“’Twas the least he could do, but no credit’s due him. It was to be. I’m not envying Father Bourassa nor her there with him.”
Varley made no reply. He was watching the receding storm with eyes which told nothing.
Finden spoke once more, but Varley did not hear him. Presently the door opened and Father Bourassa entered. He made a gesture of the hand to signify that all was over.
Outside, the sun was breaking through the clouds upon the Western prairie, and there floated through the evening air the sound of a child’s voice singing beneath the trees that fringed the river:
| “Will you come back, darlin’? Never heed the pain and blightin’, Never trouble that you’re wounded, that you bear the scars of fightin’; Here’s the luck o’ Heaven to you, Here’s the hand of love will brew you The cup of peace—ah, darlin’, will you come back home?” |
WATCHING THE RISE OF ORION
“In all the wide border his steed was the best,” and the name and fame of Terence O’Ryan were known from Strathcona to Qu’appelle. He had ambition of several kinds, and he had the virtue of not caring who knew of it. He had no guile, and little money; but never a day’s work was too hard for him, and he took bad luck, when it came, with a jerk of the shoulder and a good-natured surprise on his clean-shaven face that suited well his wide gray eyes and large, luxurious mouth. He had an estate, half ranch, half farm, with a French-Canadian manager named Vigon, an old prospector who viewed every foot of land in the world with the eye of the discoverer. Gold, coal, iron, oil, he searched for them everywhere, making sure that sooner or later he would find them. Once Vigon had found coal. That was when he worked for a man called Constantine Jopp, and had given him great profit; but he, the discoverer, had been put off with a horse and a hundred dollars. He was now as devoted to Terence O’Ryan as he had been faithful to Constantine Jopp, whom he cursed waking and sleeping.
In his time O’Ryan had speculated, and lost; he had floated a coal-mine, and “been had”; he had run for the local legislature, had been elected, and then unseated for bribery committed by an agent; he had run races at Regina, and won—he had won for three years in succession; and this had kept him going and restored his finances when they were at their worst. He was, in truth, the best rider in the country, and, so far, was the owner also of the best three-year-old that the West had produced. He achieved popularity without effort. The West laughed at his enterprises and loved him; he was at once a public moral and a hero. It was a legend of the West that his forebears had been kings in Ireland like Brian Boroihme. He did not contradict this; he never contradicted anything. His challenge to all fun and satire and misrepresentation was, “What’ll be the differ a hundred years from now!”