Page:The Indian Drum (1917 original).pdf/187

Rh thing to him; for he glanced swiftly at her as they turned away.

"Miss Sherrill," he asked, "have you ever stayed out in the country?"

"I go to northern Michigan, up by the straits, almost every summer for part of the time, at least; and once in a while we open the house in winter too for a week or so. It's quite wild—trees and sand and shore and the water. I've had some of my best times up there."

"You've never been out on the plains?"

"Just to pass over them on the train on the way to the coast."

"That would be in winter or in spring; I was thinking about the plains in late summer, when we—Jim and Betty, the children of the people I was with in Kansas—"

"I remember them."

"When we used to play at being pioneers in our sunflower shacks."

"Sunflower shacks?" she questioned.

"I was dreaming we were building them again when I was delirious just after I was hurt, it seems. I thought that I was back in Kansas and was little again. The prairie was all brown as it is in late summer, brown billows of dried grass which let you see the chips of limestone and flint scattered on the ground beneath; and in the hollows there were acres and acres of sunflowers, three times as tall as either Jim or I, and with stalks as thick as a man's wrist, where Jim and Betty and I . . . and you, Miss Sherrill, were playing."

"I?"

"We cut paths through the sunflowers with a corn