“Two years. Then the bank will put the screw on you. The legislature may pull you up earlier, but I can tell you more when I’ve squared up to-morrow.”
There was a curious look in Clavering’s dark eyes, but he laughed again.
“I guess that’s about enough. But I’ll leave you to it now,” he said. “It’s quite likely I’ll have got out of the difficulty before one of those years is over.”
He went out, and a few minutes later stopped as he passed the one big mirror in the ranch, and surveyed himself critically for a moment with a dispassionate interest that was removed from vanity. Then he nodded as if contented.
“With Torrance to back me it might be done,” he said. “Liberty is sweet, but I don’t know that it’s worth at least fifty thousand dollars!”
XII
THE SPROUTING OF THE SEED
Late in the afternoon of a bitter day Grant drove into sight of the last of the homesteaders’ dwellings that lay within his round. It rose, a shapeless mound of white, from the wilderness that rolled away in billowy rises, shining under the sunlight that had no warmth in it. The snow that lay deep about its sod walls and upon the birch-branch roof hid its squalidness, and covered the pile of refuse and empty cans, but Grant knew what he would find within it, and when he pulled up his team his face grew anxious. It was graver than it had been a year ago, for Larry Grant had lost a good deal of his hopefulness since he heard those footsteps at the depot.