By Right of Purchase

by Harold Bindloss

Leland nodded, though there was light enough to show the curious look in his eyes. "Well," he said, "that ought to be excuse enough for me, and it's going to be a good deal colder presently."

He slipped his free arm round her, and drew her to him masterfully. Then he shook the furs higher about her neck with the hand that held the reins, and Carrie, who felt that protest would be useless and undignified, said nothing when she found her shoulder drawn against his breast, though the old fur coat had a faint but unmistakable odour of tobacco and the stable about it.

Leland looked down on her with a little laugh. "After all, that is where you ought to be," he said. "Perhaps, if I am very good to you, you will come there of your own will, by-and-bye."

Carrie said nothing, and, though she felt her cheeks burn, it was not altogether with anger against him. The man had been tactfully considerate, and had deferred to her as she felt that Aylmer would not have done. Indeed, she realised that she owed him a good deal, if only because of the delicacy he had displayed, and which she had scarcely expected from one so much beneath her in station. It was not even so repugnant as she had fancied to lie there warmed by the heat of his body, with his arm about her, and she felt, at least, a comforting confidence in his ability to shelter and protect her. What Leland felt he did not tell her until some time afterwards. He was accustomed to restraint, and, too, the driving occupied most of his attention, for darkness was creeping across the waste, and the snow was deep outside the beaten trail.

Then the cold increased until it grew numbing, and when the pain ceased, all feeling died out of the girl's hands and feet. She gradually grew drowsy, and, looking up now and then with heavy eyes, saw only the dim shapes of the horses projected against the bitter blueness of the night. Still, at times, they plunged into belts of shadow, where there was a crackling under the runners and a flitting by of ghostly trees that vanished when they once more swept out into the awful cold of the open. Now and then Leland called to the horses, but his voice was lost again next moment in the silence it had scarcely broken. A curious sense of the unreality of it all came upon the girl. She almost felt that, if she could cry out, he and the team would vanish, and all would be with her as it had been in England before she met him. Then the drumming of hoofs grew very faint, and with a half-conscious desire for warmth she crept still closer to the silent man, who looked down on her very compassionately, and then, setting his lips, gave his attention again to the team. She remembered nothing further until she roused herself at a pressure on her arm.

"Prospect is close in front of us," said her companion.

She raised herself a trifle, and, looking round with a shiver, saw a half-moon sailing low above a dusky mass of trees. What seemed to be a wooden house stood in the midst of them, and its windows flung out streaks of ruddy light upon the snow. Behind it, she could dimly see a range of strange, shapeless buildings. They did not in the least look like English stables, barns, or granaries. Then there was a sound of voices, and a door swung open, letting out a broader track of brightness, in the midst of which the sleigh pulled up. Shadowy figures appeared here and there, and Leland, who unstrapped the robes, rolled them about her. Then, before she quite realised his purpose, he had lifted her and them together, and was walking stiffly towards the house. In another minute or two he set her down in a little log-walled room which had a tiled stove in the middle of it, and a hard-featured elderly woman came towards her with a kindly smile in her eyes.

"Mrs. Nesbit, Carrie," said the man. "She has been looking after the house for me lately. My wife's 'most frozen, and you'll do what you can to make her comfortable. . . . I suppose those are the fixings from Montreal?"

Mrs. Nesbit said they were, but that they had arrived with one of the sledges too late to be opened that day. Leland pointed to several canvas-covered rolls and bulky cases as he turned to the girl.

"They're curtains and rugs and carpets, and things of that kind," he said. "We don't worry much about them on the prairie, but this room and the next one are your own, unless there are any you like better. We'll get the cases opened to-morrow."