"Climb in alongside the Missis, Bill," directed John Nixon, who had made no special preparation for extreme weather conditions, other than to pull his corduroy cap down over his ears, "We'll need to get a-goin', if we're intendin' to strike home before we get blew off the trail. All set?" "All set, old chap," Sir William responded, as he tucked his end of the goatskin robe around his knees and, in response to Lovina's mumbled recommendation, felt with his toes for the extra brick which Nixon had heated for him on the top of the livery stable stove; "it's a jolly good thing Daisy decided to do as Mother wanted and stay in town for a week. Perhaps we shall have a better day, to bring her out." "Oh, the gal wouldn't mind this," Nixon rejoined, casually, after he had "clucked" the horses into a trot down the drifted street; "no, sir, Bill; she'd have got you off that seat, a-runnin' behind in the sleigh-track, as soon as your toes would start for to feel nippy. It would take a mighty high wind to chase Daise into the house in the winter-time, except when dinner is ready. Her and the dog is about even, when it comes to standin' the cold. Ain't that so mother?" "Oh, yes, it's so," Lovina's voice, muffled but still recognizable in its sharpness, said through the swathes of shawl, "except when I ust to want her to fetch in an armful o' wood or a pail of water. Then you couldn't budge her from behint the stove." "Aw, go on," Nixon, happy to be on the way home to the "stock" again, swung his whip jovially but harmlessly over the backs of the horses. "Wait till you see the happy reunion between her and Rove, Bill, when she gets here next week. It'll prove what I say about them bein' chums. Rove, he would have no use for a girl that stayed in the house: you couldn't coax him any closer to in-doors than the chip-pile, not if it was sixty below zero." The two bay sleigh-ponies--a light team had been chosen, as they could stand quick travel over difficult roads better than the heavy-fetlocked, big-haunched, working horses--trotted along sure-footed on the hard ridge of the trail. The last house on Toddburn's one short street was soon passed. Turning out at a wide angle from the railroad, at a point where Ware saw one of the country's tall red elevators, with staccato explosion of gasoline engine, pouring wheat into a freight-car, the prairie road set off alone across the white country.