"Oh, listen to Miss Prim!" Marjorie interrupted. "Who would think she had a letter from her mother asking if she was canning any buffalo beans?"
It was not until Spoof's tall form had dissolved out of view in the starlight that it occurred to me how skilfully he had changed the conversation from the subject of Mrs. Alton. It was something to think about.
CHAPTER XIII.
We did as Spoof suggested. Early the next afternoon we hitched Buck and Bright to the wagon and wended our slow way south-westward, Jack and I taking turns in the exclamatory exercises by means of which the oxen were kept in motion. The prairie now was very brown and bare, and only the more hardy gophers remained about to whistle saucily at our carry-all lumbering by. The dazzling sunshine seemed to have lost its force, and there was a presage of coming winter in the air. We dropped into silence save for the noises of our locomotion.
"The world seems to have died," said Jean after a long period of thoughtfulness.
The expression was an appropriate one. The world was, actually, dead. Every blade of grass was a stark little corpse, swaying ghostily to the stir of the cold air. Soon the shroud of Winter would be woven about them, flake by flake, mantling them all in its cold, white tomb.
"But in the spring it will live again," Jean continued, after a pause. "That is the life eternal."
Jean was a strange girl. Her thoughts went on and on, reaching out, and out. She seemed to live always on the verge of the infinite. . . .
At length we were at Brown's. The rickety shack, smaller than either of ours, presented a sad and forlorn appearance. Three little faces were crowded in the single window that covered our approach. Brown himself was busy building a stable of sods, and succeeding very badly in his work. He could scarcely be distinguished from his building material, but when he saw us he shook himself, as a dog shakes off water, and came up, touching his cap.
"We are your neighbours from Fourteen," we announced ourselves. "May we go in?"