Evidently Spoof had come to the point where he was willing to work, but certainly not to allow work to interfere with his social engagements. Fragments of harness about the door of the tent indicated the line of his effort just before we had come up, but now he was pouring tea and helping sugar and biscuits and cheese with a grace of manner which made Jack and me and even Marjorie a little ill at ease. We had an uncomfortable feeling of being out of our class, as one does when he listens to a conversation in which his limitations will allow him to take little part. Only Jean seemed to wholly enjoy it; she was talking with him about prairie cloudscapes, and seemed to have quite forgotten herself in her enthusiasm. As I listened I marvelled how wonderful Jean's voice was; it was not harsh or guttural or uneven, but seemed to flow in a liquid, limpid stream, tinkling and rippling and running in happy little rills. It must have sounded very sweet to English ears.
Spoof, too, seemed to enjoy the conversation, and to react to the music of Jean's voice. He was too fine mannered to monopolize the stage with any one of his guests; occasionally he threw conversational feelers at Marjorie, and Jack, and me, but we were slow in the up-take, and before we quite knew what he was talking about the dialogue had again passed back to Jean. She seemed to have a grasp of things, of delicate, thoughtful, artistic things, far beyond any gift of ours. I was astonished and a bit terrified by the gulf which I now found spreading between her plane and mine. I had not been conscious of that gulf before. I had not failed to appreciate Jean's charms, but never before had I realized how high her level was above mine; never before had I felt myself unworthy of her; never had I known the lurking fear that some one, of finer clay than I, might claim her in the end.
The sun was setting when our little caravan started homeward, casting its mammoth shadows across the soft, warm prairies, and bearing Spoof's promise to return our visit at the earliest opportunity.
CHAPTER VIII.
Spoof was as good as his word. The following Sunday we saw his ox-team as a slowly-growing speck on section Eleven, and a mile away we heard remarks to the "bally bullocks" which, presumably, were intended to be confidential.
"I just brought the bullocks for exercise," he explained, when he drew up before our shack. "I could have walked much easier, and much quicker, but they keep my arms and voice in form."
Even while Spoof was speaking, his oxen, attracted by the smell of fresh hay at our stable, moved down over the bank of the gully and upset the wagon en route. We disentangled them with some difficulty.
"I begin to lose sympathy with them; I really do," said Spoof, when we found that the reach of his wagon was broken. "Now I shall have to bind this bally thing together. Yesterday they balked in the hay meadow; in the hay meadow, mind you, where, if at all, an ox should be in an amiable mood. I argued with them for an hour, without effect, and then I went home and read a magazine. It's an ill wind, you know. They followed me about supper time."
"I'll tell you how to fix them," Jack remarked. "Next time they balk——"
"But if I fix them they won't be able to move at all," Spoof protested. "'Fix' is to make fast, to render immovable, and they're too much that way already."