“We could let you have our ox-team to do that breaking with,” she volunteered. “You’ve had Sproatly living with you all winter. Why don’t you make him stay and work out his keep?”
Hawtrey laughed. “Sally,” he said, “do you think anybody could make Sproatly work?”
“It would be hard,” the girl admitted, and then looked up at him with a little glint in her eyes. “Still, I’d put a move on him if you sent him along to me.”
She was a capable young woman, but Hawtrey was dubious concerning her ability to accomplish such a task. Sproatly was an Englishman of good education, though his appearance seldom suggested it. Most of the summer he drove about the prairie in a wagon, vending cheap oleographs and patent medicines, and during the winter contrived to obtain free quarters from his bachelor acquaintances. It is a hospitable country, but there were men round Lander’s who, when they went away to work in far-off lumber camps, as they sometimes did, nailed up their doors and windows to prevent Sproatly from getting in.
“Does he never do anything?” Sally added.
“No,” Hawtrey assured her, “at least, never when he can help it. He had, however, started something shortly before I left him. You see, the house has needed cleaning, the last month or two, and we tossed up for who should do it. It fell to Sproatly, who didn’t seem quite pleased, but he got as far as firing the chairs and tables out into the snow. Then he sat down for a smoke, and he was looking at them through the window when I drove away.”
“Ah,” commented Sally, “you want somebody to keep the house straight and look after you. Didn’t you know any nice girls back there in the Old Country?”
She spoke naturally, and there was nothing to show that the girl’s heart beat a little more rapidly than usual as she watched Hawtrey. His face, however, grew a trifle graver, for she had touched upon a momentous question to such men as he. Living in Spartan simplicity upon the prairie, there are a good many of them, well-trained, well-connected young Englishmen, and others like them from Canadian cities. They naturally look for some grace of culture or refinement in the woman they would marry, and there are few women of the station to which they once belonged who could face the loneliness and unassisted drudgery that must be borne by the small wheat-grower’s wife. There were also reasons why this question had been troubling Hawtrey in particular of late.
“Oh, yes, of course, I knew nice girls in England, one or two,” he answered. “I’m not quite sure, however, that girls of that kind would find things even moderately comfortable here.”
A certain reflectiveness in his tone, which seemed to indicate that he had already given the matter some consideration, jarred upon Sally. Moreover, she had an ample share of the Western farmer’s pride, which firmly declines to believe that there is any land to compare with the one the plow is slowly wresting from the wide white levels of the prairie.