The Doctor : a Tale of the Rockies | Page 4

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 his breast. "I'll tell you the first nights after he went I used to feel for him in the dark and be sick to find the place empty."
"Well," said the girl doubtfully, "I hope he won't be different. College does make a difference, you know."
"Different! Dick! He'd better not. I'll thrash the daylights out of him. But he won't be different. Not to us, nor," he added shyly, "to you."
"Oh, to me?" She laughed lightly. "He had better not try any airs with me."
"What would you do?" inquired Barney. "You couldn't take it out of his