Two days later, he was busy in front of his homestead putting together a new binder which had just arrived from the settlement. It was the latest type of harvesting implement and designed to cut an unusually broad swath. While he was engaged, the trooper he had met when accompanying Jernyngham rode up with a corporal following. He stopped his horse and glanced at the binder with admiration.
“She’s a daisy, Jack; I guess she cost a pile,” he said. “Where did you get the money to buy a machine of that kind?”
“It wasn’t easy to raise it,” Prescott replied. “But I’ll save something in labor—harvest wages are high—and I’ve long wanted this binder. When Trant came round from the implement store yesterday morning I thought I’d risk the deal. Will you wait for dinner?”
“No, thanks,” the corporal broke in. “We’re making a patrol north; just called to look at your guards. Several big grass fires have been reported in the last few days.”
Prescott pointed to the rows of plowed furrows which cut off his holding from the prairie. The strip of brown clods, which was two or three yards in width, seemed an adequate defense, and after a glance at it the corporal nodded his satisfaction.
“Good enough,” he said. “We’ll take the trail.”
He trotted away with his companion and it was evening when they rode along the edge of a ravine which pierced a high tract of rolling country. The crest of the slope they followed commanded a vast circle of grass that was changing in the foreground from green to ocher and silvery white. Farther back, it ran on toward the sunset, a sweep of blue and neutral gray, flecked with dusky lines of bluffs, interspersed with gleaming strips of water, but nowhere in the wide landscape was there a sign of human habitation. Small birches and poplars, with an undergrowth of nut bushes, clothed the sides of the ravine, but some distance ahead it broadened out and the stream that flowed through it turned the hollow into a muskeg. There harsh grass and reeds grew three or four feet high, hiding the stretch of mire.
The police were young men with deeply bronzed faces, dressed in smart khaki uniform with broad Stetson hats of the same color.
“What’s that?” exclaimed Corporal Curtis, pointing to an indistinct object lying among a patch of scrub some distance off.
“Looks like a hat,” replied Private Stanton. “Some settler prospecting for a homestead location must have lost it.”