"If you desire another motive, you may conclude, as you heard before, that it was love of justice; which really ought to satisfy you."
"It is a creditable one," I answered. "But I fear that it does not."
We left Crane Valley shortly, Haldane on horseback, his daughter—because something had gone wrong with the Bonaventure vehicle—beside me in our light wagon, which, if it in no way resembled the cumbrous contrivance bearing that name in England, was, I was uneasily conscious, by no means overclean. On the way we met the threshers, and stronger teams hauling the machines towards Crane Valley, for our threshing is done mostly in the field. We stopped to bid them hurry, and Haldane, learning they had met Gordon, whom he desired to see, bade us proceed while he looked for the rancher. I was not sorry to do so, and accordingly it was without him that we approached the dip to the Sweetwater hollow.
The afternoon was waning, and the air very still. The tiny birch leaves had ceased their whispering; but the sound of running water came musically out of their cool shadow. All the winding valley was rolled in green, an oasis of verdure in the sweep of white-bleached prairie; and, pulling the team up between the first of the slender trunks, I pointed down towards the half-seen lane of sliding water.
"I might never have known you if it had not been for a trifling accident by yonder willow clump," I said. "I remember your sister suggested that very night that our meeting might be the first scene of a drama, and, considering all that has happened since then, her prediction has proved strangely accurate."
Lucille Haldane nodded. "It is a coincidence that I was thinking of the same thing, and wondering, now that the play must be drawing towards its close, what the end will be. The meeting must, however, have been unlucky for you, because all your troubles date from that beginning."
"And my privileges," I answered, smiling. "The present is at least a happy augury. When I met Boone beside the river there was not a leaf on the birches, and their branches were moaning under a blast which makes one shiver from mere recollection. Remember the harvest at Crane Valley, and look down on yonder shining water and cool greenery. It was you who brought us the sunshine, and even the memory of the dark days is now melting like that night's snow."
"That is exaggerated sentiment, and I have heard invertebrate youths in the cities say such things more neatly," commented the girl, with an air of mock severity, and then glanced dreamily into the hollow; while, as silence succeeded, fate sent a little sting-fly to take a part—as, to confound man's contriving, trifles often do—in ending the play. The team were ill-broken broncos which had already given me trouble, and when the fly bored with envenomed proboscis through the hide of one, the beast flung up his head and kicked savagely.
The reins which I held loosely were whisked away, and before it was possible to recover them both horses had bolted. The light wagon lurched giddily, and the next moment it swept like a toboggan down the declivity.
"Hold fast!" I shouted, leaning recklessly down; and the first shock of enervating consternation vanished when I gripped the reins. Still, there was cold fear at my heart when, bracing both feet against the wagon-front, I strove uselessly to master the team. The brutes' mouths seemed made of iron, impervious to the bit; the slope was long and steep; birches and willows straggled athwart it everywhere; and the soil was treacherous. I could not break them from the gallop, and not daring to risk the sharp bends of the zigzag trail, I let them go straight for the slide of water in the bottom of the hollow.