"Don't you think you have done enough?" said the girl, slipping into a sitting posture on the floor by her mother's knee. "You work, work, work, all the time. I suppose they'll have to let you work in heaven."
"We value our work more as we grow older," said the mother…"It helps to keep us from thinking."
"There you go!" exclaimed the girl; but there was a tenderness in her voice. "Worrying again. I wish they'd stay home for a change."
The mother plied her needles in silence. "Slip away to bed, Beulah," she said at length. "I will wait up for a while."
Late in the night the girl heard heavy footsteps in the kitchen and bursts of loud but indistinct talking.
CHAPTER VII
THE CALL OF THE FARTHER WEST
Notwithstanding Harris's late hours the household was early astir the following morning. At five o'clock Jim was at work in the stables, feeding, rubbing down, and harnessing his horses, while Allan and his father walked to the engine, where they built a fresh fire and made some minor repairs. Even at this early hour the sun shone brightly, its rays mellowing in a sheen of ground-mist that enveloped the prairie, but there is a tang in the Manitoba morning air even in midsummer, and the men walked briskly through the crisp stubble. A little later Beulah came down to the corral with her milk-pails, and the cows, comfortably chewing where they rested on their warm spots of earth, rose slowly and with evident great reluctance at her approach. A spar of light blue smoke ascended in a perpendicular column from the kitchen chimney; motherly hens led their broods forth to forage; pigs grunted with rising enthusiasm from near-by pens, and calves voiced insistent demands from their quarters. The Harris farm, like fifty thousand others, rose from its brief hush of rest and quiet to the sounds and energies of another day.
Breakfast, like the meal of the night before, was eaten hurriedly, and at first without conversation, but at length Harris paused long enough to remark, "Riles is talkin' o' goin' West."
"The news might be worse," said Beulah. Riles, although a successful farmer, had the reputation of being grasping and hard to a degree, even in a community where such qualities, in moderation, were by no means considered vices.