After one got used to her poor clothes, and when she got tamed down a little on acquaintance and gave a person a chance to look at her, and especially into her eyes, she was a very pretty girl.  She had grown since I had seen her the summer before, and was fuller of figure.  Her hair was still of that rich dark brown, just the color of her eyes and eyebrows.  She had been a wild girl last summer, but now she was a woman, with spells of dreaming and times when her feelings were easily hurt.  She still was ready to flare up and fight at the drop of the hat—­because, I suppose, she felt that everybody looked down on her and her family; but to Magnus and me she was always gentle and sometimes I thought she was going to talk confidentially to me.

After she had had one of her lessons one evening she said to me, “I wish I wa’n’t so darned infarnal ignorant.  I wish I could learn enough to teach school!”

“We’re all ignorant here,” I said.

“Magnus ain’t,” said she.  “He went to a big school in the old country.  He showed me the picture of it, and of his father’s house.  It’s got four stone chimneys.”

“I wonder,” said I, “if what they learn over there is real learning.”

And that ended our confidential talk.

About the time I began wondering how long they were to stay with me, Buck Gowdy came careering over the prairie, driving his own horse, just as I was taking my nooning and was looking at the gun which Rowena had used to drive back the Settlers’ Club, and which we had brought along with us.  I thought I remembered where I had seen that gun, and when Buck came up I handed it to him.

“Here’s your shotgun,” I said.  “It’s the one you shot the geese with back toward the Mississippi.”

“Good goose gun,” said he.  “Thank you for keeping it for me.  I see you have caught me out getting acquainted with Iowa customs.  If you had needed any help that night, you’d have got it.”

“I came pretty near needing it,” I said; “and I had help.”

“I see you brought your help home with you,” he said.  “I think I recognize that wagon, don’t I?” I nodded.  “I wonder if they could come and help me on the farm.  I’d like to see them.  I need help, inside the house and out.”

I left him talking with the whole Fewkes family, except Rowena, who kept herself out of sight somewhere, and went out to the stable to work.  Gowdy was talking to them in that low-voiced, smiling way of his, with the little sympathetic tremor in his voice like that in the tone of an organ.  He had already told Surajah that his idea for a mouse-trap looked like something the world had been waiting for, and that there might be a fortune in the scheme.  Ma Fewkes was looking up at him, as if what he said must be the law and gospel.  He had them all hypnotized, or as we called it then, mesmerized—­so I thought as I went out of sight of them.  After a while, Rowena came around the end of a haystack, and spoke to me.