She laughed in delight as they jerked up their heads in astonishment.  Her laughter was young and sweet to the ear, but there was not a great deal outside her laughter that was attractive about her.

However, Joe and Harry gaped and grinned and blushed at her in the time-old fashion, for she lived in a country where to be a woman is sufficient, beauty is an unnecessary luxury, soon taxed out of existence by the life.  She possessed the main essentials of social power; she could dance unflaggingly from dark to dawn at the nearest schoolhouse dance, chattering every minute; and she could maintain a rugged silence from dawn to dark again, as she rode her pony home.

Harry Campbell took off his hat, not in politeness, but to scratch his head.  “Say, Jessie, where’d you drop from?  Didn’t see you coming no ways.”

“Maybe I come down like rain,” said Jessie.

All three laughed heartily at this jest.

Jessie swung sidewise in her saddle with the lithe grace of a boy, dropped her elbow on the high pommel, and gave advice.  “You got a pretty bad taproot under yonder.  Better chop out a bigger hole, boys.  But, say, what you clearing this here land for?  Ain’t no good for nothing, is it?” She looked around her.  Here and there the clearing around the shanty ate raggedly into the forest, but still the plowed land was chopped up with a jutting of boulders.

“Sure it ain’t no good for nothing,” said Joe.  “It’s just the old man’s idea.”

He jerked a grimy thumb over his shoulder to indicate the controlling and absent power of the old man, somewhere in the woods.

“Sure makes him glum when we ain’t working.  If they ain’t nothing worthwhile to do he always sets us to grubbing up roots; and if we ain’t diggin’ up roots, we got to get out old ‘Maggie’ mare and try to plow.  Plow in rocks like them!  Nobody but Bull can do it.”

“I didn’t know Bull could do nothing,” said the girl with interest.

“Aw, he’s a fool, right enough,” said Harry, “but he just has a sort of head for knowing where the rocks are under the ground, and somehow he seems to make old Maggie hoss know where they lie, too.  Outside of that he sure ain’t no good.  Everybody knows that.”

“Kind of too bad he ain’t got no brains,” said the girl.  “All his strength is in his back, and none is in his head, my dad says.  If he had some part of sense he’d be a powerful good hand.”

“Sure would be,” agreed Harry.  “But he ain’t no good now.  Give him an ax maybe, and he hits one or two wallopin’ licks with it and then stands and rests on the handle and starts to dreaming like a fool.  Same way with everything.  But, say, Joe, maybe he could start this stump out of the hole.”

“But I seen you both try to get the stump up,” said the girl in wonder.

“Get Bull mad and he can lift a pile,” Joe assured her.  “Go find him, Harry.”

Harry obediently shouted, “Bull!  Oh, Bull!”