“I’m going to start from the very beginning,” she said, with something akin to enthusiasm. “I’m going to start here—right here, on my very own farm. Surely the rudiments must lie here—the rudiments that must be mastered before the greater task of reading that story is begun.” She turned toward the blue hills, where the summer clouds were wrapped about the glistening snowcaps. “Yes,” she cried, clasping her hands enthusiastically, “I want to learn it all—all.” Suddenly she turned back and looked at him with a wonderful, smiling simplicity. “Will you help me?” she said eagerly. “Perhaps—in odd moments? Will you help me with those—lessons?”
Buck’s breath came quickly, and his simple heart was set thumping in his bosom. But his face was serious, and his eyes quite calm as he nodded.
“It’ll be dead easy for you to learn,” he said, a new deep note sounding in his voice. “You’ll learn anything I know, an’ much more, in no time. You can’t help but learn. You’ll be quicker to understand, quicker to feel all those things. Y’ see I’ve got no sort of cleverness—nor nuthin’. I jest look around an’ see things—an’ then, then I think I know.” He laughed quietly at his own conceit. “Oh, yes! sometimes I guess I know it all. An’ then I get sorry for folks that don’t, an’ I jest wonder how it comes everybody don’t understand—same as me. Then something happens.”
“Yes, yes.”
Joan was so eager she felt she could not wait for the pause that followed. Buck laughed.
“Something happens, same as it did yesterday,” he went on. “Oh, it’s big—it sure is!” he added. And he turned again to his contemplation of the hills.
But Joan promptly recalled his wandering attention.
“You mean—the storm?” she demanded.
Buck nodded.