Now, on this his first day out in the open, he found himself feeling very weak, a thin, pale shadow of his former self. Curiously enough he had little inclination for anything. He simply stood gazing upon the scene before him, drinking in deep draughts of the pure, bracing, spring air. Though his thoughts should have been with those matters which concerned the welfare of the homestead, they were thousands of miles away, somewhere in a London of his own imagination, among people he had never seen, looking on at a life and pleasures of which he had no knowledge of, and through it all he was struggling to understand how it was Rosebud had come to forget them all so utterly, and so suddenly.
He tried to make allowances, to point out to himself the obligations of the girl’s new life. He excused her at every point; yet, when it was all done, when he had proved to himself the utter impossibility of her keeping up a weekly correspondence, he was 229 dissatisfied, disappointed. There was something behind it all, some reason which he could not fathom.
In the midst of these reflections he was joined by Rube. The old man was smoking his after-breakfast pipe.
“She’s openin’,” he said, indicating the brown patches of earth already showing through the snow. Seth nodded.
They were standing just outside the great stockade which had been completed during Seth’s long illness. There were only the gates waiting to be hung upon their vast iron hinges.
After the old man’s opening remark a long silence fell. Seth’s thoughts ran on unchecked in spite of the other’s presence. Rube smoked and watched the lean figure beside him out of the corners of his eyes. He was speculating, too, but his thought was of their own immediate surroundings. Now that Seth was about again he felt that it would be good to talk with him. He knew there was much to consider. Though perhaps he lacked something of the younger man’s keen Indian knowledge he lacked nothing in experience, and experience told him that the winter, after what had gone before, had been, but for the one significant incident of Seth’s wound, very, very quiet—too quiet.
“Say, boy,” the old man went on, some minutes later, “guess you ain’t yarned a heap ’bout your shootin’ racket?”
Seth was suddenly brought back to his surroundings. 230 His eyes thoughtfully settled on the distant line of woodland that marked the river and the Reservation. He answered readily enough.
“That shootin’ don’t affect nothin’—nothin’ but me,” he said with meaning.
“I thought Little——”