“Forgive me, Steve; I’m unaccountable to-night.” Her voice, her manner were constrained, subdued. She accepted his injured look without comment, without further defence. She saw the perplexed look on his thin face; then she reached forward––up––and her two soft hands brought his face down to the level of her own.
Deliberately, voluntarily, she kissed him fair upon the lips.
II
The sun was just peering over the rim of the prairie, when Mrs. Warren turned in from the dusty road, picked her way among the browning weeds to the plain, unpainted, shanty-like structure which marked the presence of a homesteader. Except to the east, where stood the tents and shacks of the new railroad’s construction gang, not another human habitation broke the dull, monotonous rolling sea of prairie. 249
Mrs. Warren pounded vigorously upon the rough boards of the door.
A full half-minute she waited; then she glared petulantly at the unresponsive barrier, and pounded upon it again.
Ordinarily she would have waited patiently, for the multitude of duties of one day often found Mrs. Babcock still weary with the dawning of the next––especially since Steve had allied himself with Jack Warren’s engineering corps.
Funds had run low, and the two valetudinarians had reached the stage of desperation where they were driven to acknowledge failure, when Jack Warren happened along, in the van of the new railroad.
The work of home-building, from the raw material, had been too much for Steve’s enfeebled physique; so it happened that Mollie performed most of his share, as well as all of her own. Yet Steve toiled to the limit of his endurance, and each day, at sundown, flung himself upon his blanket, spread beneath the stars, dog-tired, fairly trembling with weariness. But he soon developed a prodigious appetite, 250 and, after the first few weeks, slept each night like a dead man, until sunrise.
This morning Annie Warren was too full of her errand to pause an instant. She stood a moment listening, one ear to the splintery, unfinished boards, then––