"Ah, that is one of its chief virtues. You may not know yet, but you will learn—at least, so Jake assured me—that population is not nearly so scarce on the prairies as it seems. He says that the inmates of one of these little bachelor shacks in many cases number literally millions. Millions. Well—they don't like tarpaper. Blessed be tarpaper!
"The house is to be fourteen feet wide, so that sixteen-foot boards will bend just the right length for the roof. The main room—which is to be all the rooms you mentioned, Jean, and the kitchen as well—will be in the centre of the building. It will be fourteen feet square—like that. At the south end of the building, where the sun will shine in spring and flowers will grow up the wall, will be a room eight by fourteen—Marjorie's. At the north end, where the winter winds will hit us first, will be a room eight by fourteen—Frank's. That's all."
"And the windows?" said Marjorie.
"A window in the south for you, a window in the north for me, a window in the west for the living-room, and a door in the east for us all."
"How simple—and delightful!" Jean trilled. "And is Jack's house—our house—to be the same?"
"That is the intention. Of course, these plans are subject to approval or rejection by the feminine vote, but Jack and I talked it over with Jake, and we figured this was the best we could afford, and the most we could get for the money."
Marjorie seemed to be studying deeply. "Then your window will look across the valley into Jean's," she said suddenly.
Now this was something which I had planned with, it seemed to me, consummate cleverness. I had thought that on dark nights and stormy nights, when the wind was whining dolefully about the gables, my light in my window might be—well, Jean might like to see it there. Still, it was surely right that Jean should occupy a south room, the same as Marjorie. I was provoked at Marjorie for—for finding me out.
"Why, Marjorie, I am surprised," I began, as severely as I could, but Jean cut me short. "I move the adoption of the plan," she said.
So I scratched the outline of the shack in the sod with my shovel and began digging a cellar in the centre of the little plot. For a depth of nearly two feet I dug through a brownish-black loam that turned easily and threw clean from the shovel. Then I struck a sticky, yellow clay, and the going was much slower. But by the time we heard Jack's hoarse voice and his tired oxen clicking their hoofs up the trail on the evening of the second day I had succeeded in making a hole which we agreed to call a cellar.