“Well,” said the girl with Western frankness, “there’s a kind of stamp on Lance that you haven’t got. I figure he brought it with him from the old country. Still, one might take you for him if you stood with the light behind you, and you’re not quite a bad-looking man. It’s a kind of pity you’re so solemn.”
Witham smiled. “I don’t fancy that’s astonishing after losing two harvests in succession,” he said. “You see, there’s nobody back there in the old country to send remittances to me.”
The girl nodded with quick sympathy. “Oh, yes. The times are bad,” she said. “Well, you read your letters; I’m not going to worry you.”
Witham sat down and opened the first envelope under the big lamp. It was from a land agent and mortgage-broker, and his face grew a trifle grimmer as he read, “In the present condition of the money market your request that we should carry you over is unreasonable, and we regret that unless you can extinguish at least half the loan we will be compelled to foreclose upon your holding.”
There was a little more of it, but that was sufficient for Witham, who knew it meant disaster, and it was with the feeling of one clinging desperately to the last shred of hope he tore open the second envelope. The letter it held was from a friend he had made in a Western city, and once entertained for a month at his ranch, but the man had evidently sufficient difficulties of his own to contend with.
“Very sorry, but it can’t be done,” he wrote. “I’m loaded up with wheat nobody will buy, and couldn’t raise five hundred dollars to lend any one just now,”
Witham sighed a little, but when he rose and slowly straightened himself nobody would have suspected he was looking ruin in the face. He had fought a slow, losing battle for six weary years, holding on doggedly though defeat appeared inevitable, and now when it had come he bore it impassively, for the struggle which, though he was scarcely twenty-six, had crushed all mirth and brightness out of his life, had given him endurance in place of them. Just then a man came bustling towards him, with the girl who bore a tray close behind.
“What are you doing with that coat on?” he said. “Get it off and sit down right there. The boys are about through with the mail and supper’s ready,”
Witham glanced at the steaming dishes hungrily, for he had passed most of the day in the bitter frost, eating very little, and there was still a drive of twenty miles before him.
“It is time I was taking the trail,” he said.