Luther Hansen looked up eagerly.
“Lizzie, I’ve found th’ very man for you folks. He’ll stay too. He’s a fellow by th’ name of Noland—workin’ for Chamberlain, an’ wants a job right soon—got a lot of book-learnin’—just your kind.”
“I’ll have John see him when he gets home,” Elizabeth answered indifferently. “My! I wonder when they will be able to get back?” she added.
“They wasn’t through tradin’ when this thing come on,” Luther replied. “Anyhow, houses was too thick t’ get lost th’ first half of th’ way. Listen to that wind, though! I’m glad t’ be here if I do look like a turkey gobbler with these ears,” he laughed.
It was so cold that Elizabeth had built a roaring fire, and to keep the snow, which penetrated every crack, from sifting under the door, she laid old coats and carpets across the sill. She brought coal and cobs from the shed, stopping each trip to get warm, for even to go the twenty steps required to get to the cobhouse was to experience more cold than she had ever encountered in all the days when she had plowed through the snows of Kansas winters while teaching; in fact, had the fuel been much farther from her door she would hardly have ventured out for it at all in a wind which drove one out of his course at every fresh step and so confused and blinded him that the points of the compass were a blank, and paths could not be located for the drifts, which ran in every direction the swirling wind chose to build them. She had gone around the shed to the back door, knowing that the front door being on the windward side could not be shut again if once opened, and the few extra steps necessary to creep around the building froze her to the bone, for the eddying wind had carried the snow deep at that point and, being enough sheltered to prevent packing, had left it a soft pile into which she sank almost to her waist. She was obliged to hunt for a shovel and clear the snow out of the doorway when she was through, and her hands were completely numbed when she reached the house after it was over. With the feeling that she might not be able to reach the shed at all in the morning, or that the doors might be drifted shut altogether, Elizabeth had taken enough cobs and coal into the kitchen to half fill the room and was ready to withstand a siege of days, but she paid toll with aching hands and feet that frightened Luther into a new realization of the nature of the storm.
When at last the one fire Elizabeth thought it wise to keep up was rebuilt and dry shoes had replaced the wet ones, she settled down beside the lounge, with her feet in another chair to keep them off the cold floor, and turned to Luther expectantly.
“This storm’s awful, as you say,” she said in reply to his observation that it might hold for days, “but I’m just so glad of a real chance for a visit with you that I’m quite willing to bring cobs and keep fires.”
“If that’s true, why don’t you come t’ see us as you ought t’, Lizzie?” Luther said, looking her searchingly in the eye. “I never meddle in other people’s business, but you ain’t th’ stuck-up thing folks says you are. Honest now, why don’t you do as a neighbour should?”
Elizabeth Hunter’s face flushed crimson and she leaned forward to tuck the old coat, in which she had wrapped her feet, more closely about them while she took time to get herself ready to answer the paralyzing question. The longer she waited the harder it became to meet the kindly questioning eyes bent upon her, and the more embarrassing it became to answer at all. She fumbled and tucked and was almost at the point of tears when Jack, who was asleep on a bed made on two chairs, began to fret. Seizing the welcome means of escape, she got up and took the child, sitting down a little farther away from Luther and hugging the baby as if he were a refuge from threatened harm.
Luther felt the distance between them, but decided to force the issue. He came about it from another quarter, but with inflexible determination.