“I reckon we do, but we got over it, and so will Mrs. Aydelot.”
“How do you know that?” Asher inquired eagerly. “I believe she could hardly keep back the tears till I got away.”
“Then why didn’t you get away sooner? I know she will get over it, because she’s as good a woman as we are men, and we stood for it.”
“Well, here’s your plow. Better get your guard thrown up. I can smell smoke now. There’s a prairie fire sweeping in on this wind somewhere. There’s a storm brewing, too. Remember what a fight we had with fire a year ago?”
Asher was helping to put Jim’s team in the harness.
“Yes, you saved your well and a few other little things. But you’ve got your grit, you darned Buckeye, to hold on 37 and start again from the ashes. And now you have your wife here. You are lucky,” Jim declared.
“Where’s that broken plow of yours? Is it bolt or weld? Maybe I can mend it.” Asher was casting about for tools.
“It’s bolt. Everything is on the stable shelves,” Jim called back against the wind, as he drove the plow deep in the black soil. “Be sure you put ’em back when you are through with ’em, too.”
“Poor Jim!” Asher said to himself with a smile. “The artist in him makes him keep the place in order. He’d stop to hang up his coat and vest if he had to fight a mad bull. Poor judgment puts a good many tragedies into lives as well as stage villain types of crime.”
And then Asher thought of Virginia, and wondered what she was doing through the long afternoon. He was whistling softly with a smile in his eyes as Jim Shirley made the tenth round of the premises and stopped opposite the stable door.