At nights we pitched the tent and made down blankets for the girls, but Jack and I slept under the stars. We were roughing it, but every muscle in our young bodies was vibrating with the tense new life of the open. The smell of spring flowers was in our nostrils; the whip of spring winds about our cheeks; the myriad murmurings of the little lives of spring crept up through the silences. When the girls called us to breakfast of fried bacon and potatoes and steaming coffee and milk from our traveling dairy we were more happy and more hungry than anything we had ever known to be possible. And the girls! We saw them growing browner every day, but with their sunburn they seemed to take on a strange new charm and competence. They treated the whole experience as a high adventure, and after cramped hours on the top of "the ark" they would race like wild things across the prairies, their hair flying in the breeze, and a vagrant wind tossing the skirts about their shapely limbs. They had taken the precaution to provide themselves with sunbonnets and a better cosmetic than axle-grease, but the prairie sun is an impetuous lover, and their cheeks and lips showed the mark of his caresses. He was a rival who did not pique my jealousy, for in his embrace I saw the woman Jean bursting forth from the bud of girlhood in a beauty that kept my blood a-tingle. The prairies were a never-ceasing source of delight and wonder. Almost over-night, it seemed, they had blossomed out in myriads of flowers, mauve and yellow, so thick that at places they almost hid the grass from sight. The girls plucked handfuls of them and arranged the downy stems in the bands of their sunbonnets. Saucy gophers mounted the little dumps of moist earth in front of their burrows and sent their shrill whistle defiantly forth, save when a well-aimed clod from Jack or me brought the note to an end in a sudden sharp crescendo, accompanied by a flicker of a jaunty tail as the owner took refuge underground. In a moment, if we watched, we would see his sharp eyes levelled on us through the grass at the mouth of his burrow, or perhaps he would appear from another exit and send forth his shrill challenge more saucily than ever. Coyotes we frequently saw; a badger once or twice, and one day figures at a great distance which we took to be antelope. Innumerable ducks flew overhead, and the nights were at times almost sleepless with the clanging of wild geese, wedging their way to the nesting grounds in the north.