ummer dawns, broke the spell of this conjured
sorrow, and in spite of herself she was again a very hearty and happy
young woman. Besides, if one has a liking for comedy, it is
impossible to be dull on a Nebraska prairie. The people are a merrier
divertissement than the theatre with its hackneyed stories. Catherine
Ford laughed a good deal, and she took the three Johns into her
confidence, and they laughed with her. There was Minerva Fitch, who
insisted on coming over to tell Catherine how to raise her children, and
who was almost offended that the children wouldn't die of sunstroke
when she predicted. And there was Bob Ackerman, who had inflammatory
rheumatism and a Past, and who confided the latter to Mrs. Ford while
she doctored the former with homoeopathic medicines. And there were all
the strange visionaries who came out prospecting, and quite naturally
drifted to Mrs. Ford's cabin for a meal, and paid her in compliments of
a peculiarly Western type. And there were the three Johns themselves.
Catherine considered it no treason to laugh at them a little.

Yet at Waite she did not laugh much. There had come to be something
pathetic in the constant service he rendered her. The beginning of his
more particular devotion had started in a particular way. Malaria was
very bad in the country. It had carried off some of the most vigorous
on the prairie, and twice that summer Catherine herself had laid out the
cold forms of her neighbors on ironing-boards, and, with the assistance
of Bill Deems of Missourah, had read the burial service over them. She
had averted several other fatal runs of fever by the contents of her
little medicine-case. These remedies she dealt out with an intelligence
that astonished her patients, until it was learned that she was studying
medicine at the time that she met her late husband, and was persuaded to
assume the responsibilities of matrimony instead of those of the medical
profession.

One day in midsummer, when the sun was focussing itself on the raw pine
boards of her shanty, and Catherine had the shades drawn for coolness
and the water-pitcher swathed in wet rags, East Indian fashion, she
heard the familiar halloo of Waite down the road. This greeting, which
was usually sent to her from the point where the dipping road lifted
itself into the first view of the house, did not contain its usual note
of cheerfulness. Catherine, wiping her hands on her checked apron, ran
out to wave a welcome; and