anics or musicians or salesmen. Things grew for him. He
seemed instinctively to know facts about the kinship of soil and seed
that other men had to learn from books or experience. It grew to be a
saying in that section "Ben Westerveld could grow a crop on rock."

At picnics and neighbourhood frolics Ben could throw farther and run
faster and pull harder than any of the farmer boys who took part in the
rough games. And he could pick up a girl with one hand and hold her at
arm's length while she shrieked with pretended fear and real ecstasy.
The girls all liked Ben. There was that about his primitive strength
which appealed to the untamed in them as his gentleness appealed to
their softer side. He liked the girls, too, and could have had his pick
of them. He teased them all, took them buggy riding, beaued them about
to neighbourhood parties. But by the time he was twenty-five the thing
had narrowed down to the Byers girl on the farm adjoining Westerveld's.
There was what the neighbours called an understanding, though perhaps he
had never actually asked the Byers girl to marry him. You saw him going
down the road toward the Byers place four nights out of the seven. He
had a quick, light step at variance with his sturdy build, and very
different from the heavy, slouching gait of the work-weary farmer. He
had a habit of carrying in his hand a little twig or switch cut from a
tree. This he would twirl blithely as he walked along. The switch and
the twirl represented just so much energy and animal spirits. He never
so much as flicked a dandelion head with it.

An inarticulate sort of thing, that courtship.

"Hello, Emma."

"How do, Ben."

"Thought you might like to walk a piece down the road. They got a calf
at Aug Tietjens with five legs."

"I heard. I'd just as lief walk a little piece. I'm kind of beat,
though. We've got the threshers day after to-morrow. We've been cooking
up."

Beneath Ben's bonhomie and roguishness there was much shyness. The two
would plod along the road together in a sort of blissful agony of
embarrassment. The neighbours were right in their surmise that there was
no definite understanding between them. But the thing was settled in the
minds of both. Once Ben had said: "Pop says I can have the north eighty
on easy payments if--when--"

Emma Byers had flushed up brightly, but had answered equably: "That's a
fine piece. Your pop is an awful good man."

Beneath the stolid exteriors of these two