It was this prairie characteristic that possessed Jim Burns, when he struck up the "Blizzard Song of Meadowlea" in the face of a gathering blizzard. This melody is a versified account of an actual happening, in which a farmhouse in the School District of Meadowlea caught fire during a blizzard and the family lost their lives in the storm.
"I say, old son," Ware leaned and tapped the singer on the shoulder at the conclusion of a line running: 'An' here an' there, in drifts of snow, a frozen corpse they found', "that is a piquant tune, you know, and you're in splendid voice—but shall we try something we all know—something comic, for instance?"
Jim Burns paused reluctantly. "Oh, all right," he grumbled, after a moment; "how about 'The Dying Cowboy'?"
"Splendid!" assented Sir William, "is that comic?"
Jim Burns rubbed his head ponderingly.
"It ain't very comic, Bill," John Nixon explained, "but—I begin to see your point—there ain't nothin' about blizzards in it. Let her go, Jim."
"Yes," said Ware, "let her go, Burns, old chap. Majority vote for 'The Dying Cowboy'. What do you say, Mrs. Nixon?"
"Oh, don't bother to ast the weemen folk, out in this country," Lovina Nixon's voice came, muffled and sarcastic, from the depths of her shawl, "we ain't got no say, even when it comes to invitin' pernicketty people out to a house that ain't been swept nor dusted for two weeks."
"I took and scrubbed the whole floor, Mam, two days ago," said Jim Burns, in an injured voice. "The minute I got your letter that you was comin' home, I peeled off and went to her, with snow-water an' soap." Jim Burns did not add that he had scrubbed the farmhouse because he had expected Daisy with the party.
"Snow-water, eh?" Lovina's tone was half-hopeful, "well, Jim, you got more sense than I thought you had. Did you scrub behind the stove?"