"It's all ours, this land about here," he said.
"Yes?"
Her eyes wandered too.
"I have worked all my days, till now," he said, reviving a bitter memory, "without so much as a plot of sour earth as big as y're handkerchief to call my own. Worked for other men, sweated the body and soul out of me ... and now, this is mine ... all this ... hundred acres ... and more when I'm ready for it, more, and more, and more...."
He paused a moment, all the emotion in him stirred and surging. Then, with a short-drawn breath that dismissed the past and dedicated thought and energy to the future, he went on:
"I marked this place when I came through to the Port with Middleton's cattle, last year. I'll run cattle—but I want to clear and cultivate too. Up there where there are trees now will be ploughed fields and an orchard soon. The house and barns'll be on the brow of the hill. By and by ... we shall have a name and a place in the country."
His wife's eyes were on his face. He had spoken as though he were taking an oath.
"No doubt it will be as you say, Donald," she said, with a faint sigh. "But it is a strange lonely land, indeed, without the sight of a roof in all the long miles we have come by. Never the sound of a human voice, or the lowing of cattle."
Donald Cameron did not reply. He was envisaging his schemes for the future. Not a man given to dreams, the thoughtful mood had taken him; his breath came and went in steady draughts. His face was set to the mould of his musing; there was determination in every line of it. A gloomy face it was, rough-cast, with deep set eyes.
His wife's words and the sigh that went with them were repeated in a remote brain cell.