“We can’t skate, we can’t coast, we can’t ride, and the walking is—”
“That’s just what it is!” Boyd agreed.
“Then what can we do?” Blue Bonnet looked at Alec, as if expecting him to solve the difficulty.
“You might meditate and invite your soul,” he suggested.
It was a Saturday morning, and the three were sitting on the Clyde’s back porch in the sunshine. Blue Bonnet had explained that she could stay only “a moment”—that she was dusting; but Blue Bonnet’s minutes were apt to prove elastic.
“I don’t want to invite my soul!” she protested now. On the whole, the past fortnight had been very tiresome; what she wanted, more than anything at this moment, was to have some fun—fun spelled with a capital F.
Lying alone in the twilight that Saturday evening two weeks ago, she had made all manner of good resolutions, among which, being in early had taken prominent place. Then the thaw had come, and there had been no excuse for staying out.
Worst of all, the warm February wind, with its touch of Spring softness, blowing the last few days, would keep sending her thoughts back to the great open sweep of the prairie. Oh, for one long ride across it with Uncle Cliff! One glimpse of the old familiar ranch life! Of Uncle Joe and old Benita!
“Woodford is dull,” Boyd was saying,—“at least for us outsiders. There’s no use denying it.”
Blue Bonnet flicked her duster; that was what had brought her out to the porch in the first place, and whenever the thought that she ought to go in grew too insistent, she flicked it again.