The sun was setting when our little caravan started homeward, casting its mammoth shadows across the soft, warm prairies, and bearing Spoof's promise to return our visit at the earliest opportunity. CHAPTER VIII. Spoof was as good as his word. The following Sunday we saw his ox-team as a slowly-growing speck on section Eleven, and a mile away we heard remarks to the "bally bullocks" which, presumably, were intended to be confidential. "I just brought the bullocks for exercise," he explained, when he drew up before our shack. "I could have walked much easier, and much quicker, but they keep my arms and voice in form." Even while Spoof was speaking, his oxen, attracted by the smell of fresh hay at our stable, moved down over the bank of the gully and upset the wagon _en route_. We disentangled them with some difficulty. "I begin to lose sympathy with them; I really do," said Spoof, when we found that the reach of his wagon was broken. "Now I shall have to bind this bally thing together. Yesterday they balked in the hay meadow; in the hay meadow, mind you, where, if at all, an ox should be in an amiable mood. I argued with them for an hour, without effect, and then I went home and read a magazine. It's an ill wind, you know. They followed me about supper time." "I'll tell you how to fix them," Jack remarked. "Next time they balk----" "But if I fix them they won't be able to move at all," Spoof protested. "'Fix' is to make fast, to render immovable, and they're too much that way already." "No doubt that is what fix means in England," Jack admitted, "but in Canada, to 'fix' a balky ox means, when everything else fails, to put an armful of hay under him and set fire to it. It does the trick." "By Jove, that's a ripping idea! Now why couldn't I think of that? I suppose because I'm a greenhorn. I shall try it at the first opportunity." Spoof retrieved a bundle of papers which had fallen out of his wagon box, and together we went up to the house. The girls were waiting in the shade at the eastern side of the shack; in their Sunday dresses of flimsy stuff appropriate to the hot weather they looked very sweet and charming. "Ah, here are the ladies," said Spoof, and in his manner there was a touch of gallantry that in some way seemed foreign to either Jack or me. "Real prairie roses, and no mistake," as he took their hands in his. "It's jolly decent to ask a stranger over. All this out-of-doors; dawns, sunsets, sky, distance--all very fine, but it isn't good to be too much alone with it. Rather overwhelms one, don't you think?" "I have felt that," said Jean, while Marjorie was fumbling for words. "It's too grand; it oppresses one. It's--it's all soul; no body."