"Thought you might like to walk a piece down the road.They got a calf at Aug Tietjens' with five legs.""I heard.I'd just as lief walk a little piece.I'm kind of beat, though.We've got the threshers day after tomorrow.We've been cooking up."Beneath Ben's bonhomie and roguishness there was much shyness.The two would plod along the road together in a sort of blissful agony of embarrassment.The neighbors were right in their surmise that there was no definite understanding between them.But the thing was settled in the minds of both.Once Ben had said: "Pop says I can have the north eighty on easy payments if--when----"Emma Byers had flushed up brightly, but had answered equably: "That's a fine piece.Your pop is an awful good man."The stolid exteriors of these two hid much that was fine and forceful.Emma Byers' 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 other's 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' 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, "who'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 this was the new schoolteacher.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.Thatwas 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 neighborhood swains Ben Westerveld already occupied a position at the top of the column.
He felt his face redden as they approached each other.To hide his embarrassment he swung his little hickory switch gaily and called to his dog Dunder, who was nosing about by the roadside.Dunder bounded forward, spied the newcomer, and leaped toward her playfully and with natural canine curiosity.
Bella screamed.She screamed and ran to Ben and clung to him, clasping her hands about his arm.Ben lifted the hickory switch in his free hand and struck Dunder a sharp cut with it.It was the first time in his life that he had done such a thing.If he had had a sane moment from that time until the day he married Bella Huckins, he never would have forgotten the dumb hurt in Dunder's stricken eyes and shrinking, quivering body.
Bella screamed again, still clinging to him.Ben was saying: "He won't hurt you.He won't hurt you," meanwhile patting her shoulder reassuringly.He looked down at her pale face.She was so slight, so childlike, so apparently different from the sturdy country girls.From-- well, from the girls he knew.Her helplessness, her utter femininity, appealed to all that was masculine in him.Bella, the experienced, clinging to him, felt herself swept from head to foot by a queer electric tingling that was very pleasant but that still had in it something of the sensation of a wholesale bumping of one's crazy bone.If she had been anything but a stupid little flirt, she would have realized that here was a specimen of the virile male with which she could not trifle.She glanced up at him now, smiling faintly."My, I was scared!" She stepped away from him a little--very little.
"Aw, he wouldn't hurt a flea."
But Bella looked over her shoulder fearfully to where Dunder stood by the roadside, regarding Ben with a look of uncertainty.He still thought that perhaps this was a new game.Not a game that he cared for, but still one to be played if his master fancied it.Ben stooped, picked up a stone,and threw it at Dunder, striking him in the flank.
"Go on home!" he commanded sternly."Go home!" He started toward the dog with a well-feigned gesture of menace.Dunder, with a low howl, put his tail between his legs and loped off home, a disillusioned dog.
Bella stood looking up at Ben.Ben looked down at her."You're the new teacher, ain't you?""Yes.I guess you must think I'm a fool, going on like a baby about that dog.""Most girls would be scared of him if they didn't know he wouldn't hurt nobody.He's pretty big."He paused a moment, awkwardly."My name's Ben Westerveld." "Pleased to meet you," said Bella."Which way was you going?
