“It really beats all the way you run this farm with your father gone,” he affirmed. “When he gets back, I’d like to hire you myself.” He saw the boy relishing his praise. “You must treat Chirstie like a man, Dod. You mustn’t blame her for crying. It’s the way women do, sometimes. You say to her when you go in that my mother is always waiting to do for her. She’s the one that can help her. She don’t need to cry any more. We can fix things right. You say that to her, Dod, and tomorrow I’ll ride over and see what it is. You tell her we’ll fix everything for her.”
He went away in uncertainty and distress. He ought to tell his mother how things were. The idea of that girl sitting there with a gun, as if she didn’t recognize him! Or maybe it would be better to go to his Aunt Libby Keith. She ought to know. He didn’t like going to anybody. It was his affair. He couldn’t think of insinuating to anyone that the girl was—well, not quite right in her mind. He must be very careful.
And then her face came before him, loving him. After all, it was just his affair and hers. There was some reason why she must wait. But she loved him! His mind dwelt on that, rather than on his inexplicable rejecting. He decided that in the morning he would ride over to the Keiths’ and ask in a roundabout way, what the trouble was with Chirstie.
But in the morning he felt so certain that she loved him, in spite of everything, that he announced to his father that he was going over to cut slough grass on his eighty, to use in thatching his new barn, having decided to go to Keiths’, less conspicuously, in the evening. This was the first time he had as much as mentioned his own farm all summer. His father was pleased, but his mother protested. Why should he begin such work on the hottest morning of the summer, when he hadn’t really been able to help in the haying at all? He might easily be overcome with the heat, in his condition. But Wully, it seemed, was at last feeling as well as he had ever felt. He had been loafing too long. He must begin to get something done on his own place.
So down in his slough he worked away with all his might, and now that his heart was light, and his fever broken, it was no contemptible strength he could exert. About the time he was so hot, so soaked through with sweat that he must sit down for a rest, he saw a horseman coming towards him. And upon that meeting there depended the destiny of generations.
He smiled when he saw who it was. Peter Keith was a cousin of both Chirstie’s and his, the only remaining child of their Aunt Libby’s and Uncle John Keith’s, the smallest adult of Wully’s seventy-one cousins, being not more than five feet seven. And he was by far the most worthless of them. Of course Peter would be riding leisurely over after the mail in the middle of the morning, while the haying was to be finished, and the wheat was white and heavy for harvest. His excuse this summer for not working was that he had a disabled foot. He said that he had accidentally discharged his gun into it. Peter Keith was such a man that when he told that story, his hearers’ faces grew shrewd and thoughtful, trying to decide whether or not he really was lazy enough to hurt his own foot in order to get out of work. There was no place for laziness in a world where men existed only by toil. It was like chronic cowardice in the face of the enemy. Peter’s mother, to be sure, said he wasn’t strong. Libby Keith’s way of hanging over him, of listening to his rather ordinary cough, her constant babying of him, was what was spoiling Peter, many said. Wully had always been more tolerant of him than some of the cousins were, because he could never imagine a man feigning so shameful a thing as physical weakness. If Peter didn’t want to farm, why insist, he argued. If he wanted to go west, to get into something else, let him go. He might be good for something somewhere. But his doting mother would never listen to such hardheartedness.
The two of them made themselves a shade in the grass, and talked away intimately. Wully was more affable than usual, having resolved upon first sight of Peter to learn something from him. Peter was always full of neighborhood news. Tam McWhee had bought ten acres more of timber, and the Sprouls were beginning to break their further forty, and so on, and so on. Wully was screwing up his courage to introduce the subject that was interesting him, in some casual way. Peter was the last man with whom he cared to discuss Chirstie. But he was exactly the one who might know something valuable. He delayed, the question at the tip of his tongue, till even the lazy Peter thought it was time to be riding on, and rose to go. His foot wasn’t really much hurt, but he hadn’t renounced his limp. It was then or never with Wully, so he said, trying to appear uninterested:
“I was riding by McNairs’ yesterday, and I saw Chirstie sitting there crying. What do you suppose she would be crying about, Peter?”
Peter gave him a sharp look, and grew red in one moment.
“How the devil should I know what girls cry about?” he asked angrily. “It’s
