"How healthy you men are!" she exclaimed, clasping her fingers in a nervous grip. "If only Gerald will grow up like that!"
"We will come over when the men bring the lumber, and help them build your house," Jack volunteered.
"The lumber—what lumber? Oh, the boards! Oh, how good of you!"
The regard in which she held us appeared to rise another degree.
"And are you carpenters, as well as farmers?" she asked. "How wonderfully clever your men are, here. I had to go to a doctor in Regina—Gerald had a rash, or something—it was in the evening and I found him at his house, building a chicken-coop. Jolly wonderful, isn't it?"
As the shadow of the democrat filled the tent door we spoke of leaving.
"Not until you have had tea," she insisted. "We shall have tea with biscuits and jam. I bought an oil stove in Regina—a most wonderful machine. We shall have it ready in a moment."
While she started her oil stove she asked, casually enough, "And am I the only new-comer in all this big prairie which you have been having to yourselves?"
"No; you are the second," I answered. "We already have one neighbour, a countryman of yours, down on section Two. Spoof, he calls himself, although that is not his real name."
She was working over the stove, with her back toward us, and perhaps she dallied longer than there was any need for, but I took no notice of the matter at the time.