The widow had had time to dress since we hove in view—that is one of the advantages of prairie life not set out in the immigration booklets—and it was a dainty and spick-and-span Mrs. Alton that greeted us when our wagon lumbered up to her door.
"I said, 'It's our friends from Fourteen and Twenty-two'—you see how I am picking up your prairie way of numbering your farms instead of naming them—I said, 'It's our friends from Fourteen and Twenty-two' as soon as I heard Sandy's first bark. That was before you were in sight, so far as my poor eyes could see. But Jerry, who was up in the wagon playing teamster cried, 'I see dem, Mudder; oxes and Mith Lane.' He's crazy about Miss Lane."
"Jerry is a young man of discrimination," I said, scoring for once. But my wit was lost in the wild and panting hug which Jean was bestowing upon my rival.
"So he's Jerry now," said Jean, releasing her embrace enough for speech. "That sounds like getting down to earth. Ever so much more chummy than Gerald."
"Do you think so?" Mrs. Alton queried. "And I had vowed that, whatever came, I never would call him Jerry. Too reminiscent of Jeremiah, and lamentations, and all that sort of thing that I wanted to get away from." Mrs. Alton stopped short, as though she had said more than she intended, then brightly took up the thread again. "I vowed I would leave my lamentations behind," she continued. "I take it that this is a country where there is room for everything but regrets."
It was evident that Mrs. Alton's bereavement was filling a good part of her mind, so Jean deftly switched the conversation back to the boy, and presently was conducting a foot-race to the chicken shed with herself, Jerry, and Sandy as the competitors. Sandy won.
We had tea, of course, and after Jerry had gone to bed and Sandy had lain down with his chops on the floor between his paws and his tail thumping the boards occasionally in approbation Jack got out our much worn deck of cards and we initiated Mrs. Alton into the mysteries of pedro. With a beginner's luck she and Jack were much too successful for Jean and me, and when it was time for us to go we insisted that she must visit Fourteen some night soon and give us a chance to return the drubbing.
"I should so like to, but I can't leave Jerry," Mrs. Alton explained.
"But Jerry must come, too," we countered. "Jerry and Sandy, and, if necessary, the cow and the chickens. Now you simply must, or some night we will come over and kidnap you by force." But Mrs. Alton would give us no definite answer.
There was no such hesitation at Jake's. Jake met us in the yard, hatless, coatless, vestless, although the temperature was flirting with the freezing point.