Witham nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I mean, to me; and the price of wheat is only part of the question.”
Miss Barrington stretched out her hand, though her niece said nothing at all. “Of course, but I want you to help us down. Maud has an account you have not sent in, to ask you for.”
Witham first turned to the two men who now stood by the idle machine. “You’ll have to drive those beasts of mine as best you can, Tom, and Jake will take your team. Get them off again now. This piece of breaking has to be put through before we loose again.”
Then he handed his visitors down, and Maud Barrington fancied as he walked with them to the house that the fashion in which the damaged hat hung down over his eyes would have rendered most other men ludicrous. He left them a space in his bare sitting-room, which suggested only grim utility, and Miss Barrington smiled when her niece glanced at her.
“And this is how Lance, the profligate, lives!” said she.
Maud Barrington shook her head. “No,” she said. “Can you believe that this man was ever a prodigal?”
Her aunt was a trifle less astonished than she would once have been, but before she could answer Witham, who had made a trifling change in his clothing, came in.
“I can give you some green tea, though I am afraid it might be a good deal better than it is, and our crockery is not all you have been used to,” he said. “You see, we have only time to think of one thing until the sowing is through.”
Miss Barrington’s eyes twinkled. “And then?”
“Then,” said Witham, with a little laugh, “there will be prairie hay to cut, and after that the harvest coming on.”