He saw the faint bewilderment in the girl’s face give place to the resentment of frankness unreturned, and with a little shake of his shoulders shrank into himself. Maud Barrington, who understood it, once more put on the becoming reticence of Silverdale.
“We are getting beyond our depth, and it is very hot,” she said. “You have all this hay to cut!”
Witham laughed as he bent over the mower’s knife. “Yes,” he said, “it is really more in my line, and I have kept you in the sun too long.”
In another few moments Maud Barrington was riding across the prairie, but when the rattle of the machine rose from the sloo behind her she laughed curiously.
“The man knew his place, but you came perilously near making a fool of yourself this morning, my dear,” she said.
It was a week or two later, and very hot when, with others of his neighbours, Witham sat in the big hall at Silverdale Grange. The windows were open wide, and the smell of hot dust came in from the white waste which rolled away beneath the stars. There was also another odour in the little puffs of wind that flickered in, and far off where the arch of indigo dropped to the dusky earth wavy lines of crimson moved along the horizon. It was then the season when fires that are lighted by means which no man knows creep up and down the waste of grass, until they put on speed and roll in a surf of flame before a sudden breeze. Still, nobody was anxious about them, for the guarding furrows that would oppose a space of dusty soil to the march of the flame had been ploughed round every homestead at Silverdale.
Maud Barrington was at the piano, and her voice was good; while Witham, who had known what it is to toil from red dawn to sunset without hope of more than daily food, found the simple song she had chosen chime with his mood: “All day long the reapers.”
A faint staccato drumming that rose from the silent prairie throbbed through the final chords of it, and when the music ceased, swelled into the gallop of a horse. It seemed in some curious fashion portentous, and when there was a rattle and jingle outside other eyes than Witham’s were turned towards the door. It swung open presently, and Dane came in. There was quiet elation and some diffidence in his bronzed face as he turned to Colonel Barrington.
“I could not get away earlier from the settlement, sir, but I have great news,” he said. “They have awoke to the fact that stocks are getting low in the old country. Wheat moved up at Winnipeg, and there was almost a rush to buy yesterday.”
There was a sudden silence, for among those present were men who remembered the acres of good soil they had not ploughed, but a little grim smile crept into their leader’s face.