tree. This he would twirl
blithely as he walked along. The switch and the twirl represented just
so much energy and animal spirits. He never so much as flicked a
dandelion head with it.

An inarticulate sort of thing, that courtship.

"Hello, Emma."

"How do, Ben."

"Thought you might like to walk a piece down the road. They got a calf
at Aug Tietjens' with five legs."

"I heard. I'd just as lief walk a little piece. I'm kind of beat,
though. We've got the threshers day after tomorrow. We've been
cooking up."

Beneath Ben's bonhomie and roguishness there was much shyness. The two
would plod along the road together in a sort of blissful agony of
embarrassment. The neighbors were right in their surmise that there
was no definite understanding between them. But the thing was settled
in the minds of both. Once Ben had said: "Pop says I can have the
north eighty on easy payments if--when----"

Emma Byers had flushed up brightly, but had answered equably: "That's a
fine piece. Your pop is an awful good man."

The stolid exteriors of these two hid much that was fine and forceful.
Emma Byers' thoughtful forehead and intelligent eyes would have
revealed that in her. Her mother was dead. She kept house for her
father and brother. She was known as "that smart Byers girl." Her
butter and eggs and garden stuff brought higher prices at Commercial,
twelve miles away, than did any other's in the district. She was not a
pretty girl, according to the local standards, but there was about her,
even at twenty-two, a clear-headedness and a restful serenity that
promised well for Ben Westerveld's future happiness.

But Ben Westerveld's future was not to lie in Emma Byers' capable
hands. He knew that as soon as he saw Bella Huckins. Bella Huckins
was the daughter of old "Red Front" Huckins, who ran the saloon of that
cheerful name in Commercial. Bella had elected to teach school, not
from any bent toward learning but because teaching appealed to her as
being a rather elegant occupation. The Huckins family was not elegant.
In that day a year or two of teaching in a country school took the
place of the present-day normal-school diploma. Bella had an eye on
St. Louis, forty miles from the town of Commercial. So she used the
country school as a step toward her ultimate goal, though she hated the
country and dreaded her apprenticeship.

"I'll get a beau," she said, "who'll take me driving and around. And
Saturd