py?" asked Ichabod, one day, observing her thus amid the
fruits of her hands.

Camilla hesitated. Catching her hand, Ichabod lifted her chin so that
their eyes met.

"Tell me, are you happy?" he repeated.

Another pause, though her eyes did not falter.

"Happier than I ever thought to be." She touched his sleeve tenderly.
"But not completely so, for--" she was not looking at him now,--"for
I love you, and--and--I'm a woman."

They said no more; and though Ichabod went back to his team, it was
not to work. For many minutes he stood motionless, a new problem of
right and wrong throbbing in his brain.

Fall came slowly, bringing the drowsy, hazy days of so-called Indian
Summer. It was the season of threshing, and all day long to the drowse
of the air was added, near and afar, all-pervading through the
stillness, the sleepy hum of the separator. Typical voice of the
prairie was that busy drone, penetrating to the ears as the ubiquitous
odor of the buffalo grass to the nostril, again bearing resemblance in
that, once heard, memory would reproduce the sound until recollection
was no more.

Winter followed, and they, who had thought the earth quiet before,
found it still now indeed. Even the voice of the prairie-chicken was
hushed; only the sharp knife-like cutting of spread wings told of a
flock's passage at night. The level country, mottled white with
occasional drifts, and brown from spots blown bare by the wind,
stretched out seemingly interminable, until the line of earth and sky
met.

Idle perforce, the two exotics would stand for hours in the sunshine
of their open doorway, shading their eyes from the glare and looking
out, out into the distance that was as yet only a name--and that the
borrowed name of an Indian tribe.

"What a country!" Camilla would say, struck each time anew with a
never-ending wonder.

"Yes, what a country," Ichabod would echo, unconscious that he had
repeated the same words in the same way a score of times before.

In January, a blizzard settled upon them, and for two days and nights
they took turns keeping the big kitchen stove red hot. The West knows
no such storms, now. Man has not only changed the face of the earth,
but, in so doing, has annihilated that terror of the past--the Dakota
blizzard.

In those days, though, it was very real, as Ichabod learned. He had
prepared for winter, by hauling a huge pile of cordwood and stacking
it, as a protection to windward, the full lengt