Page:Margaret Wilson - The Able McLaughlins.djvu/11

 itself refreshed, began gamboling about, trying its length of rope, its tail satisfactorily erect. The two had to retreat suddenly to the doorstep where Hughie sat, so impetuous it grew. Hughie was not, like the others, at home because he was too small to go to school. Indeed, no I Hughie was ten, and at home to-day because he had been chilling, the day before, with the fever that rose from the newly-broken prairie. The three of them sat quiet only a moment. “Why does he frisk his tail so?” Davie asked. “He’s praising the Lord,” replied Hughie, wise and wan. “Is he nowl” exclaimed Davie, impressed. “Does God like it?” “Fine,” said Hughie. That was an easy one. “It’s in the Psalm. Creeping things and all ye cattle.” Davie sat for some time sharing his Maker’s pleasure in the antics of happy calves. Then bored —perhaps like his Maker—he turned to other things. He rose, and went down the path towards the road, and stood looking down it, in the direction from which the older children must come, surely soon now, from school. Only here and there along that path where they would appear was the grass not higher than the children’s heads; in some places it was higher than a man on horse¬ back. There seemed no children in sight. But wasn’t that someone coming down there on the other road? 3