Then he turned and moved forward with a gesture that was almost courtly. "You are very welcome to this poor house of mine," he said.
CHAPTER VI
MISS DERINGHAM MAKES FRIENDS
The Homeric supper was over, and Miss Deringham, who, sitting next to Alton at the head of the long table, had watched the stalwart axeman feed with sensations divided between disgust and wonder, was talking to Seaforth on the verandah, when her father sat by a window of the room his kinsman called his own. There were survey maps, tassels of oats, and a great Wapiti head upon the wall, while Alton himself lay almost full length in a deerhide chair. The window was open wide, and the vista of lake, pine-shrouded hillside, and snow, framed by its log casing, steeped in nocturnal harmonies of silver and blue. Out of the stillness came the scent of balsam, and the sighing of a little breeze amidst the pines.
Deringham held a good cigar, and there was a cup of coffee beside him, while he was not wholly sorry that they sat in darkness. He had realized that Alton of Somasco was by no means a fool, and waited his questions with some anxiety. The rancher, however, had apparently no present intention of asking any.
"So they've been wondering when I am coming over," he said reflectively. "I don't know that I'll come at all." Deringham looked down at his cigar to cover his astonishment. "But you are an Alton of Carnaby," he said.
"Yes," said Alton slowly. "But that is one of the things I want to forget. You see they drove my father out because he had the grit to marry the woman who loved him instead of another one who had the money, but you know all that?"
Deringham nodded, and Alton's face showed grim in the moonlight as he continued: "But what you don't know is how he fought his way uphill in this country, and what my mother suffered helping him. Oh, yes, I can remember her well, gentle, brave, and patient as she was, and know what it must have cost her to camp down alone in the bush, and fight through the hard winter in the ice and snow. Well, she was too good for this world, and she just faded out of it before the good time came. I think they must have a special place for women of her kind in the other one."
Deringham only nodded again, because this type of man was new to him, and he had learned to keep silent when in doubt; but Alton's big right hand closed into a fist.
"And now, when I have Somasco, the man who had not a dollar for his only son leaves me Carnaby," he said. "There. Look out and see. Timber, lake and clearing, cattle, mills, and crops, the finest ranch in the district. My father commenced it, and I have finished. The Almighty made him a man, and he wouldn't sell his birthright to loaf his days away, overfed, at Carnaby."