"I don't know but it is a little over-kept as it is," Marjorie admitted, "but we're going to eat it to-night." And so we sat about our little table, with the great rabbit pie in the middle, and great helpings of potatoes and onions on our plates, and flakey white bread and yellow home-made butter within reach, and the light beating down from an oil lamp on the wall, and would not have changed places with any one on earth.
The next day revealed changes in the neighbourhood which we had not had time to notice or discuss in the evening. A number of settlers had come in. The girls had not seen any of them, but could give almost as accurate descriptions as though they had. It seems Spoof had come over to Fourteen every Sunday afternoon during our absence, and, for all the shyness against which Jean had protested, he had managed to regale the girls with the gossip of the community, for our two little shacks were really becoming the centre of a neighbourhood. From Spoof they learned that the Browns had landed from England with three children and hardly anything else, and had built a shack on the south-west quarter of Four. Mr. Brown had been a game-keeper in England. His wife was a wistful little body who seemed likely to have plenty to wist over before her children were raised on the living that a game-keeper would wring from the soil. On the north-west of Eighteen, just four miles west of us, a Scottish shipbuilder named Smith had located. He appeared to be unmarried. Three miles north of us, on Thirty-four, a Swede named Hanson had built a shanty twelve feet square in which he was housed with his wife and six children, and on Thirty-six a Russian had dug himself a sort of cave in the bank of the gully. He, too, had a wife and numerous offspring, but the exact number had not yet been ascertained.
"Ay tank thar bane plenty," Ole Hansen had said, when discussing the subject with Spoof. And as Ole regarded his own six hopefuls as "yust a nice commence," the imagination was rather stirred by the possibilities of what the cave on Thirty-six might disclose to the census taker.
"How do you say his name?" Spoof had inquired.
"Yah don' say it. Yah sneeze it," Ole explained.
"Sneezit—that'll do," said Spoof. And so, quite without his knowledge or consent, our Russian neighbour was supplied with an English name; a name which may some day—who knows?—be borne with pride by one of our best families.
Then there was Burke, an American from Iowa, a man with a lust for labor and for doing things on a big scale. He and his wife had landed on section Twenty about the middle of August, and, ignoring the tradition that it is useless to break prairie sod in the fall, had already turned over a broad strip from end to end of their quarter section. Burke it was who introduced mules into the settlement. From what the girls were able to gather from Spoof mules called for an even more extended vocabulary than did oxen.
"And you want us to believe that Spoof told you all these things without ever coming into the house?" I challenged.
"Never a foot over the doorstep," said Jean. "That is, hardly ever. It's a big country; why be so particular for a foot or two?"
"Oh, I'm not; not at all. I'm merely checking up what you said last night."