Emma Byers had flushed up brightly, but had answered equably:  “That’s a fine piece.  Your pop is an awful good man.”

Beneath the stolid exteriors of these two there was much that was fine and forceful.  Emma Byers’s thoughtful forehead and intelligent eyes would have revealed that in her.  Her mother was dead.  She kept house for her father and brother.  She was known as “that smart Byers girl.”  Her butter and eggs and garden stuff brought higher prices at Commercial, twelve miles away, than did any in the district.  She was not a pretty girl, according to the local standards, but there was about her, even at twenty-two, a clear-headedness and a restful serenity that promised well for Ben Westerveld’s future happiness.

But Ben Westerveld’s future was not to lie in Emma Byers’s capable hands.  He knew that as soon as he saw Bella Huckins.  Bella Huckins was the daughter of old Red Front Huckins, who ran the saloon of that cheerful name in Commercial.  Bella had elected to teach school, not from any bent toward learning, but because teaching appealed to her as being a rather elegant occupation.  The Huckins family was not elegant.  In that day a year or two of teaching in a country school took the place of the present-day normal-school diploma.  Bella had an eye on St. Louis, forty miles from the town of Commercial.  So she used the country school as a step toward her ultimate goal, though she hated the country and dreaded her apprenticeship.

“I’ll get a beau,” she said, “that’ll take me driving and around.  And Saturdays and Sundays I can come to town.”

* * * * *

The first time Ben Westerveld saw her she was coming down the road toward him in her tight-fitting black alpaca dress.  The sunset was behind her.  Her hair was very golden.  In a day of tiny waists hers could have been spanned by Ben Westerveld’s two hands.  He discovered that later.  Just now he thought he had never seen anything so fairylike and dainty, though he did not put it that way.  Ben was not glib of thought or speech.

He knew at once that this was the new school-teacher.  He had heard of her coming, though at the time the conversation had interested him not at all.  Bella knew who he was, too.  She had learned the name and history of every eligible young man in the district two days after her arrival.  That was due partly to her own bold curiosity and partly to the fact that she was boarding with the Widow Becker, the most notorious gossip in the county.  In Bella’s mental list of the neighbourhood swains Ben Westerveld already occupied a two-star position, top of column.

He felt his face redden as they approached each other.  To hide his embarrassment he swung his little hickory switch gayly and called to his dog Dunder that was nosing about by the roadside.  Dunder bounded forward, spied the newcomer, and leaped toward her playfully and with natural canine curiosity.