and Dick,
too."

He was about to sign it "Gander," but a sudden dignity was upon him. He
inscribed his initials, "W. H. S."

Then he stole silently through the door and started his car.

Jo, awake in her room upstairs, fancied she heard the sound of the
motor. She ran to her window just as a flash of lightning revealed
Gander's car lurching down the muddy road.


THE END


  +------------------------------------------------------------------+
  | Transcriber's Note:--                                            |
  |                                                                  |
  | Punctuation errors have been corrected.                          |
  |                                                                  |
  | The following suspected printer's errors have been addressed.    |
  |                                                                  |
  | Page 20. unsucessful changed to unsuccessful.                    |
  | (two unsuccessful attempts)                                      |
  |                                                                  |
  | Page 65. undertand changed to understand.                        |
  | (and understand)                                                 |
  |                                                                  |
  | Page 216. amuzement changed to amusement.                        |
  | (circle of amusement)                                            |
  |                                                                  |
  | Page 235. vengence changed to vengeance.                         |
  | (which threatened vengeance)                                     |
  |                                                                  |
  | Page 255. writte changed to written.                             |
  | (had not written to him)                                         |
  |                                                                  |
  | Page 237. haid changed to hair.                                  |
  | (the hair had its same)                                          |
  |                                                                  |
  +------------------------------------------------------------------+






[End of Grain, by Robert Stead]
