Winter that is winter in earnest does not allow cattle and horses to play about the fields, so everything comes home; and since no share can break ground to any profit for some five months, there would seem to be very little to do.  As a matter of fact, country interests at all seasons are extensive and peculiar, and the day is not long enough for them when you take out that time which a self-respecting man needs to turn himself round in.  Consider!  The solid undisturbed hours stand about one like ramparts.  At a certain time the sun will rise.  At another hour, equally certain, he will set.  This much we know.  Why, in the name of Reason, therefore, should we vex ourselves with vain exertions?  An occasional visitor from the Cities of the Plains comes up panting to do things.  He is set down to listen to the normal beat of his own heart—­a sound that very few men have heard.  In a few days, when the lather of impatience has dried off, he ceases to talk of ‘getting there’ or ‘being left.’  He does not desire to accomplish matters ‘right away,’ nor does he look at his watch from force of habit, but keeps it where it should be—­in his stomach.  At the last he goes back to his beleaguered city, unwillingly, partially civilised, soon to be resavaged by the clash of a thousand wars whose echo does not reach here.

The air which kills germs dries out the very newspapers.  They might be of to-morrow or a hundred years ago.  They have nothing to do with to-day—­the long, full, sunlit to-day.  Our interests are not on the same scale as theirs, perhaps, but much more complex.  The movement of a foreign power—­an alien sleigh on this Pontic shore—­must be explained and accounted for, or this public’s heart will burst with unsatisfied curiosity.  If it be Buck Davis, with the white mare that he traded his colt for, and the practically new sleigh-robe that he bought at the Sewell auction, why does Buck Davis, who lives on the river flats, cross our hills, unless Murder Hollow be blockaded with snow, or unless he has turkeys for sale? But Buck Davis with turkeys would surely have stopped here, unless he were selling a large stock in town.  A wail from the sacking at the back of the sleigh tells the tale.  It is a winter calf, and Buck Davis is going to sell it for one dollar to the Boston Market where it will be turned into potted chicken.  This leaves the mystery of his change of route unexplained.  After two days’ sitting on tenter-hooks it is discovered, obliquely, that Buck went to pay a door-yard call on Orson Butler, who lives on the saeter where the wind and the bald granite scaurs fight it out together.  Kirk Demming had brought Orson news of a fox at the back of Black Mountain, and Orson’s eldest son, going to Murder Hollow with wood for the new barn floor that the widow Amidon is laying down, told Buck that he might as well come round to talk to his father about the pig. But old man Butler meant fox-hunting from the first, and what he wanted