The kernels were counted no longer, nor were they placed in the hills precisely. Without a glance to right or left, she raced along the rows, her cheeks flaming and her hair flying out in the wind. She had decided that she would plant all of the strip—but not cover the corn until next day.
The sun sank slowly toward the horizon as she worked. But the unplanted rows were rapidly growing fewer and fewer now, and the descending disk gave her little worry. Up and down she hurried, scattering rather than dropping the seed, until she was on her final trip. When she reached the end of the last row, she joyfully put all the corn she had left into one hill, turned the seed-bag inside out, slipped her lunch-bucket into it, and, after hiding her hoe in the stone pile on the carnelian bluff, turned her face toward the house. And at that very moment, with the winding of the cow-horn for its farewell salute, the last yellow rind of the sun went out of sight below the level line of the prairie.
Early the next day, while the little girl's big brothers were busy with the chores, she mounted her pony and rode away southward from the farm-house. At the reservation road, she faced toward the sun and struck her horse to a canter. A mile out on the prairie to the east, she turned due north up a low ravine; and finally completed almost a perfect square by coming west, when on a line with the carnelian bluff, to the edge of the corn-field. There she tied her pony to a large stone on the slope of the bluff and well out of sight of the house, and, after hunting up the hoe, started energetically to cover up the planting of the day before.
She began at the bluff on the first uncovered row, and swung down it rapidly, her hoe flashing brightly in the sun as she pulled the dirt over the kernels. But when she had gone less than half the distance to the meadow she stopped at a hill and anxiously examined it a moment. She went on to the next without using her hoe, then on to the next and the next; and, finally, putting it across her shoulder, walked slowly to the end.
Arrived at the edge of the meadow, she turned about and followed up another row. Her hoe was still across her shoulder, and she did not stop to use it until she was near the bluff. When she reached the meadow the second time, she sat down on the row-marker and looked out across the timothy.
"Goodness!" she said, addressing the half-dozen animated stakes that were eying her from a proper distance, "you've done it!"
The gophers stood straighter than ever when they heard her voice, and new ones came from their burrows and sat up to watch her, with their fore paws held primly in front of them, their tails lying out motionless behind, and their slender heads poised pertly—with no movement except the twinkle of sharp, black eyes and the quiver of long whiskers.
"And there ain't 'nough seed left in that barrel," went on the little girl, "to plant a single row over again."
She sat on the marker a long time, a sorrowful little figure, in deep study. And when she finally rose and resumed work at the upper end of the strip, she thought with dread of the disclosure that sprouting-time would bring.