Leland laughed as he swung himself from the saddle. "That's all right. You did the sensible thing, and nobody's going to blame you," he said. "If you don't mind rousing Jake, we'll get the troopers breakfast before they go away. You know your way to the stables, boys." Urmston and the troopers disappeared, and Carrie looked down on her husband, who stood, a shadowy figure, beside her stirrup. "You," she said, with a little soft laugh, "would have found another course." Leland said nothing, but stretched his arms up, and, when she slipped from the saddle into them, held her there while he kissed her. CHAPTER XIX PRAIRIE HAY It was the middle of a scorching afternoon when Carrie drew her waggon over a low rise and down the long slope to the dried-up sloo. Urmston, riding beside it, sprinkled white with dust, looked uncomfortably hot, and Eveline Annersly, whose face was unpleasantly flushed, tried in vain to shelter herself beneath her parasol in the jolting waggon. "I am positively melting, and my head aches," she said. "If I had known how hot it was, you would never have got me here, and, if Mrs. Custer will keep me, I am not going back to Prospect to-night. How does your husband work this weather?" Carrie laughed as she pulled her team up near the sloo. She, at least, looked delightfully fresh and almost cool in her long white dress and big white hat. "He would probably tell you it is because he has to," she said. "In any event, he seems to be working rather harder than ever." "It is one of Charley Leland's strong points that he knows when a thing has to be done," and Eveline Annersly glanced at Urmston with a little smile. "There are men who don't, and never will, though they are sometimes able to shift the consequences on to the shoulders of other people." Then she turned, and blinked about her with half-dazed eyes. In front of the waggon a haze of dust floated up against the intense blueness of the sky, and under it a belt of tall, harsh grass rustled drily in the scant, hot breeze. Everything seemed white and suffused with brightness. Beyond them, the parched, grey prairie rolled back to the horizon. There was no shade anywhere, nor, so far as the eye could travel, a single speck of green. "And this is a prairie sloo!" she said. "I had pictured a nice, cool lake where the wild duck swim. Charley is, presumably, haymaking, though I never saw it done this way before."