Ida smiled a little as she remembered a man of considerable importance in the wheat-lands of Assiniboia, whom she had last seen sitting, clad in blue shirt and very old trousers, on a huge machine which a double span of reeking horses hauled through the splendid grain. He had driven it since sunrise, and it was dusk of evening then, and his wants were, as she knew, remarkably simple. He bore his share of the burden under a burning sun, but it seemed to her that, had Weston been in his place, he would have ridden around that farm with a gloved hand on his hip, and would have raised it only now and then, imperiously, to direct the toilers. Then she thought of another man, who was like him in some respects, and was then, in all probability, plodding through the lonely bush.
“You mentioned a son,” she said. “What became of him?”
“He went out to Canada. Quarreled with his father. As I believe I suggested, the lad was at heart a rebel.” Ainslie smiled rather dryly. “A good many of us are. He wouldn’t see that his mother’s ideas were apt to get him into trouble when he tried to apply them.”
Ida sat silent for a few moments. There was no longer any doubt in her mind that Weston who had turned his back on Scarthwaite was identical with Weston the camp-packer.
“Do you remember what they quarreled over?” she asked at length.
“Yes,” said Ainslie, who was inclined to wonder at her interest in the subject, “it was water-finding. It’s a thing of which you probably have never heard.”
“I have,” said Ida. “Won’t you go on?”
“Well,” continued Ainslie, “there was a tenant on this estate who was rather more badly off than the rest of them. He had a piece of upland with rock under it, and in a dry season—though we don’t often get one—it was with the greatest trouble he got water enough for his stock. He asked young Weston to find him a likely spot to drive a well. The lad was walking over one parched meadow with the hazel twig in his hand, when his father came upon the procession—everybody belonging to the farm was out with him. Weston, I heard, went purple when he saw what was going on, and, from his point of view, his indignation was perhaps comprehensible. His son was openly, before one of the tenants and a parcel of farm-hands, making use of a superstitious device in which no sane person could believe. Weston, as I remember it, compared him to a gipsy fortune-teller, and went on through the gamut of impostor, mountebank and charlatan, before he commanded him to desist on the moment. I don’t quite know what came next, though something was said about a lifted riding-crop, but within the week Clarence started for Canada.”
“He abandoned the attempt to find water?”
Ainslie smiled.