d drive in?" "No, thank you.
I'll roll out here. Much obliged to you. Good night."

His passenger stepped down over the front wheel, and the old man drove
on reluctantly, looking back as if he would like to see how the stranger
would be received.

As Nils was crossing the dry creek he heard the restive tramp of a horse
coming toward him down the hill. Instantly he flashed out of the road
and stood behind a thicket of wild plum bushes that grew in the sandy
bed. Peering through the dusk, he saw a light horse, under tight
rein, descending the hill at a sharp walk. The rider was a slender
woman--barely visible against the dark hillside--wearing an
old-fashioned derby hat and a long riding skirt. She sat lightly in the
saddle, with her chin high, and seemed to be looking into the distance.
As she passed the plum thicket her horse snuffed the air and shied.
She struck him, pulling him in sharply, with an angry exclamation,
_"Blazne!"_ in Bohemian. Once in the main road, she let him out into
a lope, and they soon emerged upon the crest of high land, where they
moved along the skyline, silhouetted against the band of faint colour
that lingered in the west. This horse and rider, with their free,
rhythmical gallop, were the only moving things to be seen on the face of
the flat country. They seemed, in the last sad light of evening, not to
be there accidentally, but as an inevitable detail of the landscape.

Nils watched them until they had shrunk to a mere moving speck against
the sky, then he crossed the sand creek and climbed the hill. When
he reached the gate the front of the house was dark, but a light was
shining from the side windows. The pigs were squealing in the hog
corral, and Nils could see a tall boy, who carried two big wooden
buckets, moving about among them. Halfway between the barn and the
house, the windmill wheezed lazily. Following the path that ran around
to the back porch, Nils stopped to look through the screen door into
the lamplit kitchen. The kitchen was the largest room in the house; Nils
remembered that his older brothers used to give dances there when he was
a boy. Beside the stove stood a little girl with two light yellow braids
and a broad, flushed face, peering anxiously into a frying pan. In the
dining-room beyond, a large, broad-shouldered woman was moving about the
table. She walked with an active, springy step. Her face was heavy and
florid, almost without wrinkles, and her hair was black at