On the afternoon of the twelfth of January, Abbie put her shawl over her shoulders and walked down the road to Reinmuellers’. The day was like a spring one,—a soft, mild, spring day.

“It’s probably the last time I can go to any of the neighbor’s,” she had said to Will, “and it will do Christine good to think I made the effort to come over once more to see her.”

The sun was warm. There was moisture on the sides of the cedars and cottonwoods. Hens scratched in the damp, steaming ground on the south side of the straw stacks, their liege lords crowing ecstatically over their activities.

Abbie walked cumbersomely, heavy with child. It was hard for her at forty-one to get about. The old buffalo trail of twenty years before, with its faintly outlined tracks, was a well-defined road now, running on to the big town of Lincoln, as straight as the crow, except for one short deviation, where it formed a letter S over the new Missouri Pacific railroad.

As she neared the Reinmueller house, Gus drove out of the yard with two of the younger boys on their way to town.

Abbie drew her shawl closer around her and called pleasantly, “Spring is here.”

“Ya,” shouted Gus. “She’s come, all right. Weather-breeder, that’s what she is. Ya . . . look at that.” Pigeons had settled down before his horses’ hoofs, to rise with a whirr of wings and settle again. What did Gus mean? Was it a bad sign? Grandma Deal would have said it was.

How queer that Gus used so much better English than Christine, Abbie was thinking. It seemed that Christine didn’t even try to talk right.

She found Christine alone in the square, box-like house which had replaced the dug-out. The girls had gone over to Lutz’s store, Christine said. Rosie was going to work at Dr. Hornby’s.

The two women talked for some time about trivial neighborhood things, beyond which they had little in common. Neighborliness, caused by the proximity of their houses and the fact that they had come into the new country at the same time, held them together. Christine was paradoxically rough and kind, penurious and unselfish. After a time, Abbie rose laboriously and said she must go. At the door she and Christine stood for a few minutes in parting. The northern sky was the color of dark gray ashes. It was very quiet,—the hushed quiet of a waiting storm god who gloats a little over the peace of Nature before he assaults. Suddenly Abbie felt half frightened and did not know why.

The great gray clouds were now coming in from the northwest, rolling low over the land like billows of thick smoke from a thousand factories of the storm gods located somewhere beyond on the prairie. A single snarling blast came out of the clouds and needles of snow struck Abbie in the face.

Even while she hurried out of the yard, the wind was whipping her shawl about her and a great smother of snow was engulfing her.