"Certainly! Then there were the teams. It would have been a pity to let them be killed."
Beatrice thought he might have offered a better explanation. He had implied that anxiety about the boiler had influenced him more than regard for his horses. She felt that she must give him an opportunity for defending himself.
"I wonder which consideration counted most?"
He looked at her with amusement; and she flushed as she suddenly recalled that he was sometimes very shrewd.
"Well," he said, "the main thing was to get hold of the reins—and I don't know that it matters now."
"I suppose not," Beatrice agreed, vexed that he did not seem anxious to make the best impression. "After all, breaking land on a large scale must be expensive, and I understand that your plans are ambitious."
Harding glanced across the prairie: it ran back to the blue smear of trees on the horizon, covered with thin snow, and struck a note of utter desolation.
"Yes," he said with a gleam in his eyes. "All this looks lifeless and useless now, but I can see it belted with wheat and oats and flax in the fall. There will be a difference when the binders move through the grain in rows."
"In rows!"
"We'll want a number, if all goes well. Devine's land follows my boundary, and we must drive our plows in one straight line. We begin at the rise yonder and run east to the creek."