These words he uttered with the solemnity of an oath and turned towards the porch. A dark figure flitted across the kitchen and disappeared into the house. Cameron walked slowly towards the barn.
“He's mad. He's clean daffy, but none the less dangerous,” he said to himself. “What a rotten mess all this is!” he added in disgust. “By Jove! The whole thing isn't worth while.”
But as he thought of Mandy's frightened face and imploring eyes and the brutal murderous face of the man who claimed her as his own, he said between his teeth:
“No, I won't quit now. I'll see this thing through, whatever it costs,” and with this resolve he set himself to the business of getting to sleep; in which, after many attempts, he was at length successful.
CHAPTER V
HOW THEY SAVED THE DAY
There never was such a Dominion Day for weather since the first Dominion Day was born. Of this “Fatty” Freeman was fully assured. Fatty Freeman was a young man for whose opinion older men were accustomed to wait. His person more than justified his praenomen, for Mr. Harper Freeman, Jr., was undeniably fat. “Fat, but fine and frisky,” was ever his own comment upon the descriptive adjective by which his friends distinguished him. And fine and frisky he was; fine in his appreciation of good eating, fine in his judgment of good cattle and fine in his estimate of men; frisky, too, and utterly irrepressible. “Harp's just like a young pup,” his own father, the Reverend Harper Freeman, the old Methodist minister of the Maplehill circuit, used to say. “If Harp had a tail he would never do anything but play with it.” On this, however, it is difficult to hold any well based opinion. Ebullient in his spirits, he radiated cheeriness wherever he went and was at the bottom of most of the practical jokes that kept the village of Maplehill in a state of ferment; yet if any man thought to turn a sharp corner in business with Mr. Harper Freeman, Jr., he invariably found that frisky individual waiting for him round the corner with a cheery smile of welcome, shrewd and disconcerting. It was this cheery shrewdness of his that made him the most successful cattle buyer in the county and at the same time secretary of the Middlesex Caledonian Society. As secretary of this society he was made chiefly responsible for the success of the Dominion Day picnic and, as with everything that he took hold of, Fatty toiled at the business of preparation for this picnic with conscientious zeal, giving to it all his spare hours and many of his working hours for the three months preceding.
It was due solely to his efforts that so many distinguished county magnates appeared eager to lend their patronage. It needed but a little persuasion to secure the enthusiastic support of the Honourable J. J. Patterson, M.P.P., and, incidentally, the handsome challenge cup for hammer-throwing, for the honourable member of Parliament was a full-blooded Highlander himself and an ardent supporter of “the games.” But only Fatty Freeman's finesse could have extracted from Dr. Kane, the Opposition candidate for Provincial Parliamentary honours, the cup for the hundred yards race, and other cups from other individuals more or less deeply interested in Dominion, Provincial, and Municipal politics. The prize list secured, it needed only a skillful manipulation of the local press and a judicious but persistent personal correspondence to swell the ranks of the competitors in the various events, and thus ensure a monster attendance of the people from the neighbouring townships and from the city near by.
The weather being assured, Fatty's anxieties were mostly allayed, for he had on the file in his office acceptance letters from the distinguished men who were to cast the spell of their oratory over the assembled multitude, as also from the big men in the athletic world who had entered for the various events in the programme of sports. It was a master stroke of diplomacy that resulted in the securing for the hammer-throwing contest the redoubtable and famous Duncan Ross of Zorra, who had at first disdained the bait of the Maplehill Dominion Day picnic, but in some mysterious way had at length been hooked and landed. For Duncan was a notable man and held the championship of the Zorras; and indeed in all Ontario he was second only to the world-famous Rory Maclennan of Glengarry, who had been to Braemar itself and was beaten there only by a fluke. How he came to agree to be present at the Maplehill picnic “Black Duncan” could not quite understand, but had he compared notes with McGee, the champion of the London police force and of various towns and cities of the western peninsula, he would doubtless have received some enlightenment. To the skill of the same master hand was due the appearance upon the racing list of the Dominion Day picnic of such distinguished names as Cahill of London, Fullerton of Woodstock, and especially of Eugene La Belle of nowhere in particular, who held the provincial championship for skating and was a runner of provincial fame.