"Yes, an' while you're chasing up an' down fer a housekeeper the Yankees get all the homesteads. They're comin' in right now by the trainload, grabbin' up everythin' in sight. We'll monkey round here till the summer's over, an' then go out an' get a sand farm, or something like. Couldn't your wife do her visitin' no other time?"
"I'll tell you, Riles," said Harris, who had no desire to pursue a topic which might lead him into deep water, "you go ahead out and get the lay of the land, and I'll follow you within a week. I'll do that, for sure, and I'll stand part of your expenses for going ahead, seein' you will be kind o' representin' me."
The last touch was a stroke of diplomacy. The suggestion that Harris should pay part of his expenses swept away Riles' bad humour, and he agreed to go on the date originally planned, and get what he called "a bede on the easy money," while Harris completed his arrangements at home.
He was to get "a bede on the easy money" in a manner which Harris little suspected.
***
When Harris returned home the next forenoon he found that Mary had already left for Plainville. He sat down and tried to think, but the house was very quiet, and the silence oppressed him…He looked at his watch, and concluded he had still time to reach Plainville before the train would leave. But that would mean surrender, and surrender meant weakness.
CHAPTER XII
A WHIFF OF NEW ATMOSPHERE
Riles found the journey westward a tiresome affair. His was a soul devoid of enthusiasm over Nature's wealth or magnitude, and the view of the endless prairie excited in him no emotion other than a certain vague covetousness. It was his first long rail journey in over twenty years, but his thoughts were on the cost of travel rather than on the wonderful strides which had been made in its comfort and convenience. Riles indulged in no such luxuries as sleeping-car berths or meals served in the diner, and two nights in a crowded day-coach, with such hasty meals as could be bought for a quarter at wayside stations, made the journey a somewhat exhausting one. Back in the observation car, sleek commercial travellers, well groomed and well dressed and enveloped in comfortable self-satisfaction, gravely discussed politics, business or real estate, or exchanged the latest titbits of wit accumulated in their travels. Riles probably could have bought and paid for the worldly possessions of the whole group, and have still a comfortable balance in the bank. But a sleeper berth cost the price of two bushels of wheat, and even in a good year Riles' crop seldom exceeded ten thousand bushels.
As fate would have it, Riles selected as the base of his homestead operations the very foothill town to which Beulah Harris had come a few weeks before. He sought out the cheapest hotel, and having thrown his few belongings on the bed, betook himself to the bar-room, which seemed the chief centre of activity, not only of the hotel itself, but of the little town. Men were, lined three deep against the capacious bar, shouting, swearing, and singing, and spending their money with an abandon not to be found in millionaires. Riles was no great student of human nature; he had a keener eye for a horse than a fellow-man, but the motley crowd interested and, in a certain way, amused him. Land-seekers, some in overalls and flannel shirts, some in ready-mades with dirty celluloid collars and cheap, gaudy ties—big, powerful men with the muscles and manners of the horse—and others, lighter of frame, who apparently made an easier and a better living by the employment of their brains; cowboys in schaps and sun-burn and silk handkerchiefs; ranchers, stately English and French stock, gentlemen still five thousand miles from the place of their breeding; lumbermen and river-drivers, iron bodies set with quick, combative intellects; guides, locaters, freighters, land dealers, gamblers, sharks, and hangers-on wove back and forth plying the shuttle from which the fabric of a new nation must be wrought.