"Take 'em," he said easily. "Read 'em over at your leisure. You got property in this trust. Maybe you'll read something there that's cost me a deal of thought. That's the United Owners' Protection Schedule. You'll find in it a tabulated list of every property in the combine. Its area of grain. Its locality. Also a carefully detailed list of Owner Workers, their numbers, and supplies of machinery for seeding and harvesting. You'll also find a detailed distribution sheet of how these, in case of emergency, can be combined and distributed, and, aided with additional machinery, supplied by the trust, can complete the harvest on all trust lands without the help of one single hired man. The machinery is ordered, and is being distributed now—in case the railroad troubles develop about harvest time. There's also another document there of no small importance. It was passed unanimously at the last general meeting of directors, and is inspired by these—darned labor troubles. It empowers me to sell crops standing in the ear, at a margin under anticipated market price to speculators—if it's deemed advisable by the directors. This again is for our protection."
Then he held up a bunch of telegrams.
"These are wires from some of the big speculators. They're in code, so you can't read 'em. They're offers to buy—now. These offers, increasing in price each time as we get nearer the harvest, will come along from now on till the grain is threshed. I can close a deal any moment I choose to put pen to paper. Well?"
"Well?"
Angus looked into the man's fearless eyes, marveling at the wonder of foresight he displayed. For the moment he almost pitied the dull-witted farmhand who contemplated pitting himself against such caliber.
"Say, Angus, boy," Hendrie went on, after a pause. "Sometimes I sort of feel the game isn't worth it, fighting this mush-headed crowd who have to get other folks to think for 'em, and tell 'em when they're not satisfied. It's like shooting up women and children, in spite that any half-dozen could literally eat me alive. I tell you brain's got muscle beat all along the line. Give every man an equal share all over the world, and in six months' time it will be cornered again by brain that isn't equally distributed, and never will be."
"I'm getting another crew of niggers up from the south, and you'll have 'em put on 'time' right here at Deep Willows," he went on, after a pause. "I'm going to run my land in my own way. They need fight? They can get it. I'm in the humor to fight. And if they shout much more I'll get Chinamen down from Vancouver to bear a hand in the work."
Hendrie stood for a moment with his hand on the open door. His eyes were still alight with the fire of battle which Angus's visit had inspired. The reckless spirit of defiance was still stirring, a recklessness which was, perhaps, unusual in him. The strongest characteristic of this man was his invincible resolution. It was his deliberateness of purpose, urged by supreme personal force that had placed him where he was—not recklessness.
But just now an actual desire for recklessness was running riot through his hot veins. He wanted to fight. He felt it was the safety valve necessary for his own desperate feelings.
Monica's condition more than troubled him. All the more so because he knew that his own actions had helped her peculiar ailing, which was rapidly sapping all her vitality at the time she most needed it. He knew, no one better, that Frank's troubles, his absence, and the uncertainty of his future, had played upon her nervous system till she was left no longer fit to bear her burden of motherhood.