“You are tired, Ray,” said the girl. “Let me show you to your room.”
“Yep,” added the farmer. “The sleepin’ sickness has got you. We have it just as bad as in Africa. It don’t kill anybody here, but there’s no cure ’cept to sleep it off. Trouble is, the new-comer allus gets the sleepin’ sickness an’ the eatin’ sickness tugether, which makes it powerful hard on the proprietor. It’s twenty-one years since Ah struck these diggin’s, an’ Ah mind yet how Ah et an’ slep’ that first year. Your mother use to say there wa’n’t no use cookin’ agin an appetite like that. Yep, Kid, that was twenty-one years ago. You was born the next spring.”
“That’s how Dad betrays a woman’s secret,” bantered the girl. But the farmer was leaning forward in his chair, his eyes staring at the sparks as they dropped from the grate. His elbows rested on his knees, his palms stretched straight before him, the fingers touching at the tips. There was a strange tenderness in the weather-worn face; a misty light in those honest old eyes. He was thinking of a little mound, just up the hillside, on which the grass had grown for twenty years.
The girl touched Burton’s arm. He looked in her face, and she raised her eyebrows a hair’s-breadth. No word was spoken as he followed her silently up the stairs.
At the door of his room she placed the lamp in his hand. Then in a low voice she said, “Dad never forgets. Dear old Dad!”
She remained lost in thought for a few moments, and Burton surveyed her. She had removed the brown riding habit in which he first saw her, and stood revealed in a modest black dress. Her fair face, brown with the summer winds, seemed almost to fade into the masses of her brown hair, as the calm sea fades into the shore-line. The only shade of colour she wore was a string of scarlet ribbon drawing the dark garment together at her throat. She was rather under average height, and at first he thought her slim, but a second glance convinced him that the perfection of her proportions and her strong, athletic life gave an impression that the scales would quickly dissipate. The upper lip rose slightly in the centre, as though alert to smile; the nose, strong but not over large, caught the vision for a moment, but immediately it was stolen by the eyes. What eyes they were! The warmth of the chinook, the freedom of the great plains, the wonder of sunset and dawn, the mystery of the deep, starless night, the courage of the white, fearless winter—all were blended in their hazel depths; or was it brown, or amber-grey? The lamp tricked him; he would see in daylight.
Her wits came back from their wanderings with a suddenness that caused her to start.
“You were dreaming at supper-time,” she said. “I am dreaming now.”
“God bless the world’s dreamers,” said Burton, fervently. “How often in Bible history He revealed himself to His people in a dream! And shall He not do it still? Can we suppose the Father of thought has lost the key to the midnight chambers of the brain? But practical men despise dreamers.”
Her eyes had opened wider as he spoke; she was leaning slightly toward him when he finished. Thoughts are such mighty magnets that they attract even the material bodies that encase them. There was an appreciation in her look and her partly opened lips that Burton did not fail to notice.