"Nope. Guess she's flewed the coop. Gosh! but I'm hungry. Guess I'd better hop along and catch up with the bunch, before they bolt all o' the grub."
Which remark, needless to say, brought a clamorous invitation to dinner from the young Days, and after the usual protest at the trouble he'd be making, accompanied by a questioning, rather wistful look toward Nettie, who shyly seconded the children's invitation, he "guessed, well, mebbe I will, though don't go to any trouble for me."
Trouble! Nettie flew about the mean room, her cheeks aflame, her eyes shining, her heart singing like a bird's within her, while the children crowded about their guest, on whom, in his buckskin shirt, fur chapps, gauntlets and cowboy hat, their young prairie eyes gazed as upon a hero.
It may, moreover, be recorded that Nettie was by no means the only one through whose veins an exhilarating elixir seemed to be bounding like champagne. Young Cyril Stanley at that moment was violently aware of a thumping organ to the left of his cardiac region.
Love knows not time. It wells up in the human heart like the wave of the ocean that may not be beaten down. Nettie Day, hurrying about the kitchen, preparing a meal for the hungry stranger, and the stranger, with a "kid" on either knee and the others pressed as closely to him as space would allow, displaying his big jackknife, quirt, beaded hatband and ticking watch to the delighted youngsters, looked at each other across the space of that poor and meager room, it seemed, though they could not have expressed it in words, that somehow life had become a poem, a glad dancing song.
CHAPTER III
The winter was long and harsh, with scarcely a single Chinook to temper the intense cold. To Nettie, vainly seeking to cope with the work, the noise and the disorder, which the shutting in of a dozen husky youngsters must inevitably entail, and to Cyril Stanley, conscientiously at work in the purebred camp of the Bar Q, the Alberta winter had never seemed so long and grim. Cyril, however, found an outlet for the new feelings that he did not find hard to analyze. An Ontario-born boy, of pure Scotch ancestry, he was both sentimental and practical. Though he had met her but once, he was certain that Nettie was the only girl in the world for him, and with a canny eye to the near future, he began immediately to prepare for the realization of his dreams. It did not take Cyril long to make application for the quarter-section homestead land, which lay midway between the Day place and Dr. McDermott's original homestead. The savings of several years were prudently expended upon barbed wire and fence post.
Though the best rider and roper of the Bar Q, and in line for the post of foreman of that tempestuous ranch, Cyril's faith was in the grain land, and he purposed to develop his homestead as soon as he could afford to do so. By sacrificing a certain amount of his pay, he could leave the Bar Q in the slack seasons and put in a certain amount of work each year upon his place. Already he possessed a few head of cattle and horses, and he planned to trade some of these for implements. He would begin the building of the house in the summer, after the fencing was done. The boy's thoughts dwelt long and tenderly upon that house all winter long. He had the heart and home hunger of the man in the ranching country, who has come little into contact with women, yet craves their companionship. Cyril's longing was the keener in that he now found himself in love for the first time in his life. He pictured Nettie in the house he would build, saw her moving about preparing their meal, thrilled at the thought of their eyes meeting and the touch of her hand in his. How she would light up the place.