Thorne produced a strip of paper and handed it to her.
"I can't always trust my memory," he explained.
They went into the house, where a light was already burning, and Mrs. Farquhar glanced at the paper with a smile.
"Well," she said, "I suppose I can manage to let you have about half of what you ask for." Then she turned to Alison. "As soon as he mentioned the matter I expected this."
CHAPTER IX
THE RAISING
One afternoon when the prairie was flooded with sunshine and sprinkled with a flush of tender green, Farquhar drove his wife and Alison up to Thorne's new holding. A tent with loose curtain flapping in the breeze stood on a slight rise, with sundry piles of boards and framed timber lying on the grass about it, while Thorne and a young lad stood beside a fire above which a four-gallon coal-oil can hung boiling. His face was smutted and there was grime on his hands; while near him smoke was issuing from a beehive-shaped mass of soil which Mrs. Farquhar informed Alison was an earth oven.
The girl waited behind a few moments when her companions greeted Thorne, looking about her with some curiosity. An oblong of shattered clods, almost hidden by the fresh green blades of oats, stretched across the foreground, and beyond it there was the usual vast sweep of grass. On one side of the plowed land, however, a thin birch bluff in full leaf straggled up the rise, and a little creek of clear water wound through a deep hollow not far away. The situation, she decided, was an attractive one. Then she glanced at the piles of timber, which seemed to be arranged in carefully planned order, and surmised from the quantity of sawdust strewed among the grass that a good deal of work had been done on it by somebody. There was also a row of birch logs, evidently obtained from the bluff, with notches cut in them, and a heap of thin strips of wood which had a sweet resinous smell. These were red-cedar roofing shingles from British Columbia.
Alison strolled forward and joined the group about the fire.
"It will be a couple of hours yet before the boys turn up; and, considering everything, it's just as well," Thorne was explaining. "Still, the bread ought to be ready, and I'd be glad if somebody would get it out to cool. I want the oven for the chickens."