“Practical men are fools,” she said. “Good night.”
For some days Burton did not find himself assigned to any regular duties about the farm. Grain-growing was only a small part of Mr. McKay’s business, and was, indeed, still regarded as largely experimental; the real wealth of the farm was represented by the herds of ranch cattle which fed in the heavy grass of the valley or roamed the unsettled plains for miles around. With these herds Burton had no concern; they were under the care of two cowboys long in Mr. McKay’s employ. Decent fellows Burton found them to be, yet while they treated him with frank familiarity they could not altogether disguise their inbred conviction that the cow-puncher is of better clay than the sod-buster. He envied them their wild free life, their rides over the limitless plains, their “leave and liking to shout,” while he sharpened the binder knives and tacked new slats on the canvases, and made fly-blankets for the horses out of twine sacks. The ancient war of the herdsman and the grainman was being fought out again in his own breast, and he secretly admitted a sense of envy. To ride the plains seemed a greater thing than to till them.
But if the cattlemen excited a measure of envy in the breast of Burton, he soon discovered that he had unwittingly aroused their jealousy. Although their feeling toward him took no unkind form of expression, he became more and more conscious that he was regarded as an intruder, an unwelcome person tolerated simply for courtesy’s sake. And the boy knew, by a kind of intuition, that the farmer’s daughter was largely responsible for this. With the cattlemen she chatted flippantly, giving them word for word and laughing at their smartest sallies; but with Burton she talked slowly in the dusk of the long, cool evenings, when the work inside and out was finished, and the farmer smoked his pipe on the kitchen porch. The cowboys, whom she had known for years, she still held saucily at a safe distance; but with Burton, on a week’s acquaintance, she spoke of things whereof her soul hungered for conversation. She had taken the boy at his word. She had started in the middle of the book.
And to himself Burton confessed that to him she was a new relevation of womanhood. At times, out of the nightmare of the past, he would conjure up that face which, in all his wanderings and through all his associations, still hedged his soul about on every side, so that he could follow no emotion far until he met it. He saw her as she rode home on her pony along the pasture path, while the gathering dusk raised the willows very tall about them; he saw her as they sat by the water’s edge that never to-be-forgotten Sunday at the Crossing; he saw her again, half-reclining against a wall, her face drawn as though with pain and yet flushed as in excitement, the flickering light of an uncertain fire falling upon her fine features. He stood her before him and he tried to compare, but he could not compare. It was as though one would compare form with colour, or sound with sight. She was, he knew, everything that was “pure womanly,” but this daughter of the prairie was something more. Although clothed in all the delicacy of her sex, she seemed to hide nothing, to conceal nothing, behind that distinction of nature which has been so grossly misused by convention. At times she spoke to him as a sister might speak; at other times it might have been the voice of his mother; again, she was a child at his feet; but most of all it seemed she spoke as a brother. It was this spirit of comradeship, this attitude of equality, this frankness so sincere that it seemed the only natural thing—the inevitable thing—it was these that drew his soul out to her with the affection of a brother. And yet he marvelled that the face still hedged him about; that every new experience, every new confidence, seemed to paint it still clearer on his mind’s horizon.
The season wore on. Presently the wheat fields were ripe, and Burton found himself so lost in work that thoughts of his past, his present, and his future seemed crowded out of the busy hours. His practical knowledge of farm work and farm machinery, and the genuine personal interest he took in everything that fell to his lot, won for him a regard by the old farmer that was almost paternal. Indeed, more than once Mr. McKay dropped remarks about his advancing years, intimating that he felt the time must soon come when he should place the active management of his affairs in younger hands, and on such occasions Burton felt his heart bound as the thought of a possibility fired his pulses. But then the face rose, calm and thoughtful, and the possibility died away amid the mist of dreams.
And then, one Sunday afternoon, after the wheat was all in stook, came another incident to change the course of his career. The cowboys, with a number of friends, were riding to neighbouring ranches; Mr. McKay dozed over an old newspaper as he sat in the shade of the kitchen porch; and Burton and Kate lounged on the front verandah, reading little excerpts from their magazines, but most of the time staring with dreaming eyes across the hot prairies.
“Pshaw,” said Burton, after his fourth attempt to centre his interest in a story, “I can’t read to-day. Let’s go for a walk, Kate.” He called her Kate now, although he had not been able to bring himself to the more familiar name by which the other hands addressed her. And yet he knew that he was much better acquainted with her than were they.
The girl clasped her hands above her head and yawned leisurely. Then she looked long and intently at the fringe of willows along the gulley. “It’s too hot,” she said at length.
“What, you a prairie girl and afraid of the heat?” Burton bantered.
“I’m not afraid of it,” she answered, laughing, “but I respect it. And I can’t walk in the grass in this skirt. And most of all,” she confessed, bringing her elbows to her knees and resting her chin on her hands—“most of all, I’m lazy.”