CHAPTER II
SALLY TAKES CHARGE
The night was clear and bitterly cold when Hawtrey and Sally Creighton drove away from Stukely’s barn. Winter had lingered unusually long that year, and the prairie gleamed dimly white, with the sledge trail cutting athwart it, a smear of blue-gray in the foreground. It was—for Lander’s lay behind them with the snow among the stubble belts that engirdled it—an empty wilderness that the mettlesome team swung across, and during the first few minutes the cold struck through the horses with a sting like the thrust of steel. A half moon, coppery red with frost, hung low above the snow-covered earth, and there was no sound but the crunch beneath the runners, and the beat of hoofs that rang dully through the silence like a roll of muffled drums.
Sleighs like the one that Hawtrey drove are not common on the prairie, where the farmer generally uses the humble bob-sled when the snow lies unusually long. It had been made for use in Montreal, and bought back East by a friend of Hawtrey’s, who was possessed of some means, which is a somewhat unusual thing in the case of a Western wheat-grower. This man also had bought the team—the fastest he could obtain—and when the warmth came back to the horses Hawtrey and the girl became conscious of the exhilaration of the swift and easy motion. The sleigh was light and narrow, and Hawtrey, who drew the thick driving-robe higher about Sally, did not immediately draw the mittened hand he had used back again. The girl did not resent the fact that it still rested behind her shoulder, nor did Hawtrey attach any particular significance to the fact. He was a man who usually acted on impulse. How far Sally understood him did not appear, but she came of folk who had waged a stubborn battle with the wilderness, and there was a vein of grim tenacity in her.
She was, however, conscious that there was something beneath her feet which forced her, if she was to sit comfortably, rather close against her companion; and it seemed expedient to point it out.
“Can’t you move a little? I can’t get my feet fixed right,” she said.
Hawtrey looked down at her with a smile. “I’m afraid I can’t unless I get right outside. Aren’t you happy there?”
It was the kind of speech he was in the habit of making, but there was rather more color in the girl’s face than the stinging night air brought there, and she glanced at the bottom of the sleigh.
“It’s a sack of some kind, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Yes,” Hawtrey answered, “it’s a couple of three-bushel bags. Some special seed Lorton sent to Winnipeg for. Ormond brought them out from the railroad. I promised I’d take them along to him.”