I have a tent along. I want to do as much breaking as I can this summer; and to build. Ruth will be out in a week or two.”

Mary gave him a quick look. “So you got married after all? Why did you not let us know?”

“It was all done so suddenly. I sold the place and didn’t know where to go. We got married, and two days later I started west.”

“Why did you not bring her? She could have stayed with me.”

“I came by a freight train and had the horses to look after. I’ll put up a shack at once.”

Mary nodded and rose. “I’ll get you a cup of tea, shall I?”

“I won’t decline.”

When Mary had left the room, Abe sat for a few minutes, looking straight ahead. Then he rose and walked about, stopping in the bay window which looked to the street, turning again and stepping over to a library table covered with books. Of these he picked up one or two, and, finding that they were poetry, dropped them again, resuming his walk.

“I had a late dinner,” Mary said when she returned. “I won’t partake, if you don’t mind.” She moved a small low table to her brother’s side, placing the tray upon it, and went out again to fetch the tea.

When she brought it, Abe helped himself.

“Why not let Ruth come at once, Abe?” Mary asked shortly. “You know I’d be glad to have her.”

“Oh, well–” Then bluntly, “I believe she’d rather not.”

There was a pause.

“And the old farm is sold? I can hardly believe it.”

Abe, knowing that he was unjust, took that remark to hold a vague reproach. “What could I do? Eighty acres! And mortgaged at that.”

Seeing that the money raised by the mortgage had paid for her education, Mary might have been offended in turn. But she smoothed all occasion of offence away. “It was the logical thing to do. The same amount of work put in here is bound to bring better results. We have both gone west, after all. You will miss the trees, though.”

“I shall plant trees here.”

“I suppose. But no cedars.”

“No,” Abe said after a silence. “Nor hard maples.”

This addition to what his sister had said restored the inner understanding between them; they spoke of their old home for a while.

Then Abe rose.

“You won’t return for the night?” Mary asked once more.

“No. I shall have to keep an eye on the horses.”

Half an hour later Abe was unloading his chattels at the platform, leading his horses out first and then manoeuvring his wagon into a position where he could pile it high with a minimum of lost motion. Having taken as much as he could, he hitched two horses in front–Belgians these–and tied a team of Percherons behind. Thence, driving along the trail between track and elevators, he went west till he was opposite the station building. There, leaving his teams, he crossed the right-of-way and spoke to the agent, to tell him he would return for the remainder of his goods next morning.

At last he climbed to the top of his load and started north for the six-mile trek over open prairie.

A few hundred yards from the Somerville Line, as the east-west road was called, he reached that flat and unrelieved country which, to the very horizon, seemed to be a primitive wilderness. North, east, and west, nothing showed that looked like a settlement, and the impression of an utter loneliness was perhaps even enhanced by the knowledge that somewhere it harboured at least one man by name of Hall, half-crazed with work and isolation, and destined to be Abe’s neighbour. As for others, the two who, probably under an impulse to huddle close together in this immensity, had a decade ago filed on the two northern quarters of the same section, they were gone, and having “proved up” on their claims, had vanished again in the outer world.

Abe’s brief call at his sister’s had somewhat unsettled him. For a year he had mentally lived on that open, flat prairie, planning and adjusting himself. He needed room; he needed a country which would give scope to the powers he felt within him. Forbidding as it looked, this was that country. But Mary’s casual remark about the cedars had reawakened in him the vision of the old farm as a place to live in: the house in its cluster of cedars, with the gnarled apple trees in the orchard behind; with the old furniture in the rooms–not very comfortable perhaps, but harmonious in the half-light admitted by the scanty windows half closed with vines: mellowed into unity by being lived in through generations.