Sometimes a neighbour dropped in during the middle of the day, and on pleasant days they would harness up the team and take a drive down to the store and the post-office; but mainly they vegetated like a couple of huge potatoes in a cellar, as did most of the settlers. There was nothing else to do.
It was the worst winter since the first that they had spent in the country. The snow seemed never still. It slid, streamed, rose in the air ceaselessly; it covered the hay, drifted up the barn door, swept the fields bare, and, carrying the dirt of the ploughed fields with it, built huge black drifts wherever there was a wind-break, corn-field, or other obstruction.
There were moments when Bert was well-nigh desperate. Only contact with hard work and cold winds saved him. He was naturally a more ambitious, more austere man than Anson. He was not content to vegetate, but longed to escape. He felt that he was wasting his life.
It was in December that the letter first came from Flaxen which mentioned Will Kendall.
O boys! I had the best time. We had a party at our house and lots of boys came and girls too, and they were nice, the boys, I mean. Will Kendall he is the nicest feller you ever seen. He has got black eyes and brown hair and a gold watch-chain with a locket with some girl's hair in it, and he said it was his sister's hair, but I told him I didn't believe it, do you? We had cake and popcorn and lasses candy; and Will he took me out to supper.
Bert was reading the letter, and at this point he stopped and raised his eyes, and the two men gazed at each other without a word for a long time. Then Anson laughed.
"She's gittin' over her homesickness. She's all right now she's got out to a sociable."
After that there was hardly a letter that did not mention Kendall in some innocent fashion among the other boys and girls who took part in the sleigh-rides, parties, and sociables. But the morbidly acute Bert, if he saw, said nothing, and Anson did not see.
"Who d' y' s'pose this Kendall is?" asked Anson, one night late in the winter, of Gearheart, who was reading the paper while his companion reread a letter from Flaxen. "Seems to me she's writin' a good 'eal about him lately."
"Oh, some slick little dry-goods clerk or druggist," said Bert, with unwarrantable irritation.