“You see now, don’t you,” said Alvin, “that I am homesick? I made myself a hidden refuge. I built a shack and, shut in there, tried to think myself back in the North-West. There upon a nail hangs the gun that has been my companion for so many years.”
He took it down and laid it across his knees, caressing it with his hands.
He talked on, and neither Eweretta nor Philip interrupted him.
“This gun has travelled many a mile slung behind the wagon, and I’ve brought down many a prairie chicken with it. You should see the prairie chickens feasting on the stooks! Ah, they are very good eating! I guess I’ll be too late for the ‘fall’ ploughing. But I shall get a job, never fear. You won’t keep me long waiting, will you? now you have seen—this? I can’t go till I see you married, and you can see now how homesick I am!”
Philip was holding Eweretta’s hand. She was silently weeping.
“I can’t bear to think of your going back to that hard, lonely life, uncle,” she exclaimed. “At least, take enough money for some land and stock. For love of me, take that! I see well enough that you can’t be happy here, but do—oh, do let me help you to make life easy out there!”
“You may lend me the fare out, Eweretta,” he answered. “I will repay it. Oh, I shall be able to repay it! I know that the ‘Thirteenth Man’ will have luck from now. The spell is broken. I shall miss the threshing. Ah, the threshing gets quickly done! Over a thousand bushels of wheat or upwards of two thousand bushels of oats in a day! Man! They go to sleep in this country!”
Alvin bared his brawny arm and looked at it. “This can work,” he said. “Why, once I pulled a cow out alone that had got buried under two settings of straw. It had burrowed where the separator had stood, and the straw had slid off the top with the weight of the snow and buried the poor beast.”
Thomas Alvin was, they saw, drunk with Canada this night. They saw that it would be cruelty to try to prevent his going back. They knew, moreover, that it would be useless to do so.
Eweretta came close to him and put her arms round his neck, her wet cheek against his.