"Oh, yes," he said; "little time to do it in, and a good deal to do. Some of us were born to feel that way."
"Not all," said Eveline Annersly. "There are, as you know, men who waste their substance to while the day away. You are not that sort. Perhaps it's fortunate for you."
Leland smiled again. "I don't quite know. There's a great order and system that runs things, though I can't quite get the hang of it—I haven't time. Every man works in this country, as all Nature does. Those little grasses have been ten thousand years building up the black loam I'm making wheat of. The mallard, the brent goose, and the sandhill crane—you can see them coming up from the south in their skeins and wedges all day long—have to hunt their food from the shores of the Caribbean to the Pole. Well, one feels there must be a balance struck some day, and the men who don't do anything are having the soft things now."
He laughed good-humouredly, and stroked one of the horses that turned its head to nibble affectionately at his shoulder. "I'll be sorry for this by and by, but you have a habit of making me give myself away."
"Then we will be practical. Are you going to sow all that ploughing?"
"I am. I expect to break two hundred acres more. There are folks who want the wheat, and we'll feed the world some day."
"But wheat is going down."
"It is," and Leland's face grew a trifle hard. "No bottom to the market, apparently. That's why I'm buying new machines and cutting things down and down. We must have everything that can save or earn a dollar at Prospect now."
Carrie Leland was struck by something in her husband's face. It was a comely face, as well as forceful, clean-skinned in spite of its deepness of tint, and there was a clearness in the steady eyes that is only seen in those of such men as he. There was also in his features a suggestion of endurance and optimism that, in fact, was strongest in the time of stress and struggle. Sun and wind, fruitful soil and barren, nipping frosts, drought and devastating hail, all these were things to be grappled with or profited by with equal willingness. He and his kind in new countries give without stint all they have been given, from the sweat of tense effort each and every day to the smiling courage that cuts down hours of rest and goes on sowing when seasons are adverse and markets fall away; and there is, in turn, usually set upon them plainly the symbol of man's dominion over the material world. The patient beasts that toiled with him recognised it, and again one of them muzzled his shoulder and caught at his arm.