He spent a full hour at his task, and when he returned to his wagon to water his horses, and feed them from the reserve of oats he carried with him, it was in the full knowledge that Andy’s farm was abandoned for good.
There was not a living thing to be discovered anywhere. The man’s horses were gone. His two cows. His spring wagon, harness, and even the wealth of implements he had acquired from the machine agent. There was not a spade, or fork, or axe, or saw, about the place. The house, too, was similarly bare. Such items of furnishing as the place had possessed had vanished. Blankets, pots, and crocks—all had been swept away. And the answer to it came to him without even an effort. The man had given up, and either sold up, or been sold up—the man who had promised to marry Molly before the summer was out.
He had fixed his team and seated himself in the shade of his wagon, prepared to eat such food as he had brought with him.
The full significance of the thing he had discovered slowly took possession of him. And he found in it the looked-for answer to the latest change in Molly. Oh, yes, it was clear enough to him now. The whole thing must have been in contemplation, even exactly planned, at the time when—yes, that was it. Molly had found the same as he had found. What did it signify? Was it that the man reckoned he would no longer need the place with Molly as his wife? It looked that way. Then why had he not shown up in three weeks?
The old man sat there eating, and labouring heavily with thought. He saw the whole thing in its own light. He contemplated it from the viewpoint of his own experiences of men. Deliberately, definitely, his mind fixed itself on the night of the dance, and his whole focus became preoccupied with the girl’s breakdown after McFardell’s departure on that night.
Why? Why? Why that flood of tears? All the rest receded into the background. That one detail stood out above all others. And as he considered it, as he translated it in the only fashion possible to him, a sickening horror took possession of him.
CHAPTER XXV
The Beginning of the Harvest
THE things Lightning discovered at McFardell’s homestead and later learned in Hartspool instantly suggested headlong action. He wanted to fling everything to the winds and get after the “gopher police-scab” with his old guns primed and a supply of bullets in his pockets.
But there was something, some subtle claim that was infinitely stronger, holding him back. He felt he would be serving Molly better by remaining at her call on the farm. Since that hour or so of meditation in the shade of his wagon at McFardell’s there had steadily grown up within him a conviction that, whatever his devotion might prompt in Molly’s defence, his place must be near her all the time now. He felt that never in all her young life had Molly had so great a need of him.
The thing he learned in Hartspool of Andy McFardell while his team was being shod came from the township’s best-informed gossip. Barney, at Lightning’s first introduction of the subject, was only too ready to pour out an opinion that never at any moment brooked disguise. He nodded a toast at the old cattleman, at whose expense he was drinking, swallowed his modest “two fingers” of Rye, set his glass in the water-trough under the counter, and, leaning forward against the bar, with arms folded upon it, let loose his story.