“If only I’d take time to do this sort of thing I’d be more as I ought to be,” she meditated when she had at last risen to go home. “I won’t be like pa! I won’t! I won’t!” she reiterated many times as she walked back, over the frozen cow-path. “I’ll come here every few days. Ma and pa were born to be happy, only they never took time to be.”
And though John was cross because the baby had cried in her absence, Elizabeth felt that she had been helped by getting away from him. She accepted her husband’s reproaches without reply, and was able to forget them even while they were still issuing from his mouth. She kept her temper down all that week, and though the Thanksgiving invitations were not sent, she cooked the dinner and put as many hours into its concoction as if she had had all the people she had hoped to have about her board to eat it, and she was so sunny and natural as she served it that John did not even guess that she was governing herself consciously. She stayed at home the next Sunday and the next, and John Hunter was unaware that she was endeavouring to surrender herself to his will.
“She’ll get over wanting to run somewhere all the time,” he told his mother, and Mrs. Hunter, to whom these people were not pleasing, agreed with him, and thought that it was just as well if it were so, not realizing that the girl lived alone in their house and that she might have an attitude toward these people distinctly different from theirs.
This winter, like the preceding one, passed with Elizabeth at home. There was no peace to be had if she thought of going anywhere for any purpose whatever. Elizabeth went nowhere and required few clothes. The cold the child had caught on that first trip to Luther’s was sufficient excuse to prevent any further foolishness on the part of its mother. However, a trip to town was in waiting for Elizabeth Hunter and was proposed by John Hunter himself.
There had been a “warm spell” in the month of February and John had asked Elizabeth to help him with the pump in the barnyard, which had been working badly for days. It was Saturday evening, and Jake and the other hired man had been granted time off that day; the pump had refused to work at all after they were gone, and with a hundred cattle waiting for water it was necessary to impress any one available with the duty of helping. Elizabeth was more than willing to help: it meant a couple of hours out of doors. They had worked industriously and their efforts were about crowned with success when Mrs. Hunter came out to them with the baby wrapped in a warm shawl. John tossed aside the extra piece of leather he had cut from the top of an old boot and fitted the round piece in his hand about the sucker.
“Now, mother, you shouldn’t bring that child out here; You’ll have him sick on our hands again,” he said.
“Oh, lots of children go out of doors in winter. I took you out whenever I wanted to, and you’ve lived to tell the tale,” his mother said easily, seating herself on the end of the trough.
“Well, I don’t want anything to happen to him for a few days, I can tell you. I want you to keep him and let Elizabeth go in to town with me and sign the mortgage on this eighty, Monday,” John replied, examining the valve with great attention.
“Why, I thought this eighty was already mortgaged!” Mrs. Hunter exclaimed.
“Well, it is,” John replied uneasily, “but I’ve got to raise the interest before I can get that bunch of shoats ready to sell, and I’ve got to do it that way.”