第9章 THE HOUSE THAT WAS NOT(1)

BART FLEMING took his bride out to his ranch on the plains when she was but seventeen years old, and the two set up housekeeping in three hundred and twenty acres of corn and rye.

Off toward the west there was an unbroken sea of tossing corn at that time of the year when the bride came out, and as her sewing window was on the side of the house which faced the sunset, she passed a good part of each day looking into that great rustling mass, breathing in its succulent odors and listening to its sibilant melody.It was her picture gallery, her opera, her spectacle, and, being sensible, -- or perhaps, being merely happy, -- she made the most of it.

When harvesting time came and the corn was cut, she had much entertainment in dis-covering what lay beyond.The town was east, and it chanced that she had never rid-den west.So, when the rolling hills of this newly beholden land lifted themselves for her contemplation, and the harvest sun, all in an angry and sanguinary glow sank in the veiled horizon, and at noon a scarf of golden vapor wavered up and down along the earth line, it was as if a new world had been made for her.Sometimes, at the coming of a storm, a whip-lash of purple cloud, full of electric agility, snapped along the western horizon.

"Oh, you'll see a lot of queer things on these here plains," her husband said when she spoke to him of these phenomena."Iguess what you see is the wind."

"The wind!" cried Flora."You can't see the wind, Bart.""Now look here, Flora," returned Bart, with benevolent emphasis, "you're a smart one, but you don't know all I know about this here country.I've lived here three mortal years, waitin' for you to git up out of your mother's arms and come out to keep me company, and I know what there is to know.Some things out here is queer -- so queer folks wouldn't believe 'em unless they saw.An'

some's so pig-headed they don't believe their own eyes.As for th' wind, if you lay down flat and squint toward th' west, you can see it blowin' along near th' ground, like a big ribbon; an' sometimes it's th' color of air, an' sometimes it's silver an' gold, an' some-times, when a storm is comin', it's purple.""If you got so tired looking at the wind, why didn't you marry some other girl, Bart, instead of waiting for me?"Flora was more interested in the first part of Bart's speech than in the last.

"Oh, come on!" protested Bart, and he picked her up in his arms and jumped her toward the ceiling of the low shack as if she were a little girl -- but then, to be sure, she wasn't much more.

Of all the things Flora saw when the corn was cut down, nothing interested her so much as a low cottage, something like her own, which lay away in the distance.She could not guess how far it might be, because dis-tances are deceiving out there, where the alti-tude is high and the air is as clear as one of those mystic balls of glass in which the sallow mystics of India see the moving shadows of the future.

She had not known there were neighbors so near, and she wondered for several days about them before she ventured to say any-thing to Bart on the subject.Indeed, for some reason which she did not attempt to ex-plain to herself, she felt shy about broaching the matter.Perhaps Bart did not want her to know the people.The thought came to her, as naughty thoughts will come, even to the best of persons, that some handsome young men might be "baching" it out there by themselves, and Bart didn't wish her to make their acquaintance.Bart had flattered her so much that she had actually begun to think herself beautiful, though as a matter of fact she was only a nice little girl with a lot of reddish-brown hair, and a bright pair of reddish-brown eyes in a white face.

"Bart," she ventured one evening, as the sun, at its fiercest, rushed toward the great black hollow of the west, "who lives over there in that shack?"She turned away from the window where she had been looking at the incarnadined disk, and she thought she saw Bart turn pale.