"My land sakes alive, you should have heard Motherwell pitch into me when we got out. Sam was as huffy about it as a wet hen.
"It's no good tryin' to fool them lads. I got my lesson that time, if I'd just had sense enough to know it; but if you believe me, sir, I got caught again. (Eh, what's that? Have another piece of chicken.) It was when I went to Montreal to see about the lump in my jaw. Did ye hear about the trouble we had that year, summer of '87? Big crop, but frozen—forty-seven cents, by George, best you could do. Well, sir, didn't I take a lump in my jaw—just like you've seen in those mangy steers. It wasn't very big at first, but it grooved something awful. I got a bottle of Mason's Lump jaw cure, but it just peeled the hide off me, and the lump grew bigger than ever. The missus here got scared she was goin' to lose me, and nothin' would do her but that I'd have to go to Montreal to see Dr. Murray. Now, I've always heard that he's awful easy on poor men, but takes it out of the rich ones, so you can bet I went prepared to put up a hard-luck story. I wore a boiled shirt, goin' down, but you bet I peeled it off before I went to see him, and I told him a pretty likely story about livin' on a rented farm, and me with a big family, most of them sickly like their ma's folks. He seemed awful sorry for me and wrote down my name and where I lived, and all that, and by George, I began to think he was goin' to pay my way back or give me the price of a cow or somethin'. He husked out the lump quick enough, had me come at seven o'clock—that man gets up as early as a farmer—and when I came to settle up he says to me: 'Mr. Perkins, if I was you I wouldn't live on a rented farm any longer. I'd go on one of my own—the north half of seventeen there—what's the matter with that? My secretary tells me you own that and there's two hundred acres under cultivation, and then there's that quarter-section of yours just across the Assiniboine, where you keep your polled Angus cattle. It really seems too bad for you to be grubbin along on a rented farm when you have four hundred and eighty acres of your own—good land, too.' Then he laughed, and I knew I was up against it, and I tried to laugh, too, but my laugh wasn't near as hearty as his. Then he says: 'It do beat all how many poor men with large sickly families, livin' on rented farms, come here to see me; but'—says; he, gittin' close up to me, and kinda tappin' me on the shoulder 'did you ever hear about an angel writin' in a big book—writin' steady day and night? Well, says he, 'here's one of them books,' and he whipped over the pages and showed me my name, where I lived and all. 'Ye can't fool the angels,' says he, 'and now I'll just trouble you for an even hundred,' says he. 'I have had three workin'-girls in to see me about their eyes today, and I done them free. I was writin' for some one like you to come along and settle for them when he was settlin' for his own. I paid it without a kick, you bet. Don't it beat the cars? Eh? What?"
Mr. Donald laughed heartily and agreed with Mr. Perkins that honesty was the best policy.
While her father was telling his story Martha sat thinking her own thoughts. She had listened to his reminiscences so often that they had long ago ceased to interest her. The schoolmaster studied her face closely. "No wonder she is quiet," he thought to himself, "she has never had a chance to talk. There is no room in the conversation for any one else when her voluble parent unfurls his matchless tongue. Martha cannot or does not talk for the same reason that people that live in the dark in time lose the power to see, because they haven't had it to do."
That night Arthur came over for his bread. The schoolmaster noticed the sudden brightening of Martha's face when Arthur's knock sounded on the door, and the animated, eager way in which she listened to every word he said. There was a feeling of good-fellowship, too, between them which did not escape the sharp eyes of the schoolmaster. "Arthur likes her," he thought, "that's a sure thing; but I'm afraid it's that brotherly, sort of thing that's really no good. But, of course, time may bring it all right. He's thinking too much now of the fair-haired Thursa. It's hard to begin a new song when the echoes of the old song are still ringing in your ears."
Through the open doorway he could see Martha in the kitchen filling the basket that Arthur had brought over for his bread. The bread—three loaves—was put in the bottom, rolled in a snow-white flour-sack; then she put in a roasted chicken, a fruit-cake and a jar of cream.
"Strong arguments in your favour, Martha," the teacher said, smiling to himself as he watched her.
"They are good, sensible, cogent arguments, every one of them,
Martha, and my own opinion is that you will win."