The glow of success at having gained the victory over Joyce in such an unexpected way, the realization of being herself a homesteader, with all the responsibilities and opportunities which that title conferred gave Harry a new interest in the hard work of the succeeding months. Winter came early and stayed late up there in the foothills and before the snow began to fall in November a great deal must be done.  
Most important of all was the building of the house. Within six months after filing on land each homesteader must, in the language of the law, "establish a residence." Fortunately the section line between Harry's hundred and sixty and Rob's ran just east of the stream and so, by placing the two fourteen-foot cabins together with this line between them, a very fair-sized house would result.
 
Rob had figured that, with Harry's help, he could get the house up in a month. He had planned to build it during October between harvesting and threshing. He had already engaged to work for the ranchers down on the flat with their hay and grain, and furthermore he had taken a job feeding stock for the winter at Stone Bridge, a new settlement up the river.
 
But now Harry must be included in the winter's plans. A few months earlier this would have been[Pg 136] a serious consideration, as the only thing she could do by which she could earn her living sufficiently well was teaching, and, as has been said, she had had to give up that work because of eyestrain. But six months of desert life had, in addition to broadening her ideas, restored the natural vigor of her eyesight. The complete rest from school work, the change from living in close rooms, from narrow, close-built streets, and moving crowds, to working out of doors with the wide horizon and silent spaces of the hills around her had, in fact, given her more vigor than she had ever had and she felt more fit than ever to teach.
 
Here, of course, another difficulty arose. Teachers would have been engaged for all district schools by the time Rob and Harry should be ready to leave the ranch. They talked the situation over and decided that an advertisement in the Prairie Despatch would reach the most remote hamlets; those where lay the probable chances of finding a vacancy. If this failed, Harry could go out with Rob to cook for the threshing crews and, when that work ended, board in Stone Bridge through the winter.
 
Having settled this, Rob went down to help Robinson put up his second cutting of alfalfa and Harry spent the week irrigating their alfalfa and the garden. They had put in a quarter of an acre of potatoes with the intention of having enough both for their own use the following spring and summer and for selling to the ranchers down on the flat where late frosts usually nipped the garden patches.
 
[Pg 137]
 
Harry's advertisement was to appear in that Saturday's Despatch, so naturally there was no report from it when Rob came up to spend Sunday. But the following week he brought a letter from the trustees of a mountain hamlet and, more important, word from Mrs. Robinson that her husband's sister living up at Stone Bridge, had written that their teacher was going to be married and they were wondering where to find another.
 
Harry, of course, rode out with Rob on Monday, taking her diploma and a letter of recommendation from the principal of the school in the East where she had taught. She was obliged to pass an examination before being allowed to teach in Idaho, but she did that satisfactorily and it was not difficult for the school board to believe in her general fitness for the work—if "work" it could be called—she reflected after seeing the textbooks and the fifteen children who were to be her pupils.
 
The winter's work being thus happily settled for them, Harry and Rob gave their attention to the new house. He hauled the lumber at odd times between haying and harvesting and on the first of October came home with a last load of nails, shingles, windows and building paper, ready to begin work.
 
The building of that "prove-up shack," as Rob would call it, was, next to Harry's coming into Idaho, the most significant event in her life. All her traditions had built the conviction that a home must be something more than a weatherproof box containing the number of[Pg 138] cubic feet required by the homestead law and lighted by one window two and a half feet square.
 
"I can't, I won't live in a—a shack like some I've seen," she protested; "board walls so full of splinters you could curry a horse against them and nothing but a row of nails for a closet. Why isn't it just as cheap to make a pretty cottage of the same amount of wood?"
 
"Why, isn't it just as cheap to make a lace veil as a flour sack? They're both made of cotton thread. I've figured on spending one month's time and about two hundred dollars cash on this dwelling. Now if you can show me where any style can be worked in for that sum of money and labor—don't forget the labor—go ahead and make your plan."
 
This somewhat discouraging permission was quite enough for Harry. A flood of sketches including dormer windows, pergolas, verandas and colonial chimneys was the result offered for Rob's consideration.
 
"Now if I were an architect and you had a million dollars to spend we'd show these old timers, wouldn't we?" he laughed. But nevertheless, he did try to adapt his material to the spirit of Harry's wishes.
 
The eaves of the steep, gabled roof hung low; there were windows wherever a free wall space allowed—big windows that gave the plain rooms a set of ever-changing pictures of prairie and mountains. There was even a little porch before the door—that door built of planks, studded with nail-heads and twice the width of the ordinary mill-work door, "so that when we get[Pg 139] our piano, it will be easy to bring it inside," explained Harry.
 
"You must be figuring on making money, real money," Rob teased.
 
Harry could not tell him how the slow raising of that house had lifted her to the sight of still wider horizons. But every board she helped to lay in place, every nail she drove fastened her more firmly to this new land, strengthened her will to succeed. As she and Rob worked they talked, planning endless improvements to be made as they should prosper. The desire for those things stirred them to toil happier than many pleasures.
 
Rob did not finish the house, there was too much else to be done; a horse shed to be run up, firewood to be cut and hauled in readiness for the following spring, the channel of the stream that ran close to the house to be deepened and widened with the slip, so that when the snow water came down in the spring break-up it would not overflow into their new cellar, or swirl a pile of stones from the hillside into the garden.
 
They left the gathering of the stove wood to the last; freezing ground would not make sagebrush any harder to cut and haul. They were getting the wood in a coulee about a mile east of Harry's hundred and sixty where there were plenty of willows and the sagebrush grew big and thick.
 
It was a cold November afternoon when, as they were loading the last wagonful, they saw coming in[Pg 140] along the trail a team hauling lumber and a mountain wagon.
 
"Well! What do you know about that," Rob exclaimed; "looks like some one's filed here. I'd better go over and see."
 
Harry watched in a stir of eager curiosity. Homesteaders! That would mean neighbors. A procession of possibilities swept through her mind.
 
The three men talked for five minutes or so, then Rob came back.
 
"Homesteaders all right," he announced, "an old man named Eldredge and his wife. The young fellow is a real estate man from Shoshone who's locating them. Eldredge is only going to put up his shack this fall and then go back east—he's from Missouri—and came out in the spring with his wife."
 
"How jolly to have neighbors," Harry beamed. "I hope they've some children?"
 
"Nary one. Just Darby and Joan. But she'll be another woman for you to exchange flower seeds with and have a tryout as to which can make the best cake. Isn't that what you've been wanting?"
 
"You seem to be pleased yourself. It'll give you fresh material to tease me with."
 
"Fine! I didn't expect you'd see that so quickly. Too bad we'll have to wait until next spring to start the fun."
 
"Oh, I don't know. By the time you've helped feed a hundred head of cattle and cleaned the corral for a[Pg 141] month you'll forget there is such a thing as a joke or me to be tormented."
 
Harry's prediction hit the mark.
 
All through the winter she and Rob did not talk together once a week. He was at work in the morning before she left for school and in the evening after nodding a few moments over the paper he rolled off to bed.
 
Harry, herself, gave little thought to anything beyond her work. As soon as she began teaching, all the interest and pleasure which she had taken in it before revived with an ardor to kindle the most indifferent child. She had been cut off so abruptly from her companionship with girls that her heart was still a little bit sore from the tearing loose of old bonds. Also, she had been in her new environment just long enough to feel, beneath the material interests and excitement of new work and prospects, the ache of loneliness for friends. In her six months of wilderness life she had made the acquaintance of enough people to realize with startling emphasis how frankly dishonest and also what crudely and unassumingly good pioneers men and women are. With senses alert for such things she saw what school life—all too short for these sturdy workers—might be made to mean.
 
That flow of warm good will helped to carry her far over the difficult beginning, for it was hard at the start. Her pupils were of all ages from six to fifteen and of as many dispositions. All, of course, were suspicious[Pg 142] of the new teacher who had supplanted the one they knew.
 
"They look at me," Harry reflected, inwardly amused, "as I might view a boa constrictor coiled in a college professor's chair. If they only knew how much that is interesting a boa constrictor could tell them! Well, I'll show them how I'm not like one—Attention, please!"
 
She smiled at them as they turned, surprised, on their way to the door. (It was Friday afternoon and they were in a hurry to be off.) "You are all invited to meet me here to-morrow evening at seven o'clock," she went on, "girls please wear aprons as we are going to make candy. That'll show them I'm half human," she added to herself, watching the faint start of surprise that went through them, followed by smiles and murmured thanks.
 
That was a good beginning even though between beginning and finishing may be a hilly road. But it was Harry's belief that every one loved adventure, every one dreamed of romantic deeds with himself the hero. From this she had decided that every one would work and study with gusto if the task were skillfully presented to the imagination as a living, pulsing part of the great romance—life. But the theories which she had evolved while teaching carefully reared girls from well-to-do families was not certain to fit all cases. The first month at Stone Bridge district school was destructive to all theories and nearly baffled her.
 
Such unexpected work she had: to make children[Pg 143] wash their faces and hands; to make and enforce the rule that handkerchiefs were to be universally carried; to watch those who came in thin shoes through the snow and rain and make them dry their feet; to see that certain big boys did not filch the lunches from certain small, timid ones; and to watch that pencils, erasers, colored crayons and other small belongings were not carried off by those to whom they did not belong. Also, she bought mittens and scarfs for two small children of a hard-drinking sawyer at the lumber mill, and acquired the habit of carrying something extra with her lunch every day for the little girl who never had enough.
 
"And all the time I'm learning a lot from them," she realized when she saw them settle things for themselves. When red-headed Katie Riordan jumped out and slapped "Portagee Joe" Biane, the worst boy in school, for sticking his foot out and tripping little Lon Fisher, it took Harry's breath away. She hadn't been intended to see it because she was working at the board. Not knowing what to do, she waited to think it over. In the meanwhile, Joe let Lon alone and Katie was as sweet as new milk to every one.
 
Every day she saw things which made her bubble with laughter, ache with pity and burn with indignation: the blacksmith's three children who came to school on one horse, their feet tied up in sacks full of straw to keep them from freezing; Knute Sundstron, who wore neither socks nor undershirt and swallowed a spoonful of sand to cure indigestion, asking to sit by[Pg 144] the door where his feet might not get warm and make his chilblains itch; Charlie Martin, an only child who loved books with a ruling passion but was not allowed to carry them home from the school library because they "littered up the house," slipping them inside the lining of his overcoat in order to smuggle them into his room; and Isita Biane, the sister of "Portagee Joe," pretending that she didn't want to go out to play at noontime, when the reason was that she had no jacket and couldn't run or play in the man's overcoat in which she rode to school.
 
Of all these, amongst all the children in school Isita most appealed to Harry. She was a puzzle, too. She said she was fourteen but looked small for her age and was far behind the class she should have been in. She stumbled hopelessly over her arithmetic, could scarcely write her name legibly and yet spoke good English and could read remarkably well.
 
She studied earnestly, but at times Harry would look up and find the girl's gentle, black eyes on her with a timid steadfastness that stayed with her after school. "I wonder if she isn't badly treated at home," she pondered. "I'm sure I've seen bruises on her face and she seems to be utterly submissive to that hulking brother of hers. I must try to make friends with her."
 
But oddly enough this was something which she could not quite bring about. She knew Isita liked her; the faint flush which brightened her face when Harry spoke to her, the shy answering smile, were not to be mistaken. But there was a reserve which met Harry's[Pg 145] attempts at active friendliness and which she was too well bred to force. "I'm a stranger and she isn't quite sure of me," she decided. "I............