ow route--and worked for hours with a shovel
before he had a channel from the tiny, submerged shanty to the light
of day beyond. Then together he and Camilla stood side by side in the
doorway, as they had done so many times before, looking about them at
the boundless prairie, drifted in waves of snow like the sea: the
wonder of it all, ever new, creeping over them.

"What a country!" voiced Camilla.

"What a country, indeed," echoed Ichabod.

"Lonely and mysterious as Death."

"Yes, as Death or--Life."

CHAPTER IV--A REVELATION

Time, unchanging automaton, moved on until late spring. Paradox of
nature, the warm brown tints of chilly days gave place under the heat
of slanting suns to the cool green of summer. All at once, sudden as
though autochthonal, there appeared meadow-larks and blackbirds: dead
weeds or man-erected posts serving in lieu of trees as vantage points
from which to sing. Ground squirrels whistled cheerily from newly
broken fields and roadways. Coveys of quail, tame as barn-yard fowls,
played about the beaten paths, and ran pattering in the dust ahead of
each passing team. Again, from its winter's rest, lonely, uncertain as
to distance, came the low, booming call of the prairie rooster. Nature
had awakened, and the joy of that awakening was upon the land.

Of a morning in May the faded, dust-covered day-coach drew in at the
tiny prairie village. A little man alighted. He stood a moment on the
platform, his hands deep in his pockets, a big black cigar between his
teeth, and looked out over the town. The coloring of the short
straggling street was more weather-stained than a year ago, yet still
very new, and the newcomer smiled as he looked; a big broad smile that
played about his lips, turning up the corners of his brown moustache,
showing a flash of white teeth, and lighting a pair of big blue eyes
which lay, like a woman's, beneath heavy lashes. In youth, that smile
would have been a grin; but it was no grin now. The man was far from
youth, and about the mouth and eyes were deep lines, which told of one
who knew of the world.

Slowly the smile disappeared, and as it faded the little man puffed
harder at the cigar. Evidently something he particularly wished to
explain would not become clear to his mind.

"Of all places," he soliloquized, "to have chosen--this!"

He started up the street, over the irregular warping sidewalk.

"Hotel, sir-r?" The formula was American, the trilling r's dist