And then, one Sunday afternoon, after the wheat was all in stook, came another incident to change the course of his career. The cowboys, with a number of friends, were riding to neighbouring ranches; Mr. McKay dozed over an old newspaper as he sat in the shade of the kitchen porch; and Burton and Kate lounged on the front verandah, reading little excerpts from their magazines, but most of the time staring with dreaming eyes across the hot prairies.
“Pshaw,” said Burton, after his fourth attempt to centre his interest in a story, “I can’t read to-day. Let’s go for a walk, Kate.” He called her Kate now, although he had not been able to bring himself to the more familiar name by which the other hands addressed her. And yet he knew that he was much better acquainted with her than were they.
The girl clasped her hands above her head and yawned leisurely. Then she looked long and intently at the fringe of willows along the gulley. “It’s too hot,” she said at length.
“What, you a prairie girl and afraid of the heat?” Burton bantered.
“I’m not afraid of it,” she answered, laughing, “but I respect it. And I can’t walk in the grass in this skirt. And most of all,” she confessed, bringing her elbows to her knees and resting her chin on her hands—“most of all, I’m lazy.”
“Oh, how gallant you are! I suppose if I had said I was lame you would have admired lame people?”
“But I spoke seriously,” he protested. “I don’t say I admire one who is chronically lazy, but I do respect the man or woman who can forget the rush of life now and again and lapse into a period of laziness. ‘Leisure,’ some people call it, and it is closely identified with culture, which brings us around to the poets and the painters and art generally.”
“Speaking of art, did I ever let you see my pictures? I have a few I gathered when I was East at college. Oh, yes, and my photographs. That is where so many acquaintances start, you know, over the family album, while one expounds to someone who doesn’t care the tribal history of people he doesn’t know.”
The sentence was ended on the stairs. In a minute she was down with a basketful of photographs.
“Now, Mr. Ray, you shall behold the friends of my girlhood—up to date. By the way, when are you going to let me into the mystery of your surname? One of these days some of the neighbours will call, and I shall have to introduce you as ‘Our man Ray.’ Here I have told you my history from Alpha to Omega, and all I know about you is that your first name is Ray. When, please sir, will I be sufficiently established in your confidence to be entrusted with your name?”