Ailin Redmond fixed her black eyes intently upon me, and I grew uneasy, seeing what suggested a smoldering fire in them. "You are not clever enough to deceive a woman," she said, with a disconcerting composure. "I do not know all, but perhaps I shall some day, and then, whatever it costs me, you and another person shall see justice done. It may not be for a long time, but I can wait; and I am going away from the prairie. Still, I should like to ask you one question—how did your cattle get inside the fence?"
"The fire drove them; but instead of fretting over such things, you must try to forget the last two months as soon as possible," I answered as stoutly as I could, seeking meanwhile an excuse for flight, which was not lacking. "Those beasts will kill somebody if I neglect them any longer."
Ailin Redmond held out her hand to me, saying very quietly: "I shall never forget, and—it is no use protesting—a time will come when I shall understand it all clearly. Until then may the good saints protect you from all further evil, Rancher Ormesby."
As I hurried away a tented wagon lurched into the station, and when I last saw Redmond's daughter she stood near the lonely end of the platform talking earnestly with the traveling photographer.
Dennis had not recovered from his merriment when, much to the satisfaction of those we left behind, the long cars rolled out of the station, while many agents remembered our visit to the stations which succeeded. Blinding dust and fragments of ballast whirled about the cars as the huge locomotive hauled them rocking over the limitless levels. From sunrise to sunset the gaunt telegraph poles reeled up from the receding horizon, growing from the size of matches to towering spars as they came, and then slowly diminishing far down the straight-ruled line again. For hours we lay on side-tracks waiting until one of the great inter-ocean expresses, running their portion of the race round half the globe, thundered past, white with the dust of a fifteen-hundred-mile journey, and then, with cars and cattle complaining, we lurched on our way again.
At times we led the beasts out in detachments to water at wayside stations, and there was usually much profanity and destruction of property before we got them back again, and left the agent to assess the damage to his feelings, besides splintered gangways and broken rails. It was at Portage or Brandon, I think, that one showed me a warning received by wire. "Through freight full of wild beasts coming along. There'll be nothing left of your station if you let the lunatics in charge of them turn their menagerie out."
The beasts had, however, grown more subdued before the cars rolled slowly into Winnipeg, and gave us little trouble when, leaving the prairie behind, we sped, eastwards ever, past broad lake and foaming river, into the muskegs of Ontario; so that I had time for reflection when the great locomotive, panting on the grades, hauled us, poised giddily between crag face and deep blue water, along the Superior shore. The Haldanes were in Montreal, and I wondered, in case chance threw me in their way, how they would greet me, and what I should say. I was apparently a prosperous rancher when they last spoke with me, and a tender of other men's cattle now, while it might well happen that in their eyes a further cloud rested upon me.
The long and weary journey came to an end at last, and when the big engines ceased their panting beside the broad St. Lawrence I left Dennis and his companions to divert themselves in Montreal after the fashion of their kind, and, arraying myself in civilized fashion, proceeded to my relative's offices.
A clerk said that Mr. Leyland, who was absent, desired me to follow him to his autumn retreat, but I first set about the business which had brought me, unassisted. Nobody, however, would entertain the species of investment I had to propose, and it was with a heavy heart I boarded the cars again some days later.
Leyland and his wife appeared unaffectedly glad to see me at their pretty summer-house, which stood above the smooth white shingle fringing a wide lake, and at sunset that evening I lay smoking among the boulders of a point, while his son and heir sat close by interrogating me. Part of the lake still reflected the afterglow, and after the monotonous levels of the prairie it rested my eyes to see the climbing pines tower above it in shadowy majesty. Their drowsy scent was soothing, and through the dusk that crept towards me from their feet, blinking lights cast trembling reflections across the glassy water. Several prosperous citizens retired at times to spend their leisure in what they termed camping on the islets of that lake.