Her wits came back from their wanderings with a suddenness that caused her to start.
“You were dreaming at supper-time,” she said. “I am dreaming now.”
“God bless the world’s dreamers,” said Burton, fervently. “How often in Bible history He revealed himself to His people in a dream! And shall He not do it still? Can we suppose the Father of thought has lost the key to the midnight chambers of the brain? But practical men despise dreamers.”
Her eyes had opened wider as he spoke; she was leaning slightly toward him when he finished. Thoughts are such mighty magnets that they attract even the material bodies that encase them. There was an appreciation in her look and her partly opened lips that Burton did not fail to notice.
“Practical men are fools,” she said. “Good night.”
For some days Burton did not find himself assigned to any regular duties about the farm. Grain-growing was only a small part of Mr. McKay’s business, and was, indeed, still regarded as largely experimental; the real wealth of the farm was represented by the herds of ranch cattle which fed in the heavy grass of the valley or roamed the unsettled plains for miles around. With these herds Burton had no concern; they were under the care of two cowboys long in Mr. McKay’s employ. Decent fellows Burton found them to be, yet while they treated him with frank familiarity they could not altogether disguise their inbred conviction that the cow-puncher is of better clay than the sod-buster. He envied them their wild free life, their rides over the limitless plains, their “leave and liking to shout,” while he sharpened the binder knives and tacked new slats on the canvases, and made fly-blankets for the horses out of twine sacks. The ancient war of the herdsman and the grainman was being fought out again in his own breast, and he secretly admitted a sense of envy. To ride the plains seemed a greater thing than to till them.
But if the cattlemen excited a measure of envy in the breast of Burton, he soon discovered that he had unwittingly aroused their jealousy. Although their feeling toward him took no unkind form of expression, he became more and more conscious that he was regarded as an intruder, an unwelcome person tolerated simply for courtesy’s sake. And the boy knew, by a kind of intuition, that the farmer’s daughter was largely responsible for this. With the cattlemen she chatted flippantly, giving them word for word and laughing at their smartest sallies; but with Burton she talked slowly in the dusk of the long, cool evenings, when the work inside and out was finished, and the farmer smoked his pipe on the kitchen porch. The cowboys, whom she had known for years, she still held saucily at a safe distance; but with Burton, on a week’s acquaintance, she spoke of things whereof her soul hungered for conversation. She had taken the boy at his word. She had started in the middle of the book.