SOON after the garments of Barbara McNair dawned upon the congregation, her husband bought three hundred acres of land at three dollars an acre. There are those who say a man owning eight hundred and forty acres of land should be happy. Alex McNair was not. There was in his flesh one great thorn—that Glasgow wife.
She had lived through the autumn and the terrible winter, waiting for spring. And now that spring was here, what was it? Only an oozy wet waste, with patches of green in the lower places, and winds shrieking always across flat desolations. Near the sty, a sagging haystack of a barn, and a couple of bony cows trampling dead grasses deeper into the mire of the dooryard. If only there had been even a little white house, and a fence, and a few flowers sending up their endearing shoots! But this! And her from Glasgow!
Words failed her.
Had she not set forth day by day and hour by hour conscientiously, the necessity of a new house? Yet in the face of her demands, her man had gone to town to buy more wilderness. If she had known that spring that Dod was to sell part of that land for six hundred dollars an acre, her contempt for her husband’s folly would scarcely have been less hot. There he was, driving into the yard now! She went to the door and greeted him.
“You didn’t buy it?” she asked.
“Did I not say I would buy it?” he answered doggedly.
Not a change of expression passed over her face. She stood watching him unhitch his team. She had never before been so much interested in that process, having always avoided the barn.
The next day, when he was in the field, and Dod was hitching up, she went out and watched him. Would he show her how he did that? she asked. She thought she ought to know, she said. Which were the gentlest horses? And which harness did they take? She learned where it all hung in the barn. Dod liked teaching an old person. It wasn’t any trick to hitch a horse to the wagon, he said. You put this under the belly, so. And the lines through here, taking them from here, thus. She practiced. She grew proficient. She waited.
One day in early May her husband rode away horseback to the Keiths’, to pay back one of the many days of labor he owed that family. He left home at daylight, and Dod went to school. Then Barbara began.
When McNair came home that evening, Dod asked, lonesomely,