rs were better off than
she, for they didn't have such quarrels. But she wasn't to blame--Sim
didn't--then her mind changed to a vague resentment against "things;"
everything seemed against her.

She rose at last and carried her second load of milk to the well,
strained it, washed out the pails, and after bathing her tired feet in
a tub that stood there, she put on a pair of horrible shoes without
stockings, and crept stealthily into the house. Sim did not hear her
as she slipped up the stairs to the little low, unfinished chamber
beside her oldest children,--she could not bear to sleep near _him_
that night,--she wanted a chance to sob herself to quiet.

As for Sim, he was a little disturbed but would as soon have cut off
his head as acknowledge himself in the wrong, but he yelled as he went
to bed, and found her still away:--

"Say, ol' woman, aint ye comin' to bed?" and upon receiving no answer
he rolled his aching body into the creaking bed. "Do as ye damn please
about it. If ye wan' to sulk y' can." And in such wise the family grew
quiet in sleep, while the moist, warm air pulsed with the ceaseless
chime of the crickets.

II.

When Sim Burns woke the next morning he felt a sharper twinge of
remorse. It was not a broad or well-defined feeling, just a sense that
he'd been unduly irritable, not that on the whole he was not in the
right. Little Pet lay with the warm June sunshine filling his baby
eyes, curiously content in striking at flies that buzzed around his
little mouth.

The man thrust his dirty naked feet into his huge boots, and, without
washing his face or combing his hair, went out to the barn to do his
chores.

He was a type of the prairie farmer and his whole surrounding was
typical. He had a quarter-section of fine level land, mortgaged, of
course, but his house was a little box-like structure, costing,
perhaps, five hundred dollars. It had three rooms and the ever-present
"summer kitchen" attached to the back. It was unpainted and had no
touch of beauty, a mere box.

His stable was built of slabs and banked and covered with straw. It
looked like a den, was low and long, and had but one door in the end.
The cow-yard held ten or fifteen cattle of various kinds, while a few
calves were bawling from a pen near by. Behind the barn on the west
and north was a fringe of willows forming a "wind-break." A few broken
and discouraged fruit trees standing here and there among the weeds
formed the garde