The square little aperture was clearly defined against the greying sky before he distinguished signs of activity in the room below. Striker was up and moving about. He could hear him stacking logs in the fireplace, and presently there came up to him the welcome crackle of kindling-wood ablaze. A door opened and a gruff voice spoke. The settler was routing Zachariah out of his slumbers. Far off in some unknown, remote land a rooster crowed,—the day's champion, the first of all to greet the rising sun. Almost instantly, a cock in Striker's barnyard awoke in confusion and dismay, and sent up a hurried, raucous cock-a-doodle-doo,—too late by half a minute to claim the honours of the day, but still a valiant challenger. Then other chanticleers, big and little, sounded their clarion call,—and the day was born.
Kenneth, despite his longing for this very hour to come, now perversely wished to sleep. A belated but beatific drowsiness seized him. He was only half-conscious of the noise that attended the lifting of the trap-door.
"Wake up! Time to git up," a distant voice was calling, and he suddenly opened his eyes very wide and found himself staring at a shaggy, unkempt head sticking up out of the floor, rendered grim and terrifying by the fitful play of a ruddy light from the depths below. For a second he was bewildered.
"That you, Striker?" he mumbled.
"Yep,—it's me. Time to git up. Five o'clock. Breakfass'll soon be ready. You c'n wash up out at the well. Sleep well?"
"Passably. I was awakened some time in the night by your visitors."
He was sitting up on the edge of the tick, drawing on his boots. Striker was silent for a moment.
"Thought maybe you'd be disturbed, spite of all we could do to be as quiet as possible. People from a farm 'tother side of the plains."
The head disappeared, and in a very few minutes Gwynne, carrying his coat and waistcoat, descended the ladder into the presence of a roaring fire. He shot a glance at the closed bedroom door, and then hastily made his way out of the cabin and around to the well. Eliza was preparing breakfast. In the grey half-light he made out Striker and Zachariah moving about the barnlot. A rough but clean towel hung across the board wall of the well, while a fresh bucket of water stood on the shelf inside, its chain hanging limply from the towering end of the "h'isting pole."
As he completed his ablutions, the darkey boy approached.