“The fact is, Flaxen has sp’iled us,” laughed Anson, a couple of days later, when Bert was cursing the soggy biscuit.  “We’ve got so high-toned that we can’t stand common cookin’.  Time was we’d ‘a’ thought ourselves lucky to git as good as that.  Rec’lect them flapjacks we ust to make?  By mighty! you could shoe a horse with ’em.  Say, I wish I could jest slip in an’ see what she’s a-doin’ about now, hey?”

“She’s probably writin’ a letter.  She won’t do much of anythin’ else for the first week.”

“I hope you’re right,” said Anson.

They got a queer little letter every Wednesday, each one for several weeks pitifully like the others.

Dear boys i thought i would take my pen in hand to tell you i dont like it one bit the school is just as mène as it can be the girls do laugh at me they call me toe-head. if i catch em right i will fix their heads.  They is one girl who i like she is from pipestone she dont know no moren i do she says my dress is pritty ­ol nig an the drake all rite i wish i was home.  Elga.

The wish to be home was in all these letters like a sob.  The men read them over carefully and gravely, and finally Anson would put them away in the Bible (bought on Flaxen’s account) for safe-keeping.

As the letters improved in form their exultation increased.

“Say, Bert, don’t you notice she writes better now?  She makes big I’s now in place o’ little ones.  Seems ’s if she runs the sentence all together, though.”

“She’ll come out all right.  You see, she goes into the preparatory department, where they teach writin’ an’ spellin’.  You’ll see her hand improve right along now.”

And it did, and she ceased to wail for home and ceased to say that she hated her studies.

“I am getting along splendid,” she wrote some weeks after this.  “I like my teacher; her name is Holt.  She is just as nice as she can be.  She is cousin to the one who came with me; I live with her uncle, and I can go to soshibles whenever I want to; but the other girls cant.  I am feeling pretty good, but I wish you boys was here.”

She did not wish to be at home this time!

Winter shut down on the broad land again with that implacable, remorseless brilliancy of fierce cold which characterises the northern plain, stopping work on the farm and bolting all doors.  Hardly a day that the sun did not shine; but the light was hard, white, glittering, and cold, the winds treacherous, the snow wild and restless.  There was now comparatively little danger of being lost even in the fiercest storms, but still life in one of these little cabins had an isolation almost as terrible as that of a ship wedged amid the ice-floes of the polar regions.

Day after day rising to feed the cattle, night after night bending over the sooty stove listening to the ceaseless voice of the wind as it beat and brushed, whispered, moaned, and piped or screamed around the windows and eaves ­this was their life, varied with an occasional visit to the store or the post-office, or by the call of a neighbour.  It is easy to conceive that Flaxen’s bright letters were like bursts of bird-song in their loneliness.  Many of the young men, their neighbours, went back East to spend the winter ­back to Michigan, Iowa, New York, or elsewhere.

“Ans, why don’t you go back an’ visit your folks?” asked Bert, one day.  “I’ll take care o’ things.”

“Wal, the fact is, I’ve be’n away so long they don’t care whether I’m alive er dead.  I ain’t got no near relatives except a sister, an’ she’s got all the fam’ly she can ’tend to.”

“Same here.  We ain’t very affectionate, anyway; our fam’ly and I don’t write.  Still I’d like to go back, just to see how they all are.”

“Why not go?”

“Well, I don’t know.  I guess I must one o’ these days.  I’ve kind o’ be’n waitin’ till we got into a little better shape.  I hate to go back poor.”

“So do I. It’s hard work f’r me to give up beat; I ain’t goin’ to do it yet awhile.”

Sometimes a neighbour dropped in during the middle of the day, and on pleasant days they would harness up the team and take a drive down to the store and the post-office; but mainly they vegetated like a couple of huge potatoes in a cellar, as did most of the settlers.  There was nothing else to do.

It was the worst winter since the first that they had spent in the country.  The snow seemed never still.  It slid, streamed, rose in the air ceaselessly; it covered the hay, drifted up the barn door, swept the fields bare, and, carrying the dirt of the ploughed fields with it, built huge black drifts wherever there was a wind-break, corn-field, or other obstruction.

There were moments when Bert was well-nigh desperate.  Only contact with hard work and cold winds saved him.  He was naturally a more ambitious, more austere man than Anson.  He was not content to vegetate, but longed to escape.  He felt that he was wasting his life.

It was in December that the letter first came from Flaxen which mentioned Will Kendall.

O boys!  I had the best time.  We had a party at our house and lots of boys came and girls too, and they were nice, the boys, I mean.  Will Kendall he is the nicest feller you ever seen.  He has got black eyes and brown hair and a gold watch-chain with a locket with some girl’s hair in it, and he said it was his sister’s hair, but I told him I didn’t believe it, do you?  We had cake and popcorn and lasses candy; and Will he took me out to supper.

Bert was reading the letter, and at this point he stopped and raised his eyes, and the two men gazed at each other without a word for a long time.  Then Anson laughed.

“She’s gittin’ over her homesickness.  She’s all right now she’s got out to a sociable.”

After that there was hardly a letter that did not mention Kendall in some innocent fashion among the other boys and girls who took part in the sleigh-rides, parties, and sociables.  But the morbidly acute Bert, if he saw, said nothing, and Anson did not see.

“Who d’ y’ s’pose this Kendall is?” asked Anson, one night late in the winter, of Gearheart, who was reading the paper while his companion reread a letter from Flaxen.  “Seems to me she’s writin’ a good ’eal about him lately.”

“Oh, some slick little dry-goods clerk or druggist,” said Bert, with unwarrantable irritation.

“She seems to have a good ’eal to say about him, anyway,” repeated Anson, in a meditative way.

“Oh, that’s natural enough.  They are two young folks together,” replied Bert, with a careless accent, to remove any suspicion which his hasty utterance might have raised in Anson’s mind.

“Wal, I guess you’re right,” agreed Anson, after a pause, relieved.  This relief was made complete when in other letters which came she said less and less about Kendall.  If they had been more experienced, they would have been disturbed by this suspicious fact.

Then again, when Anson wrote asking “What has become of that Kendall you wrote so much about?” she replied that he was there, and began writing of him again in a careless sort of way, with the craft of woman already manifest in the change of front.

Spring came again, and that ever-recurring miracle, the good green grass, sprang forth from its covering of ice and snow, up from its hiding-place in the dark, cold sod.

Again the two men set to work ferociously at the seeding.  Up early in the wide, sweet dawn, toiling through the day behind harrow and seeder, coming in at noon to a poor and badly cooked meal, hurrying back to the field and working till night, coming in at sundown so tired that one leg could hardly be dragged by the other ­this was their daily life.

One day, as they were eating their supper of sour bread and canned beans, Gearheart irritatedly broke out:  “Ans, why don’t you git married?  It ’u’d simplify matters a good ’eal if you should.  ‘Old Russ’ is no good.”

“What’s the matter with your gittin’ married?” replied Anson, imperturbably pinching oil the cooked part of the loaf, skilfully leaving the doughy part.

“I ain’t on the marry; that’s all.”

“Neither am I.”

“Well, you ought to be.”

“Don’t see it.”

“Well, now, let me show it.  We can’t go on this way.  I’m gittin’ so poor you can count my ribs through my shirt.  Jest think how comfortable it would make things!  No more awful coffee; no more canned baked beans; no more cussed, infernal, everlastin’, leathery flapjacks; no more soggy bread ­confound it!” Here he seized the round inner part of the loaf, from which the crust had been flaked, and flung it through the open door far down toward the garden.

“Bert! that’s the last bit of bread we’ve got in the house.”

“What’s the odds?  We couldn’t eat it.”

“We could ‘a’ baked it over.”

“We could eat dog, but we don’t,” replied Bert gloomily.  His temper was getting frightful of late.

“We’ll be all right when Flaxen comes back,” said Ans, laughing.

“Say, now, you’ve said that a thousand times this winter.  You know well enough Flaxen’s out o’ this.  We ain’t countin’ on her,” blurted Gearheart, just in the mood to say disagreeable things.

“Wha’ d’ y’ mean?  Ain’t she comin’ back in June?”

“Probably; but she won’t stay.”

“No:  that’s so.  She’ll have to go back in September; but that’s three months, an’ we may sell out by that time if we have a good crop.  Anyway, we’ll live high fer a spell.  We ought to have a letter from her to-night, hadn’t we?”

“I’m goin’ down to see, if you’ll wash the dishes.”

“All right.  Take a horse.”

“No:  the horses are tired.  I’ll foot it.”

“Wal, ain’t you too?”

“Want anythin’ from the store?”

“Yes:  git a hunk o’ bacon an’ some canned corn, tomatoes, an’ some canned salmon; if y’ think we can stand the pressure, bring home a can o’ peaches.”

And so Gearheart started off for town in the dusk, afoot, in order to spare the horse, as though he had not himself walked all day long in the soft, muddy ground.  The wind was soft and moist, and the light of the stars coming out in the east fell upon Ins upturned eyes with unspeakable majesty.  Yet he saw them but dimly.  He was dreaming of a face which was often in his mind now ­a face not unlike Flaxen’s, only older, more glorified, more womanly.  He was asking himself some searching questions to-night as his tired limbs dragged themselves over the grassy road.

What was he toiling for, anyway?  What mattered all this terrible tramping to and fro ­was it an end or only a means?  Would there ever come anything like satisfaction of desire?  Life for him had been a silent, gloomy, and almost purposeless struggle.  He had not looked forward to anything very definite, though vaguely he had hoped for something better.

As his eyes fell upon the twinkling, yellow lights of the village his thoughts came back to Flaxen and to the letter which he expected to receive from her.  He quickened his steps, though his feet were sore and his limbs stiff and lame.

The one little street presented its usual Saturday-night appearance.  Teams were hitched to the narrow plank walk before the battlemented wooden stores.  Men stood here and there in listless knots, smoking, talking of the weather and of seeding, while their wives, surrounded by shy children, traded within.  Being Saturday night, the saloons were full of men, and shouts and the clink of beer mugs could be heard at intervals.  But the larger crowd was gathered at the post-office:  uncouth farmers of all nationalities, clerks, land-sharks, lawyers, and giggling girls in couples, who took delight in mingling with the crowd.

Judge Sid Balser was over from Boomtown, and was talking expansively to a crowd of “leading citizens” about a scheme to establish a horse-car line between Boomtown and Belleplain.

Colonel Arran, of the Belleplain Argus, in another corner, not ten feet away, was saying that the judge was “a scoundrel, a blow-hard, and would down his best lover for a pewter cent,” to all of which the placid judge was accustomed and gave no heed.

Bert paid no attention to the colonel or to the judge, or to any of this buzzing.  “They are just talking to hear themselves make a noise, anyway.  They talk about building up the country ­they who are a rope and a grindstone around the necks of the rest of us, who do the work.”

When Gearheart reached his box he found a large, square letter in it, and looking at it saw that it was from Flaxen directed to Anson.  “Her picture, probably,” he said as he held it up.  As he was pushing rapidly out he heard a half-drunken fellow say, in what he thought was an inaudible tone: 

“There’s Gearheart.  Wonder what’s become of his little Norsk.”

Gearheart turned, and pushing through the crowd, thrust his eyes into the face of the speaker with a glare that paralysed the poor fool.

“What’s become o’ your sense?” he snarled, and his voice had in it a carnivorous note.

With this warning he turned contemptuously and passed out, leaving the discomfited rowdy to settle accounts with his friends.  But there was a low note in the ruffian’s voice, an insinuating inflection, which stayed with him all along the way home, like a bad taste in the mouth.  He saw by the aid of a number of these side-lights of late that Flaxen never could come back to them in the old relation; but how could she come back?

Gearheart stopped and gazed thoughtfully upward.  She must come back as the wife of Ans or himself.  “Pooh! she is only a child,” he said, snapping his finger and walking on.  But the insistence remained.  “She is not a child ­she is a maiden, soon to be a woman; she has no relatives, no home to go to but ours after her two or three years of schooling are over.  It must still be her home; no breath of scandal shall touch her if I can prevent it; and after her two years are up” ­after a long, motionless reverie he strode forward ­“she shall choose between us.”

There had grown up between the two friends of late a constraint, or, to be more exact, Gearheart had held himself in before his friend, had not discussed these problems with him at all.  “Ans is just like a boy,” he had said to himself; “he don’t seem to understand the case, and I don’t know as it’s my duty to enlighten him; he either feels very sure about her, or he has not understood the situation.”

He was thinking this now as he strode across the spongy sod toward the lighted windows of the shanty.  The air was damp and chill, for the ice was not yet out of the ponds or swamps of tall grasses.  An occasional prairie-cock sent forth a muffled, drowsy “boom”; low-hung flights of geese, gabbling anxiously, or the less-orderly ducks, with hissing wings, swept by overhead, darkly limned against the stars.  There was a strange charm in the raw air.  The weary man almost forgot his pain as he drew deep breathings of the night.

It was significant of the restraint that had grown up between him and Anson that he held the letter from Flaxen unopened in his hand simply because it was directed to his friend.  He knew that it was as much to him as to Anson, and yet, feeling as he had of late, he would not open it, for he would have been angry if Anson had opened one directed to him.  He simply judged Anson by himself.

The giant was asleep when he entered.  His great, shaggy head lay beside the lamp on his crossed arms.  Bert laid the letter down beside him and shook him.

“Hello! got back, hey?” the sleeper said, rousing up sluggishly.  “Anything?” Then he caught sight of the letter.  “Oh, bless her little heart!  Wonder what it is?  Picture, bet my hat!” Here he opened it.

“Gee-whittiker, thunder and turf, gosh-all ­Friday! ­look a-there!  Ain’t she growed!” he yelled, holding the picture by the corner and moving it into all sorts of positions.  “That’s my little girl ­our Flaxen; she can’t grow so purty but what I’d know her.  See that hair done up on the top of her head!  Look at that dress, an’ the thingumajigs around her neck!  Oh, she’s gittin’ there, Smith, hey?”

“She’s changing pretty fast,” said Bert listlessly.

“Changin’ fast!  Say, ol’ man, what’s the matter with you?  Are y’ sick?”

“I’m played out, that’s all.”

“Darn my skin!  I should think y’ would be, draggin’ all day, an’ then walkin’ all o’ four mile to the post-office.  Jest lay down on the bed there, ol’ boy, while I read the letter to yeh.  Say, ol’ man, don’t you git up in the mornin’ till you please.  I’ll look after the breakfast,” insisted Anson, struck with remorse by the expression on Bert’s face.  “But here’s the letter.  Short an’ sweet.”

DEAR BOYS [Bless the little fist that wrote that!].  I send my picture.  I think it is a nice one.  The girls say it flatters me, but Will says it don’t [What the devil do we care what Will says?] ­I guess it does, don’t you?  I wish I had a picture of you both; I want to show the girls how handsome you are [she means me, of course.  No, confound it] how handsome you are both of you.  I wish you would send me your pictures both of you.  I ain’t got much to say.  I will write again soon.

    ELGA.

Bert looked at the picture over Anson’s shoulder, but did not seem to pay much attention to it.

“Wal, I’ll go out an’ shut the barn door.  Nights git cold after the sun goes down.  You needn’t peel the ’taters to-night.  We’ll bake ’em, brussels an’ all, to-morrow mornin’.”

When Anson had gone, Bert snatched up the picture with great eagerness and gazed upon it with a steady, devouring glance.  How womanly she looked with her hair done up so, and the broad, fair face and full bosom.

He heard Anson returning from the barn, and hastily laid the picture down, and when Anson entered was apparently dropping off to sleep.