Harry's advertisement was to appear in that Saturday's Despatch, so naturally there was no report from it when Rob came up to spend Sunday. But the following week he brought a letter from the trustees of a mountain hamlet and, more important, word from Mrs. Robinson that her husband's sister living up at Stone Bridge, had written that their teacher was going to be married and they were wondering where to find another.
Harry, of course, rode out with Rob on Monday, taking her diploma and a letter of recommendation from the principal of the school in the East where she had taught. She was obliged to pass an examination before being allowed to teach in Idaho, but she did that satisfactorily and it was not difficult for the school board to believe in her general fitness for the work—if "work" it could be called—she reflected after seeing the textbooks and the fifteen children who were to be her pupils.
The winter's work being thus happily settled for them, Harry and Rob gave their attention to the new house. He hauled the lumber at odd times between haying and harvesting and on the first of October came home with a last load of nails, shingles, windows and building paper, ready to begin work.
The building of that "prove-up shack," as Rob would call it, was, next to Harry's coming into Idaho, the most significant event in her life. All her traditions had built the conviction that a home must be something more than a weatherproof box containing the number of cubic feet required by the homestead law and lighted by one window two and a half feet square.
"I can't, I won't live in a—a shack like some I've seen," she protested; "board walls so full of splinters you could curry a horse against them and nothing but a row of nails for a closet. Why isn't it just as cheap to make a pretty cottage of the same amount of wood?"
"Why, isn't it just as cheap to make a lace veil as a flour sack? They're both made of cotton thread. I've figured on spending one month's time and about two hundred dollars cash on this dwelling. Now if you can show me where any style can be worked in for that sum of money and labor—don't forget the labor—go ahead and make your plan."
This somewhat discouraging permission was quite enough for Harry. A flood of sketches including dormer windows, pergolas, verandas and colonial chimneys was the result offered for Rob's consideration.
"Now if I were an architect and you had a million dollars to spend we'd show these old timers, wouldn't we?" he laughed. But nevertheless, he did try to adapt his material to the spirit of Harry's wishes.
The eaves of the steep, gabled roof hung low; there were windows wherever a free wall space allowed—big windows that gave the plain rooms a set of ever-changing pictures of prairie and mountains. There was even a little porch before the door—that door built of planks, studded with nail-heads and twice the width of the ordinary mill-work door, "so that when we get our piano, it will be easy to bring it inside," explained Harry.