"My dear," he said quietly, "if you think you have done me any wrong, it is wiped out now. Perhaps, some day, you will go a little further than you have done to-night, and I must try to wait for it. That is all I have to say, and this is becoming a little painful to both of us."
He turned slowly away, and Carrie moved towards the door, but, when she reached it, she stopped and looked back at him.
"One can be a little too generous now and then," she said.
Then the door closed, and Leland stood still, leaning on the table, with thoughtful eyes.
"I don't know if that was a lead or not, and I don't seem able to think just now," he said. "I'm not running Prospect, it's driving me, and I'm ground down mind and body by the load of wheat I'm carrying."
CHAPTER XIV
THE OUTLAWS STRIKE BACK
The brief spring was merging suddenly, earlier even than usual, into summer, and it was a still, oppressive night when Leland sat, somewhat grim in face, in a mortgage and land broker's office at the railroad settlement. The little, dusty room, with its litter of papers and survey prints, was very hot, and Leland, who had just come in from the dusk, was a trifle dazed by the light the kerosene lamp flung down. He had in his hand two or three letters the broker had given him, and glanced at one of them moodily, only with difficulty fixing his attention on it. He had toiled with feverish activity that spring, and at last the strain was telling, for his head ached, and he felt limp and weary. It had, too, been dry weather ever since he put the first plough into the ground, and that night there was an oppressive tension in the atmosphere.
Macartney, the land-broker, sat opposite him, a gaunt, keen-eyed man, with a thin jacket over his white shirt. Leland knew him for an upright man, though nobody is supposed to be particularly scrupulous in the business he followed.
"You are looking a little played out," he said. "I can give you some ice and soda, but it's partly due to your own efforts that I've nothing else. Whisky can, I believe, be had, but, in the face of the fall in land and wheat, the figure the few men want who venture to keep it is prohibitive."