The Doctor : a Tale of the Rockies | Page 4

if
I had only known! Oh, we were all so thoughtless!" She stretched up
her hands again to the blue sky with its fleecy clouds. "For your sake,
mother dear," she whispered. Not often had any seen those brave eyes
dim with tears. Not often since that day when they had carried her
mother out from the Manse and left her behind with the weeping,
clinging children, and even now she hastily wiped the tears away,
chiding herself the while. "I never saw HER cry," she said to herself,
"not once, except for some of us. And I will try. I MUST try. It is hard
to give up," and again the tears welled up in the brave blue eyes.
"Nonsense," she cried impatiently, sitting up straight, "don't be a big,
selfish baby. They're just the dearest little darlings in the world, and I'll
do my best for them."
Her moment of self-pity was gone in a flood of shamed indignation.
She locked her hands round her knees and looked about her. "It is a
beautiful world after all. And how near the beauty is to us; just over the
fence and you are in the thick of it. Oh, but this is great!" Once more
she rolled in an ecstasy of luxurious delight in the clover and lay again

supine, revelling in that riot of caressing sounds and scents.
"Kir-r-r-ink-a-chink, kir-r-r-ink-a-chink--"
She sprang up alert and listening. "That is old Charley, I suppose, or
Barney, perhaps, sharpening his scythe." She climbed up the
conveniently jutting ends of the fence rails and looked over the field.
"It's Barney," she said, shading her eyes with her hand; "I wonder he
does not cut his fingers." She sat herself down upon the top rail and
leaned against the stake.
"My! what a sweep," she said in admiring tones as the young man
swayed to and fro in all the rhythmic grace of the mower's stride,
swinging easily now backward the curving blade and then forward in a
cutting sweep, clean and swift, laying the even swath. Alas! the
clattering machine-knives have driven off from our hay-fields the
mower's art with all its rhythmic grace.
Those were days when men were famous according as they could "cut
off the heels of a rival mower." There are that grieve that, one by one,
from field and from forest, are banished those ancient arts of daily toil
by which men were wont to prove their might, their skill of hand and
eye, their invincible endurance. But there still offer in life's stern daily
fight full opportunity to prove manhood in ways less picturesque
perhaps, but no less truly testing.
Down the swath came Barney, his sinewy body swinging in very poetry
of motion.
"Doesn't he do it well!" said the girl, following with admiring eyes
every movement of his well-poised frame. "How big he is! Why--" and
her blue eyes widened with startled surprise, "he's almost a man!" The
tint of the thistle bloom deepened in her cheek. She glanced down and
made as if to spring to the ground; then settling herself resolutely back
against her fence stake, she exclaimed, "Pshaw! I don't care. He is just
a boy. Anyway, I'm not going to mind Barney Boyle."

On came the mower in mighty sweeps, cutting the swath clean out to
the end.
"Well done!" cried the girl. "You'll be cutting off Long John's heels in a
year or so."
"A year or so! If I can't do it to-day I never can. But I don't want to
blow."
"You needn't. They're all talking about you, with your binding and
pitching and cradling, and what not."
"They are, are they? Who is good enough to waste breath on me?"
"Oh, everybody. The McKenzie girls were just telling me the other
day."
"Oh, pshaw! I ran away from their crowd, but that's nothing."
"And I suppose you have not an idea how nice you look as you go
swinging along?"
"Do I? That's the only time then."
"Oh, now you're fishing, and I'm not going to bite. Where did you learn
the scythe?"
"Where? Right here where we had to, Dick and I. By the way, he's
coming home to-day." He glanced at her face quickly as he said this,
but her face showed only a frank pleasure.
"To-day? Good. Won't your mother be glad?"
"Yes. And some other people, too," said Barney.
"And who, particularly?"
A sudden shyness seemed to seize the young man, but recovering
himself, "Well, I guess I will, myself, a little. This is the first time he

has ever been away. We never slept a night apart from each other as
long as I can mind till he went to college last year. He used to put his
arm just round me here," touching