Page:Gilbert Parker--The Lane that had No Turning.djvu/148

132 and say: ‘Come home, Gal. Come home, and speak kind to Norinne and Marie.’

"I can see that hot wind lean down and twist the grain about—a damn devil thing from the Arzone desert down South. I take Gal back home, and we sit there all day, and all the nex’ day, and a leetla more, and when we have look enough, there is no grain on that hunder’ acre farm—only a dry-up prairie, all grey and limp. My skin is bake and rough, but when I look at Gal Bargon I know that his heart is dry like a bone, and, as Parpon say that back time, he have a wheel in his head. Norinne she is quiet, and she sit with her hand on his shoulder, and give him Marie to hold.

"But it is no good; it is all over. So I say: ‘Let us go back to Pontiac. What is the good for to be rich? Let us be poor and happy once more.’

"And Norinne she look glad, and get up and say: ‘Yes, let us go back.’ But all at once she sit down with Marie in her arms, and cry—bagosh, I never see a woman cry like that!

"So we start back for Pontiac with the horse and the ox and some pork and bread and molass’. But Gal Bargon never hold up his head, but go silent, silent, and he not sleep at night. One night he walk away on the prairie, and when he come back he have a great pain. So he lie down, and we sit by him, an’ he die. But once he whisper to me, and Norinne not hear: ‘You say you will marry him, Rachette?’ and I say, ‘I will.’

"‘C’est le bon Dieu!’ he say at the last, but he say it with a little laugh. I think he have a wheel in his head. But bimeby, yiste’day, Norinne and Marie and I come to Pontiac.”

The Little Chemist’s wife dried her eyes, and Medal-