"Say, Bert, let's let her stay if she wants to," he said suddenly after they had been in silence for a long time. "Don't make a cussed fool of yourself, Ans," growled Bert, who saw that heroic measures were necessary. "Go to bed an' don't you say another word; we've got to take our medicine like men." CHAPTER VIII. AN EMPTY HOUSE. Anson was the more talkative of the two next morning, however. "Come, come, brace up, babe! Anybody 'u'd think we'd lost all the rest of our family, when we're only doin' the square thing by our daughter. That's all. Why, you'll be as happy as a canary in less'n two weeks. Young folks is about the same everywhere, an' you'll git acquainted in less'n two jiffies." They were on the road to Boomtown to put Flaxen on the train. It was about the tenth of September, early in the cold, crisp air of a perfect morning. In the south there was a vast phantom lake, with duplicate cities here and there along the winding shores, which stretched from east to west. The grain-stacks stood around so thickly that they seemed like walls of a great, low-built town, the mirage bringing into vision countless hundreds of them commonly below the horizon. The smoke of steam threshing-machines mounted into the still air here and there, and hung long in a slowly drifting cloud above the land. The prairie-lark, the last of the singing birds, whistled softly and infrequently from the dry grass. The gulls were streaming south from the lakes. They were driving her to Boomtown to avoid the inquisitive eyes of the good people of Belleplain. "I may break down an' blubber," said Anson to Bert; "an' if I do, I don't want them cussed idiots standin' around laughin'--it's better to go on the C., B. and Q., anyhow." Notwithstanding his struggle to keep talk going, Anson was unsuccessful from the very moment that Belleplain faded to an unsubstantial group of shadows and disappeared from the level plain into the air, just as Boomtown correspondingly wavered into sight ahead. Silence so profound was a restraint on them all, and poor Flaxen with wide eyes looked wistfully on the plain that stretched away into unknown regions. She was thinking of her poor mother, whom she dimly remembered in the horror of that first winter. Naturally of a gay, buoyant disposition, she had not dwelt much upon her future or her past; but now that the familiar plain seemed slipping from her sight entirely, she was conscious of its beauty, and, rapt with the associated emotions which came crowding upon her, she felt as though she were leaving the tried and true for the unknown and uncertain. "Boys," she said finally, "do you s'pose I've got any folks?" "I shouldn't wonder if y' had, babe, somewhere back in the ol' country." "They couldn't talk with me if I could find 'em, could they?" "I reckon not, 'less you study so hard that you can learn their lingo," said Ans, seeing another opportunity to add a reason for going to school.