"What are you going to do about it, then?" Sandy McQuarry glared. "Ah'm goin' to drive on," he declared grimly.
"Indeed!" Miss Weir placed her basket exactly in the middle of the road, carefully adjusted her shawl over it, and, with perfect deliberation, sat down upon it.
"Hoh!" Sandy McQuarry grunted disdainfully. He could soon scare even the Duke of Wellington out of such an untenable position. "Ma conscience, but ye'll no sit there lang!" he muttered. He urged his team forward until the nose of one of his grays was right over her head. But he had not calculated on the immovability of the Iron Duke. She did not stir a muscle, but sat, with a calm, meditative face, gazing across the valley. The grays tossed their heads, puzzled and indignant, and then stopped.
Sandy McQuarry was red with rage.
"D'ye want me to run over ye, ye thrawn piece o' humanity, ye?" he shouted.
The Duke did not appear to hear him. He rose to his feet, whip in hand.
"Jemima Weir!" he thundered, "will ye, or will ye no step off that road and let me drive on?"
"I will no!" answered the Duke, with unkind emphasis.
The man raised his whip over his horses' backs and then paused. Plainly she intended to be slain rather than yield, and though murder was in Sandy's heart he hesitated to commit it. He glanced about him with a movement of impotent rage. Never before had he been balked in his will by man, nor had he ever met the woman who had dared to cross him. And here he was, held up in his own particular saw-log road by one of the despised sex! He remembered, in choking wrath, that he was a pillar of the Glenoro church, that before him was the schoolmistress, and behind the doctor and old Hughie Cameron's niece, and he dared not give adequate expression to the rage with which he was being consumed.
In a voice inarticulate with anger he opened a parley. He declared that he would have the law, that he would publish her high-handed act from one end of the county of Simcoe to the other, that he would get himself elected for trustee and drive her out of the section. He blustered, he threatened, he scolded, he argued. And through it all the obstacle sat on her basket, in the middle of the highway, not deigning him even a glance. But as the maddened man foamed on, there arose once to the surface the lurking twinkle in the Duke's gray eyes. For there was no doubt Sandy was weakening. He had even stooped to reason with her now.