CHAPTER XI
SEEDTIME
The snow had gone, and the frost-bleached prairie lay steaming under the warm April sun, when Carrie Leland pulled her team up on the crest of a low rise. The waggon she drove, a light vehicle of four high wheels with a shallow, box-like body, had been made especially for her. It was hung on comfortable springs, and the harness and horses matched it. There were few broncho teams on the prairie to compare with hers. They were young, but Carrie liked a mettlesome beast, and Leland had carefully chosen and broken them.
It was the same with everything he had given her. Only the best that could be had seemed good enough for her, and at times she almost resented his generosity. Save when he lost his temper, which happened not infrequently, she could not put him in the wrong, and she often felt that it would be easier for her if she could charge him with neglect, or had something to forgive him. He was gravely considerate for her comfort, but it was very seldom that he went any further. While this should have pleased her, she was not quite sure that it did.
On the morning in question, Eveline Annersly, who had been at Prospect a month now, sat beside her rejoicing in the sunshine and rush of warm wind. She had reached the age when one looks for little and makes the most of what comes, and the warmth and freshness of the morning delighted her. The prospect would also in all probability have had its attractions for any one with eyes to see and a nature that could respond to the reawakening pulse of life in the land.
Round three-fourths of the horizon the bleached prairie, tinged now with sunny ochre, melted into the sweep of lustrous blue, but in the foreground the sod was gemmed with little crocus-like flowers and already flecked here and there with creeping green. All this was waste and virgin, but on the fourth side tall bands of golden stubble, and belts of ashes where golden stubble had once been, were narrowed down by the steaming chocolate-tinted clods of the plough's upturning. Grain ran up in long rippled ridges from Prospect, where the birches gleamed silver, across the wide dip of basin and over its fringing rise, into the luminous blueness of the sky. That was man's work, and man at Prospect worked unusually hard, for it was not his part there to plough where others had also sown, but to grapple with the wilderness, and subdue it, in fulfilment of the charge given him when the waters dried. The wilderness was there, leagues of it, but it required a stout heart and a steadfast toil to break it and cover it with red-gold wheat when wheat was a drug upon a falling market.
Eveline Annersly, faded and frail, was dainty still. As she sat smiling in the waggon, with the sunlight lying warm on her beautiful hands, she was a part of the colour scheme in her soft, grey-tinted draperies. Some women of the cities would have been a blotch on it. She was the figure of tranquil autumn when the wealth of fruits had gone, but her companion with the crimson lips and dusky eyes was spring, when as yet Nature is only stirring and has not awakened to riotous life at the burning kiss of the sun. Eveline Annersly realised this vaguely, and at times felt a thrill of concern, for she knew there was fire beneath that cold exterior. When the awakening should come, much would depend upon whether the sudden untrammelled growth of the girl's nature would cling for warmth and shelter to the man who was her husband.
In the meanwhile, she watched the toiling teams coming on across grey grass and golden stubble in echelon. Men sat above the horses' heads on the driving-seats of the big gang-ploughs, and from amidst the curling brown clods came the twinkling flash of steel. The men had brown faces, and some of them bare, brown arms. Sun and wind had burned and beaten them and their garments to the colour of the soil they sprang from. They seemed almost a part of it, as they and the patient beasts did their share in the great, harmonious scheme which in return for the sweat of effort gives man bread to eat. This was not English farming, mixed and variable, but an unlocking of Nature's long-stored wealth in mile-long furrows that should fling the golden wheat by trainload and shipload on the markets of the world. Even Eveline Annersly, who was not greatly interested in agriculture, could realise that.
"It is a tremendous farm," she said. "We have nothing like it in England. The length of those furrows appeals to one's imagination. How big is it, Carrie?"
The girl smiled a trifle languidly. "I really don't know," she said. "Charley has told me, but I never could remember things like that. He seems rather proud of having broken—I believe that is the right word—most of it out of the prairie. In fact, he is easily content. To break so many acres every year seems his one object in life. I don't think it's anybody's. Presumably, it's a question of temperament. My husband appears to like his occupation, and absorbs himself in it."