and was to stop on the way home and leave
some groceries for the Wheelers. The train from the east was
late; it was ten o'clock that night when Mrs. Wheeler, waiting in
the kitchen, heard Havel's wagon rumble across the little bridge
over Lovely Creek. She opened the outside door, and presently Joe
came in with a bucket of salt fish in one hand and a sack of
flour on his shoulder. While he took the fish down to the cellar
for her, another figure appeared in the doorway; a young boy,
short, stooped, with a flat cap on his head and a great oilcloth
valise, such as pedlars carry, strapped to his back. He had
fallen asleep in the wagon, and on waking and finding his brother
gone, he had supposed they were at home and scrambled for his
pack. He stood in the doorway, blinking his eyes at the light,
looking astonished but eager to do whatever was required of him.
What if one of her own boys, Mrs. Wheeler thought.... She
went up to him and put her arm around him, laughing a little and
saying in her quiet voice, just as if he could understand her,
"Why, you're only a little boy after all, aren't you?"

Ernest said afterwards that it was his first welcome to this
country, though he had travelled so far, and had been pushed and
hauled and shouted at for so many days, he had lost count of
them. That night he and Claude only shook hands and looked at
each other suspiciously, but ever since they had been good
friends.

After their picnic the two boys went to the circus in a happy
frame of mind. In the animal tent they met big Leonard Dawson,
the oldest son of one of the Wheelers' near neighbours, and the
three sat together for the performance. Leonard said he had come
to town alone in his car; wouldn't Claude ride out with him?
Claude was glad enough to turn the mules over to Ralph, who
didn't mind the hired men as much as he did.

Leonard was a strapping brown fellow of twenty-five, with big
hands and big feet, white teeth, and flashing eyes full of
energy. He and his father and two brothers not only worked their
own big farm, but rented a quarter section from Nat Wheeler. They
were master farmers. If there was a dry summer and a failure,
Leonard only laughed and stretched his long arms, and put in a
bigger crop next year. Claude was always a little reserved with
Leonard; he felt that the young man was rather contemptuous of
the hap-hazard way in which things were done on the Wheeler
place, and thought his going to college a w