In thinking over the affair that night Harry wondered whether she had not made a big mistake. Ought she not to have ignored everything outside of Isita's actual school work? "Anyhow," she reminded herself, "she knows that I want to help her. It may be that something will come up later that will send her to me."
But such a hoped-for occasion was not to happen for a long time. Before the spring term ended Isita and Joe both stopped coming to school, and when the truant officer hunted for them the family had moved away. Harry could get no news of them from the other pupils and went back to the ranch for the summer without a prospect of seeing Isita again.
In the rush of summer work, concern for her school naturally waned. Moreover, she soon began to look forward with interest to the arrival of the Eldredges. Several times she went up to the little shack to see if they had come. But there were no signs of any one having been there and the summer passed without bringing them—Rob inquired at the land office whether their filing had been withdrawn, but nothing of that kind had happened.
"Too bad," said the clerk, "for somebody else'll sure file over them if they let the time go over. Good land's getting mighty scarce around here."
"I shouldn't wonder but what we'd better file on additional homesteads," Rob said, as he was telling Harry what he had heard; "I could take that long strip to the west and you could file on that swale on top of the hills; you know that long meadow just back of those buttes? With a fence around that we shouldn't be bothered so much with cattle coming in to water here when it gets dry. As soon as I can get time I believe I'll go over that land and look for section-line corners."
"Are we going to have money enough for all that," Harry asked: "take up more land before we've got this planted?"
"I shouldn't plant all of this anyway; haven't water enough to irrigate it all. But I'll need more grazing some day for my stock. If nothing happens we'll have money enough from this next winter's work to fence it."
Rob had made several hundred dollars by his winter's work at Stone Bridge and he had also gained valuable experience in handling and feeding cattle. Harry, too, had saved more than half her salary and was able to invest in a good cow, pony and saddle. It seemed to both of them that they could not do better than go back to Stone Bridge for the next two winters. They could do a lot of work on the place in the six months of the dry season and the money they made working out would help them to get ahead much faster than two or three extra months on the ranch.
Stone Bridge had, of course, grown during the summer absences. It was good wheat land and settlers were flowing in. The school naturally grew as well, and the third winter there were thirty pupils instead of fifteen, and a second teacher.
As Harry sat listening to a class recite, as she watched the children studying, she studied them: the white-headed Swedes, the olive-skinned Indians, the Austrians, Swiss, Scotch, Americans, all so different, all so worth while if one knew how to reach them. Teaching of this sort was a bigger thing than ever it had seemed. The mere copiousness of the so-called practical jokes that they played on each other was evidence of the locked-up energy within them—energy so soon to be harnessed to the plow, the mill, the mine, to follow the trail from ranch to forest reserve, to go wherever the market called for workers. She had the feeling of wanting to shut the doors and say: "Stay here! You haven't begun to learn. Think of the books you ought to read—" She stopped herself. "Literature! Why they're the stuff it's made of, aren't they? and history, too. They've already had hold of life as they'd grab a half-broken cayuse and no more afraid of it.