"You got to cut my hair, Bella. These long tags hanging down round my ears worry me."

"Yes, dear, as soon as the weather's fine. I'll borrow a bowl from Mrs. Peeble's mother so that it'll be cut evenly all the way round."

Here there was an interruption, a breathless, baby voice at the wheel, and Glen leaned down and dragged up his son Bob, wet, wriggling, and muddy. The little fellow, four years old, had on a homespun shirt and drawers, both dripping. His hair was a wet mop, hanging in rat tails to his eyes. Under its thatch his face, pink and smiling, was as fresh as a dew-washed rose. Tightly gripped in a dirty paw were two wild flowers, and it was to give these to his mother that he had come.

He staggered toward her, the wagon gave a jolt, and he fell, clasping her knees and filling the air with the sweetness of his laughter. Then holding to her arm and shoulder, he drew himself higher and pressed the flowers close against her nose.

"Is it a bu'full smell?" he inquired, watching her face with eyes of bright inquiry.

"Beautiful," she said, trying to see the knitting.

"Aren't you glad I brought them?" still anxiously inquiring.

"Very" - she pushed them away. "You're soaked. Take off your things."

And little Bob, still holding his flowers, was stripped to his skin.

"Now lie down," said his mother. "I'm turning the heel."

He obeyed, but turbulently, and with much pretense, making believe to fall and rolling on the sacks, a naked cherub writhing with laughter. Finally, his mother had to stop her heel-turning to seize him by one leg, drag him toward her, roll him up in the end of the blanket and with a silencing slap say, "There, lie still." This quieted him. He lay subdued save for a waving hand in which the flowers were still imbedded and with which he made passes at the two girls, murmuring with the thick utterance of rising sleep "Bu'full flowers." And in a moment he slept, curled against his mother, his face angelic beneath the wet hair.

When Susan came to the giving of her personal data - the few facts necessary to locate and introduce her - her engagement was the item of most interest. A love story even on the plains, with the rain dribbling in through the cracks of the canvas, possessed the old, deathless charm. The doctor and his philanthropies, on which she would have liked to dilate, were given the perfunctory attention that politeness demanded. By himself the good man is dull, he has to have a woman on his arm to carry weight. David, the lover, and Susan, the object of his love, were the hero and heroine of the story. Even the married woman forgot the turning of the heel and fastened her mild gaze on the young girl.

"And such a handsome fellow," she said. "I said to Lucy - she'll tell you if I didn't - that there wasn't a man to compare with him in our train. And so gallant and polite. Last night, when I was heating the water to wash the children, he carried the pails for me. None of the men with us do that. They'd never think of offering to carry our buckets."

Her husband who had appeared to be asleep said:

"Why should they?" and then shouted "Gee Haw" and made a futile kick toward the nearest ox.