REGARDING THE INTERMARRIAGE OF RACES
IT WAS winter, and the white snow lay everywhere; icicles hung from the eaves. All work on the farms was completed. People were journeying to a town half way between Bonesteel and Gregory to take the train for their former homes; others to spend it with their relatives, and Jean Baptiste was taking it for Chicago and New York where he went as a rule at the end of each year.
He was going with an air of satisfaction apparently; for, in truth, he had everything to make him feel so—that is, almost everything. He had succeeded in the West. The country had experienced a most profitable season, and the crop he reaped and sold had made him in round numbers the sum of seven thousand five hundred dollars. He had paid for the two hundred acres of land he had bargained for; he had seeded more land in the autumn just passed to winter wheat which had gone into the winter in the best of shape; his health was the best. For what more could he have wished?
And yet no man was more worried than he when he stepped from the stage onto the platform of the station where he was to entrain for the East.... It is barely possible that any man could have been more sad.... To explain this we are compelled to go back a few months; back to the harvest time; to his homestead and where he sat with some one near, very near, and what followed.
"I couldn't help it—I loved you; love you—have loved you always!" he passionately told her.
For answer she had yielded again her lips, and all the love of her warm young heart went out to him.
"I don't understand you always, dear," he whispered. "Sometimes there is something about you that puzzles me. I think it's in your eyes; but I do understand that whatever it is it is something good—it couldn't be otherwise, could it?"
"No, Jean," she faltered.
"And did you wonder at my calling your name that night?"
"I have never understood that fully until now," she replied.