For a moment Jean's face was a puzzle as her mind unravelled the mixed threads of Jake's little comedy. But suddenly her eyes blazed with a light such as I had seen in them only once before, and then, as now, it was for Spoof that light had burned.
"So you sent him out on a day like this," she said, speaking slowly and through teeth that were almost closed—"you sent him out on a day like this, across the untracked snow, hunting for something that doesn't exist. He may find something he wasn't sent for."
"Oh, come now, Sister, don't take it too seriously. It is just a joke."
"It will he no joke if Spoof is lost on the prairie," she returned; "no joke for any of us. For example, there will be no marriage in this house, so far as I am concerned, if anything happens to Spoof."
"Isn't that rather mixing the issue?" I said, perhaps a little testily. "Spoof has nothing to do with our marriage."
"No, but I have," she answered, with a pointedness that could not be escaped.
"You make a mountain out of a mole-hill," Jack told her, sharply. "One would think it was Spoof you were in love with, instead of Frank."
"If I discuss that at all I will discuss it with Frank, alone," she retorted, with some heat. The color which had fled her face for a moment had come back in a flood, filling her cheeks and forehead, overflowing down her neck and into her hair. If Jean the placid, Jean the mild-mannered, Jean the amiable was lovely, Jean the aroused, Jean the defiant, was adorable. I made that appraisal even while in her eyes I read something akin to my death warrant.
"I was quite serious in what I said, Frank," she continued, after a moment. "If it makes any difference to you perhaps you will follow Spoof. He hasn't the prairie sense that you have; he may be lost by this time. Fortunately there is no ground-drift, and his tracks will show."
"Of course, if you think there is any danger, I'll go," I agreed, eager for a way out of an awkward position, and lacerated at heart by a sense of the breach that had occurred between us. So Jack and I set out to follow Spoof's tracks. We traced him without difficulty to Burke's.