The girl blushed prettily, and then glanced from me towards the tired horses and the standing machine, after which her eyes rested with approval on the stalwart form of Thorn, who came up urging on his plodding team.
"It would be something to be proud of, if one could believe you, Rancher; but I am not wholly pleased with the last part of the speech," she said, with a faint, half-mocking inclination of the head. "I can guess what you are thinking, and you are a trifle slow to learn. Women are very well in their own place, are they not? However, you find it perplexing when they will not stay there, but, because some of them grow tired of breathing incense, they descend and interfere in masculine affairs. It is truly strange that there should be more forces in the world than those centered in big dusty men and splendid horses!"
"You must be a witch; but I am learning by degrees," I said. And the girl laughed merrily.
"You have not progressed very far, to judge by the comparison. Witches were usually pictured as malevolent, old, and ugly."
"I meant a beneficent fairy; but the surprise was not quite unnatural," I said. "Who could suspect in such a slender and fragile person the power she possesses to banish gloom and poverty? Legions of men and horses could not accomplish so much."
"Now you go too far in the opposite direction," and my companion shook her head. "It is the sense of balance you need."
The sun-blaze turned the clustered hair under her wide hat into the likeness of burnished gold—the gold of our own Northwest, with a coppery warmth in it—but the light in her hazel eyes eclipsed its brilliancy. The lithe figure fitted its gorgeous background of yellow radiancy, and again I felt all my pulses quicken as I paid Haldane's daughter silent homage. Magnificent as the wheat, alike to eye and understanding, when one remembered its mission, her presence seemed the crown and complement of all that splendid field. It was hard to refrain from telling her so, and possibly my voice was not pitched quite in its normal key when I said: "It is short of the truth, but there is just one thing I should like to know, and that is whether any other motive than pure benevolence prompted you."
"Why?"
Then I answered boldly: "Because it would be worth the rest to fancy that in some small measure it was due to individual goodwill towards Rancher Ormesby."
The girl looked away from me across the grain, and, as she turned her head, it was with a thrill of pleasure, which may not have been wholly artistic, that I noticed the polished whiteness of her neck and a dainty, pink-tinted little ear that peeped out from the clusters of her hair. Then she laughed, perhaps at Thorn, who argued quaintly, if forcibly, with his reluctant beasts, and turned to me.