Martha Trailey, red-faced and irritable, strode into camp.
"It serves you right, you lazy good-for-nothing, you." She had obviously overheard the few last remarks. "Here we've been walking our legs off while you've been fast asleep. Don't deny it!"—Trailey half-opened his mouth to yawn—"I can always tell when you are going to lie. Just fancy a man ever dreaming of lying to his own wife! I'd sooner have a man who comes home late at night than I'd have a liar. Oh, dear, I wonder why it should always be poor me who gets the trouble! Other women's husbands may drink on the sly, but they never lie to their wives, like you were just going to do to me. Mrs. Lightfoot-Mott, who lived next door to us on the Boulevard, said her husband had never once told her a lie. There was a nice man for you! Quiet, unassuming, took his children out for walks on Sundays, thought the world of his wife, and never drank. He simply worshipped money, though. And wasn't she a cat! Tattle! You couldn't believe a single word she said. And she'd no more idea of how to dress her children than——"
Neither had William Trailey any more intention of lying to his wife than he had of going into the diplomatic service. He was much too distressed by his bites to pay a great deal of attention to what she was saying. Having no settled abode was fast making Martha Trailey unbearably fretful. With no home to scrub, and wash, and cover up with old newspapers from the dirt, she was as unhappy as a cat with sticky fur.
Trailey did an unusual thing for him. He got up in the middle of his wife's speech and abruptly walked away to the imitation trout stream, where he began diligently to bathe his nose and wrists and ankles, an occupation from which he extracted some temporary relief.
Sam soon put the horses in the wagon, and, after everything was loaded up, drove over to the recently-discovered survey mound.
Here the problem of correctly striking the course of the final lap presented itself. A little deviation, a very slight overstepping of the mark, or an under-estimation of the distance, might cause them endless trouble. Bert's brow clouded. Esther was alarmed.
"What's the matter, darling?" she whispered. "You don't feel ill, do you?"
He had already given the present matter some hasty consideration. Since discovering the corner stake, he had compelled his brain to focus itself on the devising of a way of them travelling a farther two miles with as little error as possible. He would much rather have amused himself with his charming companion, and left the task to Sam, but driving the horses kept the latter sufficiently busy. Besides, there was a smattering of geometry needed now.
"Three thousand five hundred and twenty yards from here is our south-east corner, eh, Sam?" The south half of section thirty-six, township fifty-one, range one, west of the fourth meridian, was the "bit of land" Barr had generously allotted to them aboard the S.S. Lake Manitoba in mid-Atlantic.
Sam nodded and looked tremendously erudite. Bert said: "How would it be to try that surveyor's dodge with the wagon-wheel—counting the revolutions, y'know?"