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tickets."
"You'd better arrange it with the girls, then. I'll drive you, of course, if you want to go."
Claude escaped and went out, wishing that Bayliss would do his own courting and not drag him into it.
Bayliss, who didn't know one tune from another, certainly didn't want to go to this concert, and it was
doubtful whether Enid Royce would care much about going. Gladys Farmer was the best musician in
One of Ours 39
Frankfort, and she would probably like to hear it.
Claude and Gladys were old friends, from their High School days, though they hadn't seen much of each other
while he was going to college. Several times this fall Bayliss had asked Claude to go somewhere with him on
a Sunday, and then stopped to "pick Gladys up," as he said. Claude didn't like it. He was disgusted, anyhow,
when he saw that Bayliss had made up his mind to marry Gladys. She and her mother were so poor that he
would probably succeed in the end, though so far Gladys didn't seem to give him much encouragement.
Marrying Bayliss, he thought, would be no joke for any woman, but Gladys was the one girl in town whom he
particularly ought not to marry. She was as extravagant as she was poor. Though she taught in the Frankfort
High School for twelve hundred a year, she had prettier clothes than any of the other girls, except Enid Royce,
whose father was a rich man. Her new hats and suede shoes were discussed and criticized year in and year out.
People said if she married Bayliss Wheeler, he would soon bring her down to hard facts. Some hoped she
would, and some hoped she wouldn't. As for Claude, he had kept away from Mrs. Farmer's cheerful parlour
ever since Bayliss had begun to drop in there. He was disappointed in Gladys. When he was offended, he
seldom stopped to reason about his state of feeling. He avoided the person and the thought of the person, as if
it were a sore spot in his mind.
XVII
It had been Mr. Wheeler's intention to stay at home until spring, but Ralph wrote that he was having trouble
with his foreman, so his father went out to the ranch in February. A few days after his departure there was a
storm which gave people something to talk about for a year to come.
The snow began to fall about noon on St. Valentine's day, a soft, thick, wet snow that came down in billows
and stuck to everything. Later in the afternoon the wind rose, and wherever there was a shed, a tree, a hedge,
or even a clump of tall weeds, drifts began to pile up. Mrs. Wheeler, looking anxiously out from the
sitting-room windows, could see nothing but driving waves of soft white, which cut the tall house off from the
rest of the world.
Claude and Dan, down in the corral, where they were provisioning the cattle against bad weather, found the
air so thick that they could scarcely breathe; their ears and mouths and nostrils were full of snow, their faces
plastered with it. It melted constantly upon their clothing, and yet they were white from their boots to their
caps as they worked,--there was no shaking it off. The air was not cold, only a little below freezing. When
they came in for supper, the drifts had piled against the house until they covered the lower sashes of the
kitchen windows, and as they opened the door, a frail wall of snow fell in behind them. Mahailey came
running with her broom and pail to sweep it up.
"Ain't it a turrible storm, Mr. Claude? I reckon poor Mr. Ernest won't git over tonight, will he? You never
mind, honey; I'll wipe up that water. Run along and git dry clothes on you, an' take a bath, or you'll ketch cold.
Th' ole tank's full of hot water for you." Exceptional weather of any kind always delighted Mahailey.
Mrs. Wheeler met Claude at the head of the stairs. "There's no danger of the steers getting snowed under
along the creek, is there?" she asked anxiously.
"No, I thought of that. We've driven them all into the little corral on the level, and shut the gates. It's over my
head down in the creek bottom now. I haven't a dry stitch on me. I guess I'll follow Mahailey's advice and get
in the tub, if you can wait supper for me."
"Put your clothes outside the bathroom door, and I'll see to drying them for you."
"Yes, please. I'll need them tomorrow. I don't want to spoil my new corduroys. And, Mother, see if you can
make Dan change. He's too wet and steamy to sit at the table with. Tell him if anybody has to go out after
One of Ours 40
supper, I'll go."
Mrs. Wheeler hurried down stairs. Dan, she knew, would rather sit all evening in wet clothes than take the
trouble to put on dry ones. He tried to sneak past her to his own quarters behind the wash-room, and looked
aggrieved when he heard her message.
"I ain't got no other outside clothes, except my Sunday ones," he objected.
"Well, Claude says he'll go out if anybody has to. I guess you'll have to change for once, Dan, or go to bed
without your supper." She laughed quietly at his dejected expression as he slunk away.
"Mrs. Wheeler," Mahailey whispered, "can't I run down to the cellar an' git some of them nice strawberry
preserves? Mr. Claude, he loves 'em on his hot biscuit. He don't eat the honey no more; he's got tired of it."
"Very well. I'll make the coffee good and strong; that will please him more than anything."
Claude came down feeling clean and warm and hungry. As he opened the stair door he sniffed the coffee and
frying ham, and when Mahailey bent over the oven the warm smell of browning biscuit rushed out with the
heat. These combined odours somewhat dispersed Dan's gloom when he came back in squeaky Sunday shoes
and a bunglesome cut-away coat. The latter was not required of him, but he wore it for revenge.
During supper Mrs. Wheeler told them once again how, long ago when she was first married, there were no
roads or fences west of Frankfort. One winter night she sat on the roof of their first dugout nearly all night,
holding up a lantern tied to a pole to guide Mr. Wheeler home through a snowstorm like this.
Mahailey, moving about the stove, watched over the group at the table. She liked to see the men fill
themselves with food-though she did not count Dan a man, by any means, and she looked out to see that Mrs.
Wheeler did not forget to eat altogether, as she was apt to do when she fell to remembering things that had
happened long ago. Mahailey was in a happy frame of mind because her weather predictions had come true;
only yesterday she had told Mrs. Wheeler there would be snow, because she had seen snowbirds. She
regarded supper as more than usually important when Claude put on his "velvet close," as she called his
brown corduroys.
After supper Claude lay on the couch in the sitting room, while his mother read aloud to him from "Bleak
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