VIIIIn courtship days Kennicott had shown her a photograph of Nels Erdstrom's baby and log cabin, but she had never seen the Erdstroms. They had become merely "patients of the doctor." Kennicott telephoned her on a mid-December afternoon, "Want to throw your coat on and drive out to Erdstrom's with me? Fairly warm. Nels got the jaundice."
"Oh yes!" She hastened to put on woolen stockings, high boots, sweater, muffler, cap, mittens.
The snow was too thick and the ruts frozen too hard for the motor. They drove out in a clumsy high carriage. Tucked over them was a blue woolen cover, prickly to her wrists, and outside of it a buffalo robe, humble and moth-eaten now, used ever since the bison herds had streaked the prairie a few miles to the west.
The scattered houses between which they pass
