The prairie lay that afternoon as it had lain for centuries of September afternoons, vast as an ocean; motionless as an ocean coaxed into very little ripples by languid breezes; silent as an ocean whe...

Wully slept the whole afternoon, and that evening the aunts and uncles and cousins began coming to see him. He and Allen, being among the oldest of the clan’s young fry, had been the first to enlist, ...

After more than three months spent in hospitals, Wully came home the next March, honorably discharged from the army. His father met him at the end of the railroad, and before dawn they started westwar...

His mother’s curiosity about the lassie disappeared at the first glimpse she got of his face. She put him to bed, with hot drinks and heated stones, with quilt after quilt wrapped about him. But still...

His impulse was to run and take her in his arms, but he knew now that he must be careful. You can’t be impetuous, it seems, with women, at least not with that one. He had tried that once, and learned ...

The McLaughlin house shone ready for the guests the next evening. The light that glimmered out through the dusk came from as many new kerosene lamps as could be borrowed from the neighbors. Inside the...

It was growingly inevitable that the news, the determined news, must be broken. Wully, with his whole heart shrinking from the task, made light of it to Chirstie. Wasn’t having her better than anythin...

The autumn seemed to set itself against the house that Wully had determined to have ready for occupancy before winter. Week after week the roads continued so deep in mud that six oxen could not manage...

Chirstie used to say afterwards, when Wully’s younger orphaned brothers and sisters would try to thank her for making her home their own, that she had never spent a happier winter in her life than the...

Barbara McNair had watched Wully and Chirstie driving away towards Wully’s home that afternoon after her arrival at the sty in the slough. It was raining then, and it rained for nearly six weeks. She ...

The infamy of Chirstie’s condition, becoming known, had been scarcely less interesting than the scandal of Isobel McLaughlin’s attitude toward it. She herself had told her sister and her sisters-in-la...

Soon after the garments of Barbara McNair dawned upon the congregation, her husband bought three hundred acres of land at three dollars an acre. There are those who say a man owning eight hundred and ...

Wully and Chirstie and their bonny wee Johnnie moved into their new house towards the first of May, and at the end of that month, Wully’s brother John, having finished his second year in the snug litt...

John came out for a three months’ vacation the next year and worked again for Wully. They had acres of sod corn that summer, and wheat to make a miser chuckle. Both men, and whatever neighborly passer...

“You go on with the corn,” Wully said to John at breakfast. “I’m taking Chirstie over to mother’s.” John made no comment. Chirstie looked as if she had had fever unusually severe the day before, and n...

The neighborhood gathered at the alarm. By noon Wully’s father and mother were at the Keiths’, and the heads of families for miles around. Up and down the road the boys and younger men were halloing a...

By that time men were beginning to gather again⁠—middle-aged men on horseback, stiff from years of toil, bearded great young men with dogs at their heels, large-boned, ruddy, gaunt, rugged of face lik...

The night after the second day’s search Libby Keith had gone to bed for a while, because she was unable longer to stand up. Again she had risen when the moon rose, and Isobel McLaughlin, hearing her i...

The year’s calendar of color was almost at an end; only white was left for it now. The fields had been black. They had grown green, shyly, softly. They had given themselves up to bold greenness. They ...

The corn was husked. The year’s work in the fields was over. Wully had sold from sixty of the acres for which his father had paid two hundred and ten dollars in sixty-four, wheat worth three thousand ...

They had breakfasted together before daylight, and he had gone to load the lumber he was taking home for his father, so that they might have a very early start. In the noisy, untidy hotel office she s...

They had passed the bridge on their burdened way home. They had come to the place at which Chirstie had so astonishingly defied him. They had ridden together in a silence broken only by the refreshed ...