Miss Schuyler was not quite satisfied, but she made no further comment, and there was much to occupy her attention. The bleached plain was bright with sunshine and rolled back into the distance under an arch of cloudless blue, while the crisp, clear air stirred her blood like an elixir. They swept up a rise and down it, the colour mantling in their faces, over the long hollow, and up a slope again, until, as the white grass rolled behind her, Flora Schuyler yielded to the exhilaration of swift motion, and, flinging off the constraint of the city, rejoiced in the springy rush of the mettlesome beast beneath her. Streaming white levels, the blue of the sliding sky, the kiss of the wind on her hot cheek, and the roar of hoofs, all reacted upon her until she laughed aloud when she hurled her half-wild broncho down a slope.
“This is surely the finest country in the world,” she said.
The words were blown behind her, but Hetty caught some of them, and, when at last she drew bridle where a rise ran steep and seamed with badger-holes against the sky, nodded with a little air of pride.
“Oh, yes, and it’s ours. All of it,” she said. “Worth fighting for, isn’t it?”
Flora Schuyler laughed a little, but she shook her head. “It’s a pity one couldn’t leave that out. You would stay here with your men folk if there was trouble?”
Hetty looked at her with a little flash in her eyes. “Why, of course! It’s our country. We made it, and I’d go around in rags and groom the boys’ horses if it would help them to whip out the men who want to take it from us.”
Flora Schuyler smiled a trifle drily. “The trouble is that when we fall out, one is apt to find as good Americans as we are, and sometimes the men we like the most, standing in with the opposition. It has happened quite often since the war.”
Hetty shook her bridle impatiently. “Then, of course, one would not like them any longer,” she said.
Nothing more was said until they crossed the ridge above them, when Hetty pulled her horse up. Across the wide levels before her advanced a line of dusty teams, the sunlight twinkling on the great breaker ploughs they hauled, while the black loam rolled in softly gleaming waves behind them. They came on with slow precision, and in the forefront rolled a great machine that seamed and rent the prairie into triple furrows.
“What are they doing there? Do they belong to you?” asked Miss Schuyler.