"You'll remain my—guest—until he comes." Hendrie's voice and manner were utterly savage. "If he is too late to save her, my promise goes if—I swing for it."
CHAPTER XIX
TWO MEN
The devastation of the wheat lands of Deep Willows was complete. The home of Alexander Hendrie itself, stood out scathless, the center of a blackened, charred waste. It was a mockery, a pitiful mockery of its recent glory. Against its somber, naked surroundings the delicate paint work of its perfect wooden structure left a vulgar, even tawdry impression of the mind. It looked as out of place as bright colors at a plumed funeral. The home farm, the outlying farms for miles around, they, too, stood as they had stood before, while all the live stock, their "feed," the machinery, had escaped the ravages of the sea of fire by reason of the well-planned "fire-breaks" which the cautious Scot kept in perfect order.
The fire had stripped the river banks, too. The beautiful wooded slopes, the pride and delight of their owner and his manager, were now mere blackened skeletons whose moldering limbs were beyond even the power of time to heal.
It was a terrible destruction, so wanton, so useless, even as an expression of human hatred. So utterly was it lacking in this respect that it became nothing short of an insult to the Creator of all things rather than an act of vengeance of human upon human. The only real sufferers would be those whose hands had wrought the mischief, a suffering that must be surely just.
Hendrie himself did not witness daylight's revelation. Long before morning he was in Calford, accompanied by Frank, whose work had been the secret bestowal of Leyburn's chauffeur, and his automobile, until such time as the man could safely be permitted to return to the world to which he belonged. Hendrie and his helpers had committed themselves to their conspiracy in no uncertain fashion. Whatever the outcome for them they had been prepared to risk all for the life, which at least two of them valued above all else.
But the man whose watch and ward this beautiful farm had been, the man whose fortunes had for so long been bound up in it, was early enough abroad, and his sunken eyes, brooding, regretful, hating, witnessed the utter ruin of his years of labor.
Angus Moraine suffered far deeper than any words could tell. It was like a mother witnessing the destruction of an only child, for this farm, and all pertaining to it, was as his only child. He loved it with a depth of affection almost incongruous in a man so hard, so unsympathetic as he. Yet his love was so real that the sight that daylight revealed to his horror-stricken eyes well-nigh broke his heart, and set him hating as he had never hated in his life. So, as he gazed abroad, he thanked Providence that his was the charge of their captive, even though that captivity were only to last a week.