A Prairie Courtship

by Harold Bindloss

Hunter walked up on the veranda and, leaning on the balustrade, looked at his wife.

"You have had a deal of some kind with that man?"

A flush of anger swept into Florence's cheek.

"He told you that?" she exclaimed; and then added, with a harsh laugh, "As it happens, he was quite correct."

Hunter stood still with an expressionless face for a moment or two, apparently waiting in case she had anything else to say; and then, with a gesture which might have meant anything, he moved away along the veranda. Florence's conscience accused her when he disappeared into the house; but she was most clearly sensible that she was now a little afraid of Nevis and disposed to hate him. However, she lay quietly in her basket-chair until word was brought her that supper was ready.

Two or three days later Nevis sat late one night in his office at the railroad settlement. It was situated at the back of his implement store, on the ground floor of a very ugly wooden building which had a false front that rose a little beyond the ridge of roof. One door opened directly on to the prairie; the other led into the store, from which there exuded a pungent smell of paint and varnish. A nickeled lamp hung over Nevis's head, and the little room was unpleasantly hot, so hot, indeed, that he sat in his shirt-sleeves before a table littered with papers. Not far away a small safe stood open. This contained further papers tied up in several bundles and neatly endorsed. There was nothing else in the room except a few shelves filled with account books; and there was no covering on the floor. Nevis, like most commercial men in the small western towns, wasted very little money on superfluous accessories. He found that he could employ it much more profitably.

He had, as it happened, a troublesome matter to decide on, and seeing no way out of the difficulties which complicated it, he rose at length, and, lighting a cigar, opened the outer door and stood leaning against it. It was cooler there, and he noticed that the night was unusually dark. The stream of light that flowed out past him, forcing up his figure in a sharp, black silhouette, only intensified the thick obscurity in which it was almost immediately lost. It was also very still, and he could hear his white shirt crackle at each slight movement of the hand that held the cigar. Everybody in the little wooden town was, he surmised, already asleep, though he knew that a west-bound train would stop there in half an hour or so.

He did not know how long he remained in the doorway, but by degrees the stillness became oppressive, and at last he started as a sound rose suddenly out of the darkness. It was a faint, metallic rattle, and he leaned forward a little, listening in strained attention. The noise was so unexpected that it jarred on him.

Then he recollected that some of his neighbors were addicted to dumping empty provision cans and similar refuse into a clump of willows which straggled close up to the back of the town not far away, and he decided that one of them had fallen down or rolled over. After that he went back to his table, leaving the door open for the sake of coolness, and he was once more occupied with his papers when he heard a sharp knocking at the front of the store. Pushing his chair back he took out his watch. Somebody who was going west by the train that was almost due apparently desired to see him, though it seemed a curious thing that the man had not called earlier. He rose and entered the store, where he fell against the projecting handle of a plow in the darkness. This ruffled his temper, and he spent some time impatiently fumbling for and undoing the fastenings of the outer door. Then he flung it open somewhat violently, and strode out into the darkness. There was, so far as he could see, nobody in the vicinity, and when, moving forward a few paces he called out, he got no answer.

Feeling slightly uneasy as well as astonished, he stood still for, perhaps, a minute, gazing about him. He could dimly see the houses across the street, with the tall false fronts of one or two cutting black against the sky, but there was not a light in any of them, and there was certainly no sound of footsteps. He was neither a nervous nor a fanciful man, and it scarcely seemed possible that his ears had deceived him. Swinging around suddenly, he went back into the store and fastened the outer door before he reentered his office. The door at the back of the office and the safe stood open just as he had left them. Crossing the room he looked into the safe.