At the well, the little girl chopped a hole in the ice on the trough while the woman removed the basket, bridle, halter and what was left of the saddle and Dora lowered her head quickly into the water and drank as rapidly as she could.
“That dirty brute!” said the woman.
“He never feeds his critters,” piped in the little girl.
“He doesn’t feed his wife,” added the woman, not because she wanted to tell this to the little girl, but rather because she wanted to express the hatred of an old and bitter feud.
“Take these rotten things,” said the woman, pointing to the bridle and the halter, while she seized the remains of the saddle. “Let’s get them out of the way, and don’t you ever open your mouth to tell any one, no matter who it is, that his mare was here. I don’t want his rotten old saddle and bridle. He never keeps anything looking decent enough for any one to want any of his rotten things. Anyway it is a sin to send this poor mare back to him. It ain’t up to me to catch his runaway critters for him and I just can’t let the poor critter go off like this and die. When Dad gets back from threshin’, he’ll take these things and drop ’em on the road near his place where he will be sure to find them.”
When Dora had drunk all she could, she turned immediately to some grass near by and began voraciously to pull at it. The woman had befriended her and she was not afraid of her. But to her surprise, when she came back, the woman rushed at her with something in her hand which she waved threateningly at her, clearly ordering her away. Dora ran off as fast as she could go and when she got well out of the way, she turned to look back with a puzzled expression on her face. Both the woman and the little girl were calmly entering the shanty.
Without an attempt to get at the motive behind the woman’s strange conduct, Dora went on grazing there, moving off and looking back when her mouth was too full to crop, eating so rapidly and so absorbedly that she had no time to think about the phenomenal change that had thus miraculously come over her. If she was not thinking gratefully, she did feel grateful and possibly some higher intellectual force than hers, in some way, realised for her that only justice had been done.
CHAPTER XV
THE TRAIL OF THE MOOSE
