I found Ormond’s horses useful; for between timber-cutting, marking down growing hay, rides to purchase cattle, and visits to the Manor, we often covered fifty miles a day, with hard work besides; while, when we brought out Ontario bushmen, Fairmead and the creamery lumber piles increased rapidly in size, and our bank balance diminished as rapidly. Once, too, when I came home so weary that I could scarcely get out of the saddle, I found a black-edged letter awaiting me, and dropped heavily into a chair after opening it.
“I hope there’s no bad news,” said Aline; “it has an American stamp. Who can it be?”
“Cousin Alice! You might read it—the sun and the grass dust have almost blinded me.”
Martin Lorimer had written the letter from a little 365 town in Southern California, and Aline read: “I am in sore distress, Ralph. Your poor cousin died here yesterday of an old sickness she had long greatly suffered from. She was my only child—all that was left me; and I’m going back to England a very lonely man. I’ll ask you in a post or two to meet me.”
“I am very sorry, and yet it may have been a release,” said Aline. “Hers was a very hard lot to bear, but she was always cheerful. Poor Uncle Martin! Of course you will go to meet him.”
I did so later when, as a special favor, a mounted man brought me a telegram from Elktail, and Martin Lorimer gripped my fingers hard when I boarded the east-bound train at that station.
“I knew thee would come, Ralph, and I was longing for a face that I knew,” he said. “Ay, to the last my poor girl remembered thee. I’m going home to England—stayed here too long; and Canada seems empty without her. Only time to catch the liner, or I’d have come to Fairmead, and I’ve much to tell thee on the road to Winnipeg.”
He looked sadly shaken, but glad to meet any kinsman in his trouble, and, asking few questions, I listened quietly while, ensconced in a corner of a first-class car, he relieved his soul with talk. He told me much that surprised me, but which is not connected with this story, until I started when he said: “Now I may tell thee that it was Alice sent that money. She did it main cleverly,—her own savings, poor girl; I’m glad I never stinted her in the matter of money. ‘You can tell him when I’m gone, father; it pleased me well to know I had helped to make him happy,’ she said. Then again, almost at the end, she whispered: ‘Tell Ralph I wish him a long life, and the best this world can give him and Miss Carrington.’”
Martin Lorimer coughed vigorously before he continued: 366 “I never heard a word about that loan until I guessed from thy tale at the chalet that my girl, never suspecting it, had countered my plans. Well, well, it was all as it had to be; but if she had never helped thee maybe another Lorimer would be waiting instead of a stranger to carry on the Orb Mill when I’ve done with it.”
We were nearing the Red River, and the roofs of Winnipeg lifted themselves higher above the prairie, when he said, for Martin Lorimer, almost timidly, “Remembering our talk at the chalet, canst change thy mind, lad, or is it too late?”