“Yuh better ride around the hill and take a look at the stacks,” suggested Jim Bleeker.  “We’re feeding heavy as we dare, Bill.  If we don’t get a let-up early we’re going to be plumb out uh hay.  There ain’t been a week all together that the calves could feed away from the sheds. That’s where the trouble lays.”

Billy rode the long half-mile up the coulee to where the hay had mostly been stacked, and came back looking sober.  “There’s no use splitting the bunch and taking some to the Double-Crank,” he said.  “We need all the hay we’ve got over there.  Shove ’em out on the hills and make ’em feed a little every day that’s fit, and bank up them sheds and make ’em warmer.  This winter’s going to be one of our old steadies, the way she acts so far.  It’s sure a fright, the way this weather eats up the hay.”

It was such incidents as these which weaned him again from his singing and his light-heartedness as the weeks passed coldly toward spring.  He did not say very much about it to Dill, because he had a constitutional aversion to piling up agony ahead of him; besides, Dill could see for himself that the loss would be heavy, though just how heavy he hadn’t the experience with which to estimate.  As March came in with a blizzard and went, a succession of bleak days, into April, Billy knew more than he cared to admit even to himself.  He would lie awake at night when the wind and snow raved over the land, and picture the bare open that he knew, with lean, Double-Crank stock drifting tail to the wind.  He could fancy them coming up against this fence and that fence, which had not been there a year or two ago, and huddling there, freezing, cut off from the sheltered coulees that would have saved them.

“Damn these nesters and their fences!” He would grit his teeth at his helplessness, and then try to forget it all and think only of Flora.

CHAPTER XIX.

"I’m Not Your Wife Yet!"

Billy, coming back from the biggest town in the country, where he had gone to pick up another man or two for the round-up which was at hand, met the Pilgrim face to face as he was crossing the creek to go to the corrals.  It was nearing sundown and it was Sunday, and those two details, when used in connection with the Pilgrim, seemed unpleasantly significant.  Besides, Billy was freshly antagonistic because of something he had heard while he was away; instead of returning the Pilgrim’s brazenly cheerful “Hello,” he scowled and rode on without so much as giving a downward tilt to his chin.  For Charming Billy Boyle was never inclined to diplomacy, or to hiding his feelings in any way unless driven to it by absolute necessity.