"Beautiful," she said, trying to see the knitting.
"Aren't you glad I brought them?" still anxiously inquiring.
"Very"—she pushed them away. "You're soaked. Take off your things."
And little Bob, still holding his flowers, was stripped to his skin.
"Now lie down," said his mother. "I'm turning the heel."
He obeyed, but turbulently, and with much pretense, making believe to fall and rolling on the sacks, a naked cherub writhing with laughter. Finally, his mother had to stop her heel-turning to seize him by one leg, drag him toward her, roll him up in the end of the blanket and with a silencing slap say, "There, lie still." This quieted him. He lay subdued save for a waving hand in which the flowers were still imbedded and with which he made passes at the two girls, murmuring with the thick utterance of rising sleep "Bu'full flowers." And in a moment he slept, curled against his mother, his face angelic beneath the wet hair.
When Susan came to the giving of her personal data—the few facts necessary to locate and introduce her—her engagement was the item of most interest. A love story even on the plains, with the rain dribbling in through the cracks of the canvas, possessed the old, deathless charm. The doctor and his philanthropies, on which she would have liked to dilate, were given the perfunctory attention that politeness demanded. By himself the good man is dull, he has to have a woman on his arm to carry weight. David, the lover, and Susan, the object of his love, were the hero and heroine of the story. Even the married woman forgot the turning of the heel and fastened her mild gaze on the young girl.
"And such a handsome fellow," she said. "I said to Lucy—she'll tell you if I didn't—that there wasn't a man to compare with him in our train. And so gallant and polite. Last night, when I was heating the water to wash the children, he carried the pails for me. None of the men with us do that. They'd never think of offering to carry our buckets."
Her husband who had appeared to be asleep said:
"Why should they?" and then shouted "Gee Haw" and made a futile kick toward the nearest ox.