It was six o'clock in the evening when they arrived at a frame house which stood, roofed with cedar shingles, in the shelter of a big birch bluff. There was a very rude sod-built stable, a small log barn, and a great pile of straw, which appeared to be hollow inside and used as a store of some kind. A middle-aged man with a good-humored look met them at the door, and his wife greeted Alison in a kindly fashion when Thorne explained the cause of their visit. Indeed, Alison was pleased with the woman's face and manner, though, like many of the small wheat-growers' wives, she looked a little worn and faded. Though the men toil strenuously on the newly broken prairie, the heavier burden not infrequently falls to the woman's share.
Farquhar, their host, went out to work after supper but came back a little before dusk, and when they sat out on the stoop together, Thorne got his banjo and sang twice at Mrs. Farquhar's request; once some amusing jingle he had heard in Winnipeg, and afterward "Mandalay."
The song was not new to Alison, but she fancied that she had never heard it rendered as Maverick Thorne sang it then. It was not his voice, though that was a fine one, but the knowledge that had given him power of expression, which held her tense and still. This man knew and had indulged in and probably suffered for the longing for something that was strange and different from all that his experience had touched before. He was one of the free-lances who could not sit snugly at home; and in her heart Alison sympathized with him.
She had never seen the glowing, sensuous East and South, but the new West lay open before her in all its clean, pristine virility. A vast sweep of sky that was duskily purple eastward stretched overhead, a wonderful crystalline bluish green, until it changed far off on the grassland's rim to a streak of smoky red. Under it the prairie rolled back like a great silent sea. There was something that set the blood stirring in the dew-chilled air, and the faint smell of the wood smoke and the calling of the wild fowl on a distant sloo intensified the sense of the new and unfamiliar. One could be free in that wide land, she felt; and as she thought of the customs, castes, and conventions to which one must submit at home, she wondered whether they were needed guides and guards or mere cramping fetters. They seemed to have none of them in western Canada.
She said "Thank you!" when Thorne laid down his banjo, and felt that the spoken word had its limits, though she was careful not to look at him directly just then, and soon afterward she retired. This house was larger and much better furnished than the one she had last slept in, though she supposed that it would have looked singularly comfortless and almost empty in England. There was, for one thing, neither a curtain at a window nor a carpet on the floor.
When she joined the others at breakfast the next morning her host informed Thorne that if they could wait until noon he could lend him a horse to replace the lame Volador. He had, he explained, sent his hired man off with a team on the previous day for a plow which was being repaired by a smith who lived at a distance, and he had some work for the second pair that morning. The men went out together when breakfast was over, and Mrs. Farquhar sat down opposite Alison after she had cleared the table.
"Thorne tells me you are going to Mrs. Hunter's, though you don't know yet whether you will stay with her or not," she said.
It occurred to Alison that this was a tactful way of expressing it, though she was not sure that the delicacy was altogether Thorne's, for she had no doubt that her hostess had once been accustomed to a much smoother life in the Canadian cities.
"No," she replied, "I really can't tell until I get there."
"Then, in case you don't decide to stay, we should be glad to have you here."
Alison was astonished, but in spite of her usual outward calm there was a vein of impulsiveness in her, and she leaned forward in her chair.
"I don't suppose you know that I am quite useless at any kind of housework," she said. "I can't wash things, I can't cook, and I can scarcely sew."
Mrs. Farquhar smiled.
"When I first came out here from Toronto it was much the same with me, and there was nobody to teach me. It's fortunate that men are not very fastidious in this part of Canada. In any case I had, perhaps, better mention that while I would be glad to pay you at the usual rate and you would be required to help, you would live with us as one of the family. I want a companion. With my husband at work from sunup until dark, it's often lonely here. Besides, the arrangement would give you an opportunity for learning a little and finding out how you like the country."
Alison thought hard for a few moments. What she was offered was a situation as a servant, but she decided that it would be more pleasant here than she supposed it must generally be in England. She felt inclined to like this woman, and her husband's manner was reassuring. There was no doubt that they would treat her well.
"I'm afraid that in a little while you would be sorry you had suggested it," she said.
"The question is, would you like to try?"
"I'm quite sure of that," declared Alison impulsively. "I don't suppose you know what it is to be offered a resting-place when you arrive, feeling very friendless and forlorn, in a new country."
Mrs. Farquhar smiled.
"Then if you don't care to stay with Mrs. Hunter you must come straight back here. It would, perhaps, be better if you went to her in the first instance."
"But don't you want any references?"
"I don't think I do. In this case, your face is sufficient, and from experience we don't attach any great importance to vouchers of the other kind. Harry sometimes says that when a man is found to be insufferable in the old country they give him a walletful of letters of introduction, crediting him with all the virtues, and send him out to us. Besides, even if you were really quite dreadful, your friends wouldn't go back on you when I wrote to them."
Alison laughed, and as the hired man appeared at noon with Farquhar's team she drove away with Thorne soon after dinner. When they had left the house behind she turned to him.
"You have been talking about me to Mrs. Farquhar," she said.
"Yes," admitted Thorne with a smile, "I must confess that I have. Is there any reason why you should be angry?"
"I'm not," Alison informed him. "But why did you do it?"
"I'm far from sure that you will like Mrs. Hunter. In fact, I'd be a little astonished if you did; and if you were a relative of mine I'd try to make you stay with Mrs. Farquhar."
"I wonder whether that means that Mrs. Hunter doesn't like you?"
Thorne laughed good-humoredly.
"Oh, I'm much too insignificant a person to count either way. Mrs. Hunter is what you might call grande dame."
"Have you any of them in western Canada?"
"Well," answered Thorne, with an air of whimsical reflection, "there are certainly not many, and in spite of it the country gets along pretty well. We have, however, quite a few women of excellent education and manners who don't seem to mind making their children's dresses and washing their husband's clothes. Anyway, if she's at home, you can form your own opinion of Florence Hunter in an hour or two."
"Is she often away?"
"Not infrequently. Every now and then she goes off to Winnipeg, Toronto, or Montreal."
"But what about her husband? Can he leave his farm?"
"Hunter," Thorne replied dryly, "invariably stays at home."
His manner made it clear that he intended to say no more on that subject, and they talked about other matters while the wagon jolted on across the sunlit prairie.
CHAPTER V
THORNE GIVES ADVICE
It was early in the evening when they drove into sight of the Hunter homestead, and as they approached it Alison glanced about her with some curiosity. Long rows of clods out of which rose a tangle of withered grass tussocks stretched across the foreground. Thorne told her that this was the breaking, land won from the prairie too late for sowing in the previous year. Farther on, they skirted another