"I do know ye, boy, and it is proud I will be of it. There's Sheila at the door, callin' us. A toss of liquor and a bite—it will put the heart in us again. We must cheer up for the women, lad."
But in spite of this resolution supper was not a merry meal. Talk was spasmodic, interrupted by long silences. Mrs. McCrae—slight, gentle, motherly, with wavy silver hair—was plainly worried. Her husband brooded unconsciously over his plate. Sheila and Casey, conversing on topics which neither was thinking about, blundered ridiculously. And the son of the house, Alec McCrae, a wiry, hawk-faced young man of twenty-two, strongly resembling his sister, was almost silent.
Soon after supper the ranchers who had banded together for mutual protection began to arrive by saddle and buckboard. Men of all ages, they comprised a dozen descents and nationalities, the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon strains predominating.
There was Oscar Swanson, heavy, slow-moving, blond as Harold Haarfagar, a veritable Scandinavian colossus; Wyndham, clean-bred, clean-built, an English gentleman to his fingers' tips; old Ike James, whose tongue carried the idiom and soft-slurring drawl of his native South; Eugéne Brulé, three parts Quebec French and one part Cree; Carter, O'Gara, Bullen, Westwick, and half a dozen others.
One and all they were wind-and-sun tanned, steady of eye, mostly quiet and brief of speech. Life was a serious business with them just then. Their ranches were their all. They had given hostages to competence. Up to a year ago they had believed themselves lucky, independent, on the way to modest fortune. Then came alarming rumours; next, construction of works confirming the rumours. Now they were come to hear the worst or best from the lips of their envoy, Casey Dunne.
They listened as he gave details of his interviews with York and Wade, lips grimly wrapped around cigars and pipe stems, troubled eyes straining through the blue smoke at the speaker.
"And you couldn't get an injunction?" said Wyndham.
"No. The judge said that the mere fact of building a dam did not show an intention to interfere with anybody's rights."
"Didn't—eh?" snapped Carter, at high tension. "Then I'd like to know what would show it!"
"So would I," said Dunne. "Anyway, what the judge said went. The long and short of it is that we can't go to law till they actually take our water. Wade advises us to sell out if we can get a fair price. And that's all I have to report, gentlemen."