The uneasiness of the Grants was set at rest by telephone, which, despite many burnt poles, was fortunately still in service, and Gardiner, nothing loath, ’phoned his clerk that he would not be in until late.
The sun had set, and a moonless sky, studded with a million diamond points, arched over Gardiner and Miss Vane as they drove home through the smoke-scented night air. A hundred points of fire glowed like great coals on the horizon, with here and there a brighter pyramid of flame marking a burning stack or some unfortunate settler’s buildings. After the heat and excitement of the day everything was strangely cool, and quiet, and peaceful. The milch cows lay in their corrals, complacently chewing, and occasionally heaving great sighs of satisfaction; the horses, which had sniffed the smoke in terror during the day, had by this time concluded that it was all a part of the mysterious designs of their strange master, man, and settled themselves to enjoy a night free from the bane of flies and mosquitoes. A rainbow of light arose in the northern sky and deepened in colour until every fairy of auroraland seemed dancing in draperies of white and pink and yellowish green before the footlights of the Arctic circle to the music of the silence of immeasurable space.
“It is wonderful, isn’t it?” said Miss Vane, after a long silence. “These great prairies—how majestic they are, how silent, how awe-inspiring. It is the first time I have seen them in anger—at war with the puny efforts of man. And even in their anger how beautiful they are! You prairie-dwellers have, I am told, two great elements of danger—the blizzard and the prairie fire?”
“Three,” said Gardiner.
“Three? And what is the third?”
“Love.”
For the moment she was taken off her guard. It was the one subject she did not care to discuss with Gardiner. But she answered, in a quiet impersonal voice,
“Love is not peculiar to the prairies.”
“No, but the love of the prairies is peculiar. How can a soul, hemmed in by the works of man, seeing life in all the seaminess of man’s—and woman’s—depravity, and knowing that it is but one drop in the ocean of humanity, rise to the sublime heights experienced by the dweller on the prairie, where all the works of nature seem combined to elevate the individual? The greatest organisms come out of the cities, but the greatest individuals will always come out of the country. And love is individual.”
“Inhale that ‘prairie-fire smell in the gloaming,’ Mr. Gardiner. Is it not exquisite?”