Jean hustled about and my eyes followed every graceful movement as she prepared hot tea and made toast at the fire, and found a jar of preserves that she had cached away for some special occasion. And when we had finished our betrothal banquet she gave me a lamp and sent me into Jack's room. And after a little her limpid voice called to me a last good-night, and through the open doorway of my partition—we could not afford unnecessary doors in those days—I saw her slender hand tossing me a caress. And then her light went out, and I lay under Jack's warm blankets listening to the roar of the storm and hoping Jack was quite all right, and marvelling at the amount of happiness one human heart can hold. My doubts were gone; my faith was again the faith of a little child. And my mind wandered back into the past and picked up again those tender days of childhood when Jean and I played together beside the dam, and the sober mill-wheel across the stream flung its myriads of diamonds in the air. And Jean had saved me in those days, and I was to be hers—hers, and she mine, forever!
CHAPTER XV.
I awakened with a consciousness that the shack was very, very cold. Under the blankets I was warm enough, but the breath with which I filled my lungs was the breath of the Arctic. The cabin was in inky darkness. Outside, the whine of the gale had risen to a roar, and the frail timbers of the little shanty creaked and trembled under its fury. I thought of Jack, and wondered. The telephone—best of all God's good gifts through the inventive mind of man to those who live in the isolation of vast distances—was as yet not in general use on the prairies. As I look to-night at the telephone on my desk by means of which I can speak instantly to Jack's house or any other house in the neighbourhood I am reminded that these miracles of to-day are accepted so much as a matter of course that we are in danger of forgetting what the world was before they came. But that night there was no telephone on my wall, or Jack's; no fire-shod messengers from house to house could bear through the storm the cheerful news that all was well.
So I thought of Jack and wondered. Jean had accepted his absence with composure; she afterwards said that Brook, the Mounted Policeman, had told her that the man who was prairie-wise, when caught away from home by a storm, stayed where he was safe, even if his doing so occasioned some uneasiness to his friends.
"It is better that your friends should be uneasy while the storm is on than that they should follow you with flowers when the weather clears," Brook had declared, and Jean, after accepting the philosophy, had passed it on to Jack. She had no doubt that he was as safe on Fourteen as was I on Twenty-two.
But I had none of this philosophy to steady me, and I was decidedly uneasy about Jack. My brief wrestle with the storm had shown me how easy it was to become hopelessly lost even among the most familiar surroundings and how soon exhaustion would overpower one. A little irresistible shiver of nervousness ran up my spine as I realized how fortunate I had been in coming back to my starting point. I might have missed it and gone on into the night. . . .
As the frost settled down about me I at length, by a great effort, sprang out of bed and went groping for my clothes. I was not yet pioneer enough to know that it is fine business in very cold weather to sleep with your clothing, or at least your underwear and socks, under your pillow; it lessens the ordeal of that first break from the warm blankets into the wintry atmosphere. At length I found my clothes and scrambled into them, chattering and blowing prodigiously in the operation. No man—still less woman—knows what haste he can develop in his dressing operations until he has had a below-zero temperature as a pace-maker.
Finding matches I lighted my lamp and sallied forth into the main room. The boards beneath me creaked dismally as my weight came upon them; a drift of snow several feet in length and the shape of a great fish had formed across the room as a result of a crack in the door; the stove was ice cold; the water pails were frozen over; the little clock on the shelf had stopped. My watch was of better mettle and revealed the fact that it was seven-thirty. We had slept well.
I made shavings from a poplar stick in the wood box and soon had a fine fire roaring. When once it was started the great draft of the storm drew it impetuously up the sheet-iron pipes, and I was obliged to apply the damper. No more unhappy irony can befall the homesteader than to burn down his shack in his attempts to warm it.
"Good morning, Frank!" said a voice which set the pumps of my heart going to jig music. I think Jean's voice was really her most wonderful quality; she was enough of the artist to appreciate and cultivate the fine manners of the voice. It had the lilt of singing birds, the limpidity of purling water, the softness of rose-leaves in the twilight, the tinkling of silver bells at dawn, and if I can think of any other figure it had that, too, for me in those old love-hallowed days of mine.