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MASTERS OF THE WHEAT-LANDS

“IT’S GOING TO HURT, GREGORY, BUT I HAVE GOT TO GET YOU IN”—Page 17

Masters of the

Wheat-Lands

By HAROLD BINDLOSS

Author of “Thurston of Orchard Valley,” “By Right of

Purchase,” “Lorimer of the Northwest,” etc.

With Four Illustrations

By CYRUS CUNEO

A. L. BURT COMPANY

Publishers New York

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION

INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN

COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY

PUBLISHED IN ENGLAND UNDER THE TITLE, “HAWTREY’S DEPUTY”

October, 1910

CONTENTS

Masters of the Wheat-lands

CHAPTER I

SALLY CREIGHTON

The frost outside was bitter, and the prairie which rolled back from Lander’s in long undulations to the far horizon, gleamed white beneath the moon, but there was warmth and brightness in Stukely’s wooden barn. The barn stood at one end of the little, desolate settlement, where the trail that came up from the railroad thirty miles away forked off into two wavy ribands melting into a waste of snow. Lander’s consisted then of five or six frame houses and stores, a hotel of the same material, several sod stables, and a few birch-log barns; and its inhabitants considered it one of the most promising places in Western Canada. That, however, is the land of promise, a promise which is in due time usually fulfilled, and the men of Lander’s were, for the most part, shrewdly practical optimists. They made the most of a somewhat grim and frugal present, and staked all they had to give—the few dollars they had brought in with them, and their powers of enduring toil—upon the roseate future.

Stukely had given them, and their scattered neighbors, who had driven there across several leagues of prairie, a supper in his barn. A big rusty stove, brought in for the occasion, stood in the center of the barn floor. Its pipe glowed in places a dull red, and now and then Stukely wondered uneasily whether it was charring a larger hole through the shingles of the roof. On one side of the stove the floor had been cleared; on the other, benches, empty barrels and tables were huddled together, and such of the guests as were not dancing at the moment, sat upon the various substitutes for chairs. A keg of hard Ontario cider had been provided for the refreshment of the guests, and it was open to anybody to ladle up what he wanted with a tin dipper. A haze of tobacco smoke drifted in thin blue wisps beneath the big nickeled lamps, and in addition to the reek of it, the place was filled with the smell of hot iron which an over-driven stove gives out, and the subtle odors of old skin coats.

The guests, however, were accustomed to an atmosphere of that kind, and it did not trouble them. For the most part, they were lean, spare, straight of limb and bronzed by frost and snow-blink, for though scarcely half of them were Canadian born, the prairie, as a rule, swiftly sets its stamp upon the newcomer. Also, there was something in the way they held themselves and put their feet down that suggested health and vigor, and, in the case of most of them, a certain alertness and decision of character. Some were from English cities, a few from those of Canada, and some from the bush of Ontario; but there was a similarity among them for which the cut and tightness of their store clothing did not altogether account. They lived well, though plainly, and toiled out in the open unusually hard. Their eyes were steady, their bronzed skin was clear, and their laughter had a wholesome ring.

A fiery-haired Scot, a Highlander, sat upon a barrel-head sawing at a fiddle, and the shrill scream of it filled the barn. To tone he did not aspire, but he played with Caledonian nerve and swing, and kept the snapping time. It was mad, harsh music of the kind that sets the blood tingling, causes the feet to move in rhythm, though the exhilarating effect of it was rather spoiled by the efforts of the little French Canadian who had another fiddle and struck clanging chords from the lower strings.

In the cleared space they were dancing what was presumably a quadrille, though it bore almost as great a resemblance to a Scottish country dance, or indeed to one of the measures of rural France, which was, however, characteristic of the present country.

The Englishman has set no distinguishable impress upon the prairie. It has absorbed him with his reserve and sturdy industry, and apparently the Canadian from the cities is also lost in it, too, for his is the leaven that works through the mass slowly and unobtrusively, while the Scot and the habitant of French extraction have given the life of it color and individuality. Extremes meet and fuse on the wide white levels of the West.

An Englishman, however, was the life of that dance, and he was physically a larger man than most of the rest, for, as a rule, the Colonial born run to wiry hardness rather than to solidity of frame. Gregory Hawtrey was tall and thick of shoulder, though the rest of him was in fine modeling, and he had a pleasant face of the English blue-eyed type. Just then it was shining with boyish merriment, and indeed an irresponsible gayety was a salient characteristic of the man. One would have called him handsome, though his mouth was a trifle slack, and though a certain assurance in his manner just fell short of swagger. He was the kind of man one likes at first sight, but for all that not the kind his hard-bitten neighbors would have chosen to stand by them through the strain of drought and frost in adverse seasons.

As it happened, the grim, hard-faced Sager, who had come there from Michigan, was just then talking about him to Stukely.

“Kind of tone about that man—guess he once had the gold-leaf on him quite thick, and it hasn’t all worn off yet,” said Sager. “Seen more Englishmen like him, and some folks from Noo York, too, when I took parties bass fishing way back yonder.”

He waved his hand vaguely, as though to indicate the American Republic, and Stukely agreed with him. They were right as far as they went, for Hawtrey undoubtedly possessed a grace of manner which, however, somehow failed to reach distinction. It was, perhaps, just a little too apparent, and lacked the strengthening feature of restraint.

“I wonder,” remarked Stukely reflectively, “what those kind of fellows done before they came out here.”

He had expressed a curiosity which is now and then to be met with on the prairie, but Sager, the charitable, grinned.

“Oh,” he responded, “I guess quite a few done no more than make their folks on the other side tired of them, and that’s why they sent them out to you. Some of them get paid so much on condition that they don’t come back again. Say”—and he glanced toward the dancers—“Dick Creighton’s Sally seems quite stuck on Hawtrey by the way she’s looking at him.”

Stukely assented. He was a somewhat primitive person, as was Sally Creighton, for that matter, and he did not suppose that she would have been greatly offended had she overheard his observations.

“Well,” he said, “I’ve thought that, too. If she wants him she’ll get him. She’s a smart girl—Sally.”

There were not many women present—perhaps one to every two of the men, which was rather a large proportion in that country, and their garments were not at all costly or beautiful. The fabrics were, for the most part, the cheapest obtainable, and the wearers had fashioned their gowns with their own fingers, in the scanty interludes between washing, and baking, and mending their husbands’ or fathers’ clothes. The faces of the women were a trifle sallow and had lost their freshness in the dry heat of the stove. Their hands were hard and reddened, and in figure most of them were thin and spare. One could have fancied that in a land where everybody toiled strenuously their burden was heavier than the men’s. One or two of the women clearly had been accustomed to a smoother life, but there was nothing to suggest that they looked back to it with regret. As a matter of fact, they looked forward, working for the future, and there was patient courage in their smiling eyes.

Creighton’s Sally, who was then tripping through the measure on Hawtrey’s arm, was native born. She was young and straight—straighter in outline than the women of the cities—with a suppleness which was less suggestive of the willow than a rather highly-tempered spring. She moved with a large vigor which barely fell short of grace, her eyes snapped when she smiled at Hawtrey, and her hair, which was of a ruddy brown, had fiery gleams in it. Anyone would have called her comely, and there were, indeed, no women in Stukely’s barn to compare with her in that respect, a fact that she recognized.

“Oh, yes,” said Sager reflectively; “she’ll get him sure if she sets her mind on it, and there’s no denying that they make a handsome pair. I’ve nothing against Hawtrey either: a straight man, a hustler, and smart at handling a team. Still, it’s kind of curious that while the man’s never been stuck for the stamps like the rest of us, he’s made nothing very much of his homestead yet. Now there’s Bob, and Jake, and Jasper came in after he did with half the money, and they thrash out four bushels of hard wheat for Hawtrey’s three.”

Stukely made a little gesture of concurrence, for he dimly realized the significance of his companion’s speech. It is results which count in that country, where the one thing demanded is practical efficiency, and the man of simple, steadfast purpose usually goes the farthest. Hawtrey had graces which won him friends, boldness of conception, and the power of application; but he had somehow failed to accomplish as much as his neighbors did. After all, there must be a good deal to be said for the man who raises four bushels of good wheat where his comrade with equal facilities raises three.

In the meanwhile Hawtrey was talking to Sally, and it was not astonishing that they talked of farming, which is the standard topic on that strip of prairie.

“So you’re not going to break that new piece this spring?” she asked.

“No,” answered Hawtrey; “I’d want another team, anyway, and I can’t raise the money; it’s hard to get out here.”

“Plenty under the sod,” declared Sally, who was essentially practical. “That’s where we get ours, but you have to put the breaker in and turn it over. You”—and she flashed a quick glance at him—“got most of yours from England. Won’t they send you any more?”

Hawtrey’s eyes twinkled as he shook his head. “I’m afraid they won’t,” he replied. “You see, I’ve put the screw on them rather hard the last few years.”

“How did you do that?” Sally inquired. “Told them you were thinking of coming home again?”

There was a certain wryness in the young man’s smile, for though Hawtrey had cast no particular slur upon the family’s credit he had signally failed to enhance it, and he was quite aware that his English relatives did not greatly desire his presence in the Old Country.

“My dear,” he said, “you really shouldn’t hit a fellow in the eye that way.”

As it happened, he did not see the girl’s face just then, or he might have noticed a momentary change in its expression. Gregory Hawtrey was a little casual in speech, but, so far, most of the young women upon whom he bestowed an epithet indicative of affection had attached no significance to it. They had wisely decided that he did not mean anything.

The Scottish fiddler’s voice broke in.

“Can ye no’ watch the music? Noo it’s paddy-bash!” he cried.

His French Canadian comrade waved his fiddle-bow protestingly.

“Paddybashy! V’la la belle chose!” he exclaimed with ineffable contempt, and broke in upon the ranting melody with a succession of harsh, crashing chords.

Then began a contest as to which could drown the other’s instrument, and the snapping time grew faster, until the dancers gasped, and men who wore long boots encouraged them with cries and stamped a staccato accompaniment upon the benches or on the floor. It was savage, rasping music, but one player infused into it the ebullient nerve of France, and the other was from the misty land where the fiddler learns the witchery of the clanging reel and the swing of the Strathspey. It is doubtless not high art, but there is probably no music in the world that fires the blood like this and turns the sober dance to rhythmic riot. Perhaps, too, amid the prairie snow, it gains something that gives it a closer compelling grip.

Hawtrey was breathless when it ceased, and Sally’s eyes flashed with the effulgence of the Northern night when her partner found her a resting-place upon an upturned barrel.

“No,” she declared, “I won’t have any cider.” She turned and glanced at him imperiously. “You’re not going for any more either.”

It was, no doubt, not the speech a well-trained English maiden would have made, but, though Hawtrey smiled rather curiously, it fell inoffensively from Sally’s lips. Though it is not always set down to their credit, the brown-faced, hard-handed men as a rule live very abstemiously in that country, and, as it happened, Hawtrey, who certainly showed no sign of it, had already consumed rather more cider than anybody else. He made a little bow of submission, and Sally resumed their conversation where it had broken off.

“We could let you have our ox-team to do that breaking with,” she volunteered. “You’ve had Sproatly living with you all winter. Why don’t you make him stay and work out his keep?”

Hawtrey laughed. “Sally,” he said, “do you think anybody could make Sproatly work?”

“It would be hard,” the girl admitted, and then looked up at him with a little glint in her eyes. “Still, I’d put a move on him if you sent him along to me.”

She was a capable young woman, but Hawtrey was dubious concerning her ability to accomplish such a task. Sproatly was an Englishman of good education, though his appearance seldom suggested it. Most of the summer he drove about the prairie in a wagon, vending cheap oleographs and patent medicines, and during the winter contrived to obtain free quarters from his bachelor acquaintances. It is a hospitable country, but there were men round Lander’s who, when they went away to work in far-off lumber camps, as they sometimes did, nailed up their doors and windows to prevent Sproatly from getting in.

“Does he never do anything?” Sally added.

“No,” Hawtrey assured her, “at least, never when he can help it. He had, however, started something shortly before I left him. You see, the house has needed cleaning, the last month or two, and we tossed up for who should do it. It fell to Sproatly, who didn’t seem quite pleased, but he got as far as firing the chairs and tables out into the snow. Then he sat down for a smoke, and he was looking at them through the window when I drove away.”

“Ah,” commented Sally, “you want somebody to keep the house straight and look after you. Didn’t you know any nice girls back there in the Old Country?”

She spoke naturally, and there was nothing to show that the girl’s heart beat a little more rapidly than usual as she watched Hawtrey. His face, however, grew a trifle graver, for she had touched upon a momentous question to such men as he. Living in Spartan simplicity upon the prairie, there are a good many of them, well-trained, well-connected young Englishmen, and others like them from Canadian cities. They naturally look for some grace of culture or refinement in the woman they would marry, and there are few women of the station to which they once belonged who could face the loneliness and unassisted drudgery that must be borne by the small wheat-grower’s wife. There were also reasons why this question had been troubling Hawtrey in particular of late.

“Oh, yes, of course, I knew nice girls in England, one or two,” he answered. “I’m not quite sure, however, that girls of that kind would find things even moderately comfortable here.”

A certain reflectiveness in his tone, which seemed to indicate that he had already given the matter some consideration, jarred upon Sally. Moreover, she had an ample share of the Western farmer’s pride, which firmly declines to believe that there is any land to compare with the one the plow is slowly wresting from the wide white levels of the prairie.

“We make out well enough,” she asserted with a snap in her eyes.

Hawtrey made an expressive gesture. “Oh, yes,” he admitted, “it’s in you. All you want in order to beat the wilderness and turn it into a garden is an ax, a span of oxen, and a breaker plow. You ought to be proud of your energy. Still, you see, our folks back yonder aren’t quite the same as you.”

Sally partly understood him. “Ah,” she replied, “they want more, and, perhaps, they’re used to having more than we have; but isn’t that in one way their misfortune? Is it what folks want, or what they can do, that makes them of use to anybody else?”

There was a hard truth in her suggestion, but Hawtrey, who seldom occupied himself with matters of that kind, smiled.

“Oh,” he said, “I don’t know; but, after all, it wouldn’t be worth while for us to raise wheat here unless there were folks back East to eat it, and, if some of them only eat in the shape of dainty cakes, that doesn’t affect the question. Anyway, there will be but another dance or two, and I was wondering whether I could drive you home; I’ve got Wyllard’s Ontario sleigh.”

Sally glanced at him rather sharply. She had half-expected this offer, and it is possible would have judiciously led him up to it if he had not made it. Now, as she saw that he really wished to drive her home, she was glad that she had not deliberately encouraged the invitation.

“Yes,” she answered softly, “I think you could.”

“Then,” said Hawtrey, “if you’ll wait ten minutes I’ll be back with the team.”

CHAPTER II

SALLY TAKES CHARGE

The night was clear and bitterly cold when Hawtrey and Sally Creighton drove away from Stukely’s barn. Winter had lingered unusually long that year, and the prairie gleamed dimly white, with the sledge trail cutting athwart it, a smear of blue-gray in the foreground. It was—for Lander’s lay behind them with the snow among the stubble belts that engirdled it—an empty wilderness that the mettlesome team swung across, and during the first few minutes the cold struck through the horses with a sting like the thrust of steel. A half moon, coppery red with frost, hung low above the snow-covered earth, and there was no sound but the crunch beneath the runners, and the beat of hoofs that rang dully through the silence like a roll of muffled drums.

Sleighs like the one that Hawtrey drove are not common on the prairie, where the farmer generally uses the humble bob-sled when the snow lies unusually long. It had been made for use in Montreal, and bought back East by a friend of Hawtrey’s, who was possessed of some means, which is a somewhat unusual thing in the case of a Western wheat-grower. This man also had bought the team—the fastest he could obtain—and when the warmth came back to the horses Hawtrey and the girl became conscious of the exhilaration of the swift and easy motion. The sleigh was light and narrow, and Hawtrey, who drew the thick driving-robe higher about Sally, did not immediately draw the mittened hand he had used back again. The girl did not resent the fact that it still rested behind her shoulder, nor did Hawtrey attach any particular significance to the fact. He was a man who usually acted on impulse. How far Sally understood him did not appear, but she came of folk who had waged a stubborn battle with the wilderness, and there was a vein of grim tenacity in her.

She was, however, conscious that there was something beneath her feet which forced her, if she was to sit comfortably, rather close against her companion; and it seemed expedient to point it out.

“Can’t you move a little? I can’t get my feet fixed right,” she said.

Hawtrey looked down at her with a smile. “I’m afraid I can’t unless I get right outside. Aren’t you happy there?”

It was the kind of speech he was in the habit of making, but there was rather more color in the girl’s face than the stinging night air brought there, and she glanced at the bottom of the sleigh.

“It’s a sack of some kind, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Yes,” Hawtrey answered, “it’s a couple of three-bushel bags. Some special seed Lorton sent to Winnipeg for. Ormond brought them out from the railroad. I promised I’d take them along to him.”

“You should have told me. It’s most a league round by Lorton’s place,” Sally returned with reproach in her voice.

“That won’t take long with this team. Have you any great objections to another fifteen minutes’ drive with me?”

Sally looked up at him, and the moonlight was on her face, which was unusually pretty in the radiance of the brilliant night.

“No,” she admitted, “I haven’t any.”

She spoke demurely, but there was a perceptible something in her voice which might have warned the man, had he been in the habit of taking warning from anything, which, however, was not the case. It was one of his weaknesses that he seldom thought about what he did until he was compelled to face the consequences; and it was, perhaps, to his credit that he had after all done very little harm, for there was hot blood in him.

“Well,” he responded, “I’m not going to grumble about those extra three miles, but you were asking what land I meant to break this spring. What put that into your mind?”

“Our folks,” Sally replied candidly. “They were talking about you.”

This again was significant, but Hawtrey did not notice it.

“I’ve no doubt they said I ought to tackle the new quarter section,” he suggested.

“Yes,” assented Sally. “Why don’t you do it? Last fall you thrashed out quite a big harvest.”

“I certainly did. There, however, didn’t seem to be many dollars left over when I’d faced the bills.”

The girl made a little gesture of impatience. “Oh, Bob and Jake and Jasper sowed on less backsetting,” she said, “and they’re buying new teams and plows. Can’t you do what they do, though I guess they don’t go off for weeks to Winnipeg?”

The man was silent. He had an incentive for hard work about which she was ignorant, and he had certainly done much, but the long, iron winter, when there was nothing that could be done, had proved too severe a test for him. It was very dreary sitting alone evening after evening beside the stove, and the company of the somnolent Sproatly was not cheerful. Now and then his pleasure-loving nature had revolted from the barrenness of his lot when, stiff and cold, he drove home from an odd visit to a neighbor, and arriving in the dark found the stove had burned out and water had frozen hard inside the house. These were things his neighbors patiently endured, but Hawtrey had fled for life and brightness to Winnipeg.

Sally glanced up at him with a little nod. “You take hold with a good grip. Everybody allows that,” she observed. “The trouble is you let things go afterwards. You don’t stay with it.”

“Yes,” assented Hawtrey. “I believe you have hit it, Sally. That’s very much what’s the matter with me.”

“Then,” said the girl with quiet insistence, “won’t you try?”

A faint flush crept into Hawtrey’s face. Sally was less than half-taught, and unacquainted with anything beyond the simple, strenuous life of the prairie. Her greatest accomplishments consisted of some skill in bakery and the handling of half-broken teams; but she had once or twice given him what he recognized as excellent advice. There was something incongruous in the situation, but, as usual, he preferred to regard it whimsically.

“I suppose I’ll have to, if you insist. If ever I’m the grasping owner of the biggest farm in this district I’ll blame you,” he answered.

Sally said nothing further on that subject, and some time later the sleigh went skimming down among the birches in a shallow ravine. Hawtrey pulled the horses up when they reached the bottom of the ravine, and glanced up at a shapeless cluster of buildings that showed black amid the trees.

“Lorton won’t be back until to-morrow, but I promised to pitch the bags into his granary,” he said. “If I hump them up the trail here it will save us driving round through the bluff.”

He got down, and though the bags were heavy, with Sally’s assistance he managed to hoist the first of them on to his shoulders. Then he staggered with it up the steep foot-trail that climbed the slope. He was more or less accustomed to carrying bags of grain between store and wagon, but his mittened hands were numbed, and his joints were stiff with cold. Sally noticed that he floundered rather wildly. In another moment or two, however, he vanished into the gloom among the trees, and she sat listening to the uneven crunch of his footsteps in the snow, until there was a sudden crash of broken branches, and a sound as of something falling heavily down a declivity. Then there was another crash, and stillness again.

Sally gasped, and clenched her mittened hands hard upon the reins as she remembered that Lorton’s by-trail skirted the edge of a very steep bank, but she lost neither her collectedness nor her nerve. Presence of mind in the face of an emergency is probably as much a question of experience as of temperament, and, like other women in that country, she had seen men struck down by half-trained horses, crushed by collapsing strawpiles, and once or twice gashed by mower blades. This was no doubt why she remembered that the impatient team would probably move on if she left the sleigh, and therefore drove the horses to the first of the birches before she got down. Then she knotted the reins about a branch, and called out sharply.

No answer came out of the shadows, and her heart beat unpleasantly fast as she plunged in among the trees, keeping below the narrow trail that went slanting up the side of the declivity, until she stopped, with another gasp, when she reached a spot where a ray of moonlight filtered down. A limp figure in an old skin coat lay almost at her feet, and she dropped on her knees beside it in the snow. Hawtrey’s face showed an unpleasant grayish-white in the faint silvery light.

“Gregory,” she cried hoarsely.

The man opened his eyes, and blinked at her in a half-dazed manner. “Fell down,” he said. “Think I felt my leg go—and my side’s stabbing me. Go for somebody.”

Sally glanced round, and noticed that the grain bag lay burst open not far away. She fancied that he had clung to it after he lost his footing, which explained why he had fallen so heavily, but that was not a point of any consequence now. There was nobody who could help her within two leagues of the spot, and it was evident that she could not leave him there to freeze. Then she noticed that the trees grew rather farther apart just there, and rising swiftly she ran back to bring the team. The ascent was steep, and she had to urge the horses, with sharp cries and blows from her mittened hand, among shadowy tree trunks and through snapping undergrowth before she reached the spot where Hawtrey lay. He looked up at her when at last the horses stood close beside him.

“You can’t turn them here,” he told her faintly.

Sally was never sure how she managed it, for the sleigh drove against the slender trunks, and the fiery beasts, terrified by the snapping of the undergrowth, were almost unmanageable; but at last they were facing the descent again, and she stooped and twined her arms about the shoulders of Hawtrey, who now lay almost against the sleigh.

“It’s going to hurt, Gregory, but I have got to get you in,” she warned him.

Then she gasped, for Hawtrey was a man of full stature, and it was a heavy lift. She could not raise him wholly, and he cried out once when his injured leg trailed in the snow. Still, with the most strenuous effort she had ever made she moved him a yard or so, and then staggering fell with her side against the sleigh. She felt faint with the pain of it, but with another desperate lift she drew him into the sleigh, and let him sink down gently upon the bag that still lay there. His eyes had shut again, and he said nothing now.

It required only another moment or two to wrap the thick driving-robe about him, and after that, with one hand still beneath his neck, she glanced down. It was clear that he was quite unconscious of her presence, and stooping swiftly she kissed his gray face. She settled herself in the driving-seat with only a blanket coat to shelter her from the cold, and the horses went cautiously down the slope. She did not urge them until they reached the level, for the trail that wound up out of the ravine was difficult, but when the wide white expanse once more stretched away before them she laid the biting whip across their backs.

That was quite sufficient. They were fiery animals, and when they broke into a furious gallop the rush of night wind struck her tingling cheeks like a lash of wires. All power of feeling went out of her hands, her arms grew stiff and heavy, and she was glad that the trail led smooth and straight to the horizon. Hawtrey, who had moved a little, lay helpless across her feet. He did not answer when she spoke to him.

The team went far at the gallop. A fine mist of snow beat against the sleigh, but the girl leaning forward, a tense figure, with nerveless hands clenched upon the reins, saw nothing but the blue-gray riband of trail that steadily unrolled itself before her. At length a blurred mass, which she knew to be a birch bluff, grew out of the white waste, and presently a cluster of darker smudges shot up into the shape of a log-house, sod stables, and straw-pile granary. A minute or two later, she pulled the team up with an effort, and a man, who flung the door of the house open, came out into the moonlight. He stopped, and gazed at her in astonishment.

“Miss Creighton!” he said.

“Don’t stand there,” cried Sally. “Take the near horse’s head, and lead them right up to the door.”

“What’s the matter?” the man asked stupidly.

“Lead the team up,” ordered Sally. “Jump, if you can.”

It was supposed that Sproatly had never moved with much expedition in his life, but that night he sprang towards the horses at a commanding wave of the girl’s hand. He started when he saw his comrade lying in the bottom of the sleigh, but Sally disregarded his hurried questions.

“Help me to get him out,” she said, when he stopped the team. “Keep his right leg as straight as you can. I don’t want to lift him. We must slide him in.”

They did it somehow, though the girl was breathless before their task was finished, and the perspiration started from the man. Then Sally turned to Sproatly.

“Get into the sleigh, and don’t spare the team,” she said. “Drive over to Watson’s, and bring him along. You can tell him your partner’s broke his leg, and some of his ribs. Start right now!”

Sproatly did her bidding, and when the door closed behind him she flung off her blanket coat and thrust plenty of wood into the stove. She looked for some coffee in the cupboard, and put on a kettle, after which she sat down on the floor by Hawtrey’s side. He lay still, with the thick driving-robe beneath him, and though the color was creeping back into his face, his eyes were shut, and he was apparently quite unconscious of her presence. For the first time she was aware of a distressful faintness, which, as she had come suddenly out of the stinging frost into the little overheated room that reeked with tobacco smoke and a stale smell of cooking, was not astonishing. She mastered her dizziness, however, and presently, seeing that Hawtrey did not move, glanced about her with some curiosity, for it was the first time she had entered his house.

The room was scantily furnished, and, though very few of the bachelor farmers in that country live luxuriously, she fancied that Sproatly, who had evidently very rudimentary ideas on the subject of house-cleaning, had not brought back all the sundries he had thrown out into the snow. It contained a table, a carpenter’s bench, and a couple of chairs. There were still smears of dust upon the uncovered floor. The birch-log walls had been rudely paneled half-way up, but the half-seasoned boards had cracked with the heat, and exuded streaks of resin to which the grime and dust had clung. A pail, which contained potato peelings, stood amid a litter of old long-boots and broken harness against one wall. The floor was black and thick with grease all round the rusty stove. A pile of unwashed dishes and cooking utensils stood upon the table, and the lamp above her head had blackened the boarded ceiling.

Sally noticed it all with disgust, and then, seeing that Hawtrey had opened his eyes, she made a cup of coffee and persuaded him to drink it. After that he smiled at her.

“Thanks,” he said feebly. “Where’s Sproatly? My side stabs me.”

Sally raised one hand. “You’re not to say a word,” she cautioned. “Sproatly’s gone for Watson, and he’ll soon fix you up. Now lie quite still, and shut your eyes again.”

Hawtrey obeyed her injunction to lie still, but his eyes were not more than half-closed, and she could not resist the temptation to see what he would do if she went away. She had half risen, when he stretched out a hand and felt for her dress, and she sank down again with a curious softness in her face. Then he let his eyes close altogether, as if satisfied, and by and by she gently laid her hand on his.

He did not appear to notice it, and, though she did not know whether he was asleep or unconscious, she sat beside him, watching him with compassion in her eyes. There was no sound but the snapping of the birch billets in the rusty stove. She was anxious, but not unduly so, for she knew that men who live as the prairie farmers do usually more or less readily recover from such injuries as had befallen him. It would not be very long before assistance arrived, for it was understood that the man for whom she had sent Sproatly had almost completed a medical course in an Eastern city before he became a prairie farmer. Why he had suddenly changed his profession was a point he did not explain, and, as he had always shown himself willing to do what he could when any of his neighbors met with an accident, nobody troubled him about the matter.

By and by Sproatly brought Watson to the homestead, and he was busy with Hawtrey for some time. Then they got him to bed, and Watson came back to the room where Sally was anxiously waiting.

“Hawtrey’s idea about his injuries is more or less correct, but we’ll have no great trouble in pulling him round,” he said. “The one point that’s worrying me is the looking after him. One couldn’t expect him to thrive upon slabs of burnt salt pork, and Sproatly’s bread.”

“I’ll do what I can,” said Sproatly indignantly.

“You!” replied Watson. “It would be criminal to leave you in charge of a sick man.”

Sally quietly put on her blanket coat. “If you can stay a few hours, I’ll be back soon after it’s light,” she said. She turned to Sproatly. “You can wash up those dishes on the table, and get a brush and sweep this room out. If it’s not quite neat to-morrow you’ll do it again.”

Sproatly grinned as she went out. A few moments later the girl drove away through the bitter frost.

CHAPTER III

WYLLARD ASSENTS

Sally, who returned with her mother, passed a fortnight at Hawtrey’s homestead before Watson decided that his patient could be entrusted to Sproatly’s care. Afterwards she went back twice a week to make sure that Sproatly, in whom she had no confidence, was discharging his duties satisfactorily. With baskets of dainties for the invalid she had driven over one afternoon, when Hawtrey, whose bones were knitting well, lay talking to another man in his little sleeping-room.

There was no furniture in the room except the wooden bunk in which he lay, and a deerhide lounge chair he had made. The stove-pipe from the kitchen led across part of one corner, and then up again into the room beneath the roof above. It had been one of Sproatly’s duties since the accident to rise and renew the fire soon after midnight, and when Sally arrived he was outside the house, whip-sawing birch-logs and splitting them, an occupation he profoundly disliked.

Spring had come suddenly, as it usually does on the prairie, and the snow was melting fast under a brilliant sun. The bright rays that streamed in through the window struck athwart the glimmering dust motes in the little bare room, and fell, pleasantly warm, upon the man who sat in the deerhide chair. He was a year or two older than Hawtrey, though he had scarcely reached thirty. He was a man of average height, and somewhat spare of figure. His manner was tranquil and his lean, bronzed face attractive. He held a pipe in his hand, and was looking at Hawtrey with quiet, contemplative eyes, that were his most noticeable feature, though it was difficult to say whether their color was gray or hazel-brown, for they were singularly clear, and there was something which suggested steadfastness in their unwavering gaze. The man wore long boots, trousers of old blue duck, and a jacket of soft deerskin such as the Blackfeet dress so expertly; and there was nothing about him to suggest that he was a man of varied experience, and of some importance in that country.

Harry Wyllard was native-born. In his young days he had assisted his father in the working of a little Manitoban farm, when the great grain province was still, for the most part, a wilderness. A prosperous relative on the Pacific slope had sent him to Toronto University, where after a session or two he had become involved in a difference of opinion with the authorities. Though the matter was never made quite clear, it was generally believed that Wyllard had quietly borne the blame of a comrade’s action, for there was a vein of eccentric generosity in the lad. In any case, he left Toronto, and the relative, who was largely interested in the fur business, next sent him north to the Behring Sea. The business was then a hazardous one, for the skin buyers and pelagic sealers had trouble with the Alaskan representatives of American trading companies, upon whose preserves they poached, as well as with the commanders of the gunboats sent up north to protect the seals.

Men’s lives were staked against the value of a fur, edicts were lightly contravened, and now and then a schooner barely escaped into the smothering fog with skins looted on forbidden beaches. It was a perilous life, and a strenuous one, for every white man’s hand was against the traders; there were rangers in fog and gale, and the reefs that lay in the tideways of almost uncharted waters; but Wyllard made the most of his chance. He kept the peace with jealous skippers who resented the presence of a man they might command as mate, but whose views they were forced to listen to when he spoke as supercargo. He won the good-will of sea-bred Indians, and drove a good trade with them; he not infrequently brought his boat loaded with reeking skins back first to the plunging schooner.

He fell into trouble again when they were hanging off the Eastern Isles under double reefs, watching for the Russians’ seals. A boat’s crew from another schooner had been cast ashore, and, as the men were in peril of falling into the Russians’ hands, Wyllard led a reckless expedition to rescue them. He succeeded, in so far that the wrecked sailors were taken off the beach through a tumult of breaking surf; but as the relief crews pulled seaward the fog shut down on them, and one boat, manned by three men, never reached the schooners. The vessels blew horns all night, and crept along the smoking beach next day, though the surf made landing impossible. Then a sudden gale drove them off the shore, and, as it was evident that their comrades must have perished, they reluctantly sailed for other fishing grounds. As one result of this, Wyllard broke with his prosperous relative when he went back to Vancouver.

After that he helped to strengthen railroad bridges among the mountains of British Columbia. He worked in logging camps, and shoveled in the mines, and, as it happened, met Hawtrey, who, tempted by high wages, had spent a winter in the Mountain Province. Wyllard’s father, who had taken up virgin soil in Assiniboia, died soon after Wyllard went back to him, and a few months later the relative in Vancouver also died. Somewhat to Wyllard’s astonishment, his kinsman bequeathed him a considerable property, most of the proceeds of which he sank in acres of virgin prairie. Willow Range was now one of the largest farms between Winnipeg and the Rockies.

“The leg’s getting along satisfactorily?” Wyllard inquired at length.

Hawtrey, who appeared unusually thoughtful, admitted that it was.

“Anyway, it’s singularly unfortunate that I’m disabled just now,” he added. “There’s the plowing to begin in a week or two, and besides that I was thinking of getting married.”

Wyllard was somewhat astonished at this announcement. For one thing, he was more or less acquainted with the state of his friend’s finances. During the next moment or two he glanced meditatively through the open door into the adjoining room, where Sally Creighton was busy beside the stove. The sleeves of the girl’s light bodice were rolled up well above the elbow, and she had pretty, round arms, which were just then partly immersed in dough.

“I don’t think there’s a nicer or more capable girl in this part of Assiniboia,” he remarked.

“Oh, yes,” agreed Hawtrey. “Anybody would admit that. Still, since you seem so sure of it, why don’t you marry her yourself?”

Wyllard looked at his comrade curiously. “Well,” he said, “there are several reasons that don’t affect Miss Sally and only concern myself. Besides, it’s highly improbable that she’d have me.” Before he looked up again he paused to light his pipe, which had gone out. “Since it evidently isn’t Sally, have I met the lady?” he asked.

“You haven’t. She’s in England.”

“It’s four years, isn’t it, since you were over there?”

Hawtrey lay silent a minute, and then made a little confidential gesture.

“I’d better tell you all about the thing,” he said. “Our folks were people of some little standing in the county. In fact, as they were far from rich, they had just standing enough to embarrass them. In most respects, they were ultra-conventional with old-fashioned ideas, and, though there was no open break, I’m afraid I didn’t get on with them quite as well as I should have done, which is why I came out to Canada. They started me on the land decently, and twice when we’d harvested frost and horse-sickness, they sent along the draft I asked them for. That is one reason why I’m not going to worry them, though I’d very much like another now. You see, there are two girls, as well as Reggie, who’s reading for the Bar.”

“I don’t think you have mentioned the lady yet.”

“She’s a connection of some friends of ours. Her mother, so far as I understand it, married beneath her—a man her family didn’t like. The father and mother died, and Agatha, who was brought up by the father’s relations, was often at the Grange, a little, old-fashioned, half-ruinous place, a mile or two from where we live in the North of England. The Grange belongs to her mother’s folks, but I think there was still a feud between them and her father’s people, who had her trained to earn her living. We saw a good deal of each other, and fell in love, as boy and girl will. Well, when I went back, one winter, after I’d been here two years, Agatha was at the Grange again, and we decided then that I was to bring her out as soon as I had a home to offer her.”

Hawtrey broke off for a moment, and there was a trace of embarrassment in his manner when he went on again. “Perhaps I ought to have managed it sooner,” he added. “Still, things never seem to go quite as one would like with me, and you can understand that a dainty, delicate girl reared in comfort in England would find it rough out here.”

Wyllard glanced round the bare room in which he sat, and into the other, which was also furnished in a remarkably primitive manner.

“Yes,” he assented, “I can quite realize that.”

“Well,” said Hawtrey, “it’s a thing that has been worrying me a good deal of late, because, as a matter of fact, I’m not much farther forward than I was four years ago. In the meanwhile, Agatha, who has some talent for music, was in a first-class master’s hands. Afterwards she gave lessons, and got odd singing engagements. A week ago, I had a letter from her in which she said that her throat was giving out.”

He stopped again for a moment, with trouble in his face, and then fumbling under his pillow produced a letter, which he carefully folded.

“We’re rather good friends,” he observed. “You can read that part of it.”

Wyllard took the letter, and a suggestion of quickening interest crept into his eyes as he read. Then he looked up at Hawtrey.

“It’s a brave letter—the kind a brave girl would write,” he commented. “Still, it’s evident that she’s anxious.”

For a moment or two there was silence, which was broken only by Sally clattering about the stove.

Dissimilar in character, as they were, the two men were firm friends, and there had been a day when, as they worked upon a dizzy railroad trestle, Hawtrey had held Wyllard fast when a plank slipped away. He had thought nothing of the matter, but Wyllard was one who remembered things of that kind.

“Now,” said Hawtrey, after a long pause, “you see my trouble. This place isn’t fit for her, and I couldn’t even go across for some time yet. But her father’s folks have died off, and there’s nothing to be expected from her mother’s relatives. Any way, she can’t be left to face the blow alone. It’s unthinkable. Well, there’s only one course open to me, and that’s to raise as much money on a mortgage as I can, fit the place out with fixings brought from Winnipeg, and sow a double acreage with borrowed capital. I’ll send for her as soon as I can get the house made a little more comfortable.”

Wyllard sat silent a moment or two, and then leaned forward in his chair.

“No,” he objected, “there are two other and wiser courses. Tell the girl what things are like here, and just how you stand. She’d face it bravely. There’s no doubt of that.”

Hawtrey looked at him sharply. “I believe she would, but considering that you have never seen her, I don’t quite know why you should be sure of it.”

Wyllard smiled. “The girl who wrote that letter wouldn’t flinch.”

“Well,” said Hawtrey, “you can mention the second course.”

“I’ll let you have $1,000 at bank interest—which is less than any land-broker would charge you—without a mortgage.”

Again Hawtrey showed a certain embarrassment. “No,” he replied, “I’m afraid it can’t be done. I had a kind of claim upon my people, though it must be admitted that I’ve worked it off, but I can’t quite bring myself to borrow money from my friends.”

Wyllard who saw that he meant it, made a gesture of resignation. “Then you must let the girl make the most of it, but keep out of the hands of the mortgage man. By the way, I haven’t told you that I’ve decided to make a trip to the Old Country. We had a bonanza crop last season, and Martial could run the range for a month or two. After all, my father was born yonder, and I can’t help feeling now and then that I should have made an effort to trace up that young Englishman’s relatives, and tell them what became of him.”

“The one you struck in British Columbia? You have mentioned him, but, so far as I remember, you never gave me any particulars about the thing.”

Wyllard seemed to hesitate, which was not a habit of his.

“There is,” he said, “not much to tell. I struck the lad sitting down, played out, upon a trail that led over a big divide. It was clear that he couldn’t get any further, and there wasn’t a settlement within a good many leagues of the spot. We were up in the ranges prospecting then. Well, we made camp and gave him supper—he couldn’t eat very much—and afterwards he told me what brought him there. It seemed to me he had always been weedy in the chest, but he had been working waist-deep in an icy creek, building a dam at a mine, until his lungs had given out. The mining boss was a hard case and had no mercy on him, but the lad, who had had a rough time in the Mountain Province, stayed with it until he played out altogether.”

Wyllard’s face hardened as he mentioned the mining boss, and a curious little sparkle crept into his eyes, but after a pause he proceeded quietly:

“We did what we could for the boy. In fact, it rather broke up the prospecting trip, but he was too far gone. He hung for a week or two, and one of us brought a doctor out from the settlements, but the day before we broke camp Jake and I buried him.”

Hawtrey made a sign of comprehension. He was reasonably well acquainted with his comrade’s character, and fancied he knew who had brought the doctor out. He knew also that Wyllard had been earning his living as a railroad navvy or chopper then, and, in view of the cost of provisions brought by pack-horse into the remoter bush, the reason why he had abandoned his prospecting trip after spending a week or two taking care of the sick lad was clear enough.

“You never learned his name?” Hawtrey asked.

“I didn’t,” answered Wyllard. “I went back to the mine, but several things suggested that the name upon the pay-roll wasn’t his real one. He began a broken message the night he died, but the hemorrhage cut him off in the middle of it. The wish that I should tell his people somehow was in his eyes.”

Wyllard broke off for a moment with the deprecatory gesture, which in connection with the story was very expressive.

“I have never done it, but how could I? All I know is that he was a delicately brought up young Englishman, and the only clew I have is a watch with a London maker’s name on it and a girl’s photograph. I’ve a very curious notion that I shall meet that girl some day.”

Hawtrey, who made no comment, lay still for a minute or two, but his face suggested that he was considering something.

“Harry,” he said presently, “I shall not be fit for a journey for quite a while yet, and if I went over to England I couldn’t get the plowing done and the crop in; which, if I’m going to be married, is absolutely necessary.”

There was no doubt about the truth of the statement, for the small Western farmer has very seldom a balance in hand, and for that matter, is not infrequently in debt to the nearest storekeeper. He must, as a rule, secure a harvest or abandon his holding, since as soon as the crop is thrashed the bills pour in. Wyllard made a sign of assent.

“Well,” Hawtrey went on, “if you’re going to England you could go as my deputy. You could make Agatha understand what things are like here, and bring her out to me. I’ll arrange for the wedding to be soon as she arrives.”

Wyllard was not a conventional person, but he pointed out several objections. Hawtrey overruled them, however, and eventually Wyllard reluctantly assented.

“As it happens, Mrs. Hastings is going over, too, and if she comes back about the same time the thing might be managed,” he said. “I believe she’s in Winnipeg just now, but I’ll write to her. By the way, have you a photograph of Agatha?”

“I haven’t,” Hawtrey answered. “She gave me one, but somehow it got mislaid on house-cleaning. That’s rather an admission, isn’t it?”

It occurred to Wyllard that it certainly was. In fact, it struck him as a very curious thing that Hawtrey should have lost the picture which the girl with whom he was in love had given him. He sat silent for a moment or two, and then stood up.

“When I hear from Mrs. Hastings, I’ll drive around again. Candidly, the thing has somewhat astonished me. I always had a fancy it would be Sally.”

Hawtrey laughed. “Sally?” he replied. “We’re first-rate friends, but I never had the faintest notion of marrying her.”

Wyllard went out to harness his team, and he did not notice that Sally, who had approached the door with a tray in her hands a moment or two earlier, drew back before him softly. When he had crossed the room she set down the tray and, with her cheeks burning, leaned upon the table. Then, feeling that she could not stay in the stove-heated room, she went out, and stood in the slushy snow. One of her hands was tightly closed, and all the color had vanished from her cheeks. However, she contrived to give Hawtrey his supper by and by, and soon afterwards drove away.

CHAPTER IV

A CRISIS

While Wyllard made arrangements for his journey, and Sally Creighton went very quietly about her work on the lonely prairie farm, it happened one evening that Miss Winifred Rawlinson sat uneasily expectant far back under the gallery of a concert-hall in an English manufacturing town. In her back seat Miss Rawlinson could not hear very well, but it was the cheapest place she could obtain, and economy was of some little importance to her. Besides, by craning her neck a little to avoid the hat of the strikingly dressed young woman in front of her, she could, at least, see the stage. The programme which she held in one hand announced that Miss Agatha Ismay would sing a certain aria from a great composer’s oratorio. Miss Rawlinson leaned further forward in her chair when a girl of about her own age, which was twenty-four, slowly advanced to the center of the stage.

The girl on the stage was a tall, well-made, brown-haired girl, with a quiet grace of movement and a comely face. She was attired in a long trailing dress of a shimmering corn-straw tint. Agatha Ismay had sung at unimportant concerts with marked success, but that evening there was something very like shrinking in her eyes.

A crash of chords from the piano melted into a rippling prelude, and Winifred breathed easier when her friend began to sing. The voice was sweet and excellently trained, and there was a deep stillness of appreciation when the clear notes thrilled through the closely-packed hall. No one could doubt that the first part of the aria was a success, for half-subdued applause broke out when the voice sank into silence, and for a few moments the piano rippled on alone; but it seemed to Winifred that there was a look of tension in the singer’s face, and she grew uneasy, for she understood the cause for it.

“The last bit of the second part’s rather trying,” remarked a young man behind her. “There’s an awkward jump at two full tones that was too much for our soprano when we tried it at the choral union. Miss Ismay’s voice is very true in intonation, but I don’t suppose most of the audience would notice it if she shirked a little and left that high sharp out.”

Winifred had little knowledge of music, but she was sufficiently acquainted with her friend’s character to be certain that Agatha would not attempt to leave out the sharp in question. This was one reason why she sat rigidly still when the clear voice rang out again. It rose from note to note, full and even, but she could see the singer’s face, and there was no doubt whatever that Agatha was making a strenuous effort. Nobody else, however, seemed to notice it, for Winifred flung a swift glance around, and then fixed her eyes upon the dominant figure in the corn-straw dress. The sweet voice was still rising and the interested listener hoped that the accompanist would force the tone to cover it a little, and put on the loud pedal. The pianist, however, was gazing at his music, and played on until, with startling suddenness, the climax came.

The voice sank a full tone, rose, and hoarsely trailed off into silence again. Then the accompanist glanced over his shoulder, and struck a ringing chord while he waited for a sign. There was a curious stirring in the audience. The girl in the shimmering dress stood quite still for a moment with a spot of crimson in her cheek and a half-dazed look in her eyes. Then, turning swiftly, she moved off the stage.

Winifred rose with a gasp, and turned upon the young man next her, who looked up inquiringly.

“Yes,” she said sharply; “can’t you let me pass? I’m going out.”

It was about half-past nine when she reached the wet street. A fine rain drove into her face, and she had rather more than a mile to walk without an escort, but that was a matter which caused her no concern. She was a self-reliant young woman, and accustomed to going about unattended. She was quite aware that the scene she had just witnessed would bring about a crisis in her own and her friend’s affairs. For all that, she was unpleasantly conscious of the leak in one shabby boot when she stepped down from the sidewalk to cross the street, and when she opened her umbrella beneath a gas lamp she pursed up her mouth. There were holes in the umbrella near where the ribs ran into the ferrule; she had not noticed them before. She, however, resolutely plodded on through the drizzle, until three young fellows who came with linked arms down the pavement of a quieter street barred her way. One wore his hat on one side, the one nearest the curb flourished a little cane, and the third smiled at her fatuously.

“Oh my!” he jeered. “Where’s dear Jemima off to in such a hurry?”

Winifred drew herself up. She was little and determined, and, it must be admitted, not quite unaccustomed to that kind of thing.

“Will you let me pass?” she asked angrily. “There’s a policeman at the next turning.”

“There really is,” said one of the youths. “The Dook has another engagement. Dream of me, Olivia!”

A beat of heavy feet drew nearer, and the three roysterers disappeared in the direction of a flaming music-hall, where the second “house” was probably beginning. Winifred, who had stepped into the gutter to avoid the roysterer with the cane, turned as a stalwart, blue-coated figure moved towards her.

“Thank you, officer,” she said, “they’ve gone.”

The policeman merely raised a hand as if in comprehension, and plodded back to his post. Winifred went on until she let herself into a house in a quiet street, and ascending to the second floor entered a simply furnished room, which, however, contained a piano, and a table on which a typewriter stood amid a litter of papers. The girl took off her water-proof and sat down in a low chair beside the little fire. She was not a handsome girl, and it was evident that she did not trouble herself greatly about her attire. Her face was too thin and her figure too slight and spare, but there was usually, even when she was anxious, as she certainly was that night, a shrewdly whimsical twinkle in her eyes, and though her lips were set, her expression was compassionate.

She was not the person to sit still very long, and in a minute or two she rose to place a little kettle on the fire. She took a few scones, a coffee-pot, and a tin of condensed milk from a cupboard. When she had spread them out upon a table she discovered that there was some of the condensed milk upon her fingers, and it must be admitted that she sucked them. They were little, stubby fingers, which somehow looked capable.

“It must have been four o’clock when I had that bun and a cup of tea,” she remarked, half aloud.

She glanced at the table longingly, for she occasionally found it necessary to place a certain check upon a healthy appetite. The practice of such self-denial is unfortunately, not a very unusual thing in the case of many young women who work hard in the great cities.

“I must wait for Agatha,” she said, with a resolute shake of the head. Crossing the room toward the typewriter table she stopped to glance at a little framed photograph that stood upon the mantel. It was a portrait of Gregory Hawtrey taken years before, and she apostrophized it with quiet scorn.

“Now you’re wanted you’re naturally away out yonder,” she declared accusingly. “You’re like the rest of them—despicable!”

This seemed to relieve her feelings, and she sat down before the typewriter, which clicked and rattled for several minutes under her stubby fingers. The clicking ceased with sudden abruptness, and she prodded the carriage of the machine viciously with a hairpin. As this appeared unavailing, she used her forefinger, and when at length it slid along the rod with a clash there was a smear of grimy oil upon her cheek and her nose. The machine gave no further trouble, and she endeavored to make up some of the time that she had spent at the concert. It was necessary that it should be made up, but she was conscious that she was putting off an evil moment.

At last the door opened, and Agatha Ismay, wrapped in a long cloak, came in. She permitted Winifred to take her wrap from her, and then sank down into a chair. There was a strained look in her eyes, and her face was very weary.

“You’re working late again,” she observed.

Winifred nodded. “It’s the men who loaf, my dear,” she replied. “When you undertake the transcription of an author’s scrawl at ninepence the thousand words you have to work hard, especially when, as it is in this case, the thing’s practically unreadable. Besides, the woman in it makes me lose my temper. If I’d had a man of the kind described to deal with I’d have thrashed him.”

She was talking at random, partly to conceal her anxiety, and partly with the charitable purpose of giving her companion time to approach the subject that must be mentioned; but she rather overdid her effort to appear at ease. Agatha looked at her sharply.

“Winny,” she said, “you know. You’ve been there.”

Winifred turned towards her quietly, for she could face a crisis.

“Yes,” she confessed, “I have, but you’re not going to talk about it until you have had supper. Don’t move until I make the coffee.”

She was genuinely hungry, but while she satisfied her own appetite she took care that her companion, who did not seem inclined to eat, made a simple meal. Then she put the plates into a cupboard and sat down facing Agatha.

“Well,” she said, “you have broken down exactly as that throat specialist said you would. The first question is, how long it will be before you can go on again?”

Agatha laughed, a little harsh laugh. “I didn’t tell you everything at the time: I’ve broken down for good,” she answered.

There was a moment of tense silence, and then Agatha made a dejected gesture. “The specialist warned me that this might happen if I went on singing, but what could I do? I couldn’t cancel my engagements without telling people why. The physician said I must go to Norway and give my throat and chest a rest.”

They looked at each other, and there was in their eyes the half-bitter, half-weary smile of those to whom the cure prescribed is ludicrously impossible. It was Winifred who spoke first.

“Then,” she commented, “we have to face the situation, and it’s not an encouraging one. Our joint earnings just keep us here in decency—we won’t say comfort—and they’re evidently to be subject to a big reduction. It strikes me as a rather curious coincidence that a letter from that man in Canada and one from your prosperous friends in the country arrived just before you went out.”

She saw the look in Agatha’s eyes, and spread her hands out.

“Yes,” she admitted; “I hid them. It seemed to me that you had quite enough upon your mind this evening. I don’t know whether the letters are likely to throw any fresh light upon the question what we’re going to do.”

She produced the letters from a drawer in her table, and Agatha straightened herself suddenly in her chair when she had opened the first of them.

“Oh,” she cried, “he wants me to go out to him!”

Winifred’s face set hard for a moment, but it relaxed again, and she contrived to hide her dismay.

“Then,” she suggested, “I suppose you’ll certainly go. After all, he’s probably not worse to live with than most of them.”

Miss Rawlinson was occasionally a little bitter, but, like others of her kind, she had been compelled to compete in an overcrowded market with hard-driven men. She was, however, sincerely attached to her friend, and she smiled when she saw the flash in Agatha’s eyes.

“Oh,” she added, “you needn’t try to wither me with your indignation. No doubt he’s precisely what he ought to be, and I dare say it will ease your feelings if you talk about him again; at least it will help you to formulate your reasons for going out to him. I’ll listen patiently, and try not to be uncharitable.”

Agatha fell in with the suggestion. It was a relief to talk, and she had a certain respect, which she would not always admit, for her friend’s shrewdness. She meant to go, but she desired to ascertain how a less interested person would regard the course that she had decided on.

“I have known Gregory since I was a girl,” she said.

Winifred pursed up her lips. “I understood you met him at the Grange, and you were only there for a few weeks once a year,” she replied. “After all, that isn’t a very great deal. It seems he fell in love with you, which is, perhaps, comprehensible. What I don’t quite know the reason for is why you fell in love with him.”

“Ah,” responded Agatha, “you have never seen Gregory.”

“I haven’t,” admitted Winifred sourly; “I have, however, seen his picture. One must admit that he’s reasonably good-looking. In fact, I’ve seen quite an assortment of photographs, but it’s, perhaps, significant that the last was taken some years ago.”

Agatha smiled. “Can a photograph show the clean, sanguine temperament of a man, his impulsive generosity, and cheerful optimism?”

Miss Rawlinson rose, and critically surveyed the photograph on the mantel.

“I don’t want to be discouraging, but after studying that one I’m compelled to admit that it can’t. No doubt it’s the artist’s fault, but I’m willing to admit that a young girl would be rather apt to credit a man with a face like that with qualities he didn’t possess.” She sat down again with a thoughtful expression. “The fact is, you set him up on a pedestal and burned incense to him when you were not old enough to know any better, and when he came home for a few weeks four years ago you promised to marry him. Now it seems he’s ready at last, and wants you to go out to the new country. Perhaps it doesn’t affect the question, but if I’d promised to marry a man in Canada he’d certainly have to come for me. Isn’t there a certain risk in the thing?”

“A risk?”

Winifred nodded. “Yes,” she said, “rather a serious one. Four years is a long time, and the man may have changed. In a new country where life is so different, it must be a thing they’re rather apt to do.”

A faint, half-compassionate, half-tolerant smile crept into Agatha’s eyes. The mere idea that the sunny-tempered, brilliant young man to whom she had given her heart could have changed or degenerated in any way seemed absurd to her. Winifred, however, went on again.

“There’s another point,” she said. “If he’s still the same, which isn’t likely, there has certainly been a change in you. You have learned to see things more clearly, and have acquired a different standard from the one you had then. One can’t help growing, and as one grows one looks for more. One is no longer pleased with the same things; it’s inevitable.”

She broke off for a moment, and her voice became gentler.

“Well,” she added, “I’ve done my duty in trying to point this out to you, and now there’s only another thing to say: since you’re clearly bent on going, I’m going with you.”

Agatha looked astonished, but there was a suggestion of relief in her expression, for the two had been firm friends and had faced a good deal together.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, “that gets over the one difficulty!”

Winifred made a little whimsical gesture.

“I’m not quite sure that it does. The difficulty will probably be when I arrive in Canada, but I’m a rather capable person, and I believe they don’t pay ninepence a thousand words in Winnipeg. Besides, I could keep the books at a store or a hotel, and at the very worst Gregory could, perhaps, find a husband for me. Women, I hear, are held in some estimation in that country. Perhaps there’s a man out there who would treat decently even a little, plain, vixenish-tempered person with a turned-up nose.”

Crossing the room again she banged the cover down on the typewriter, and then turned to Agatha with a suggestion of haziness in her eyes.

“Anyway, I’m very tired of this country. It would be intolerable when you went away.”

Agatha stretched out a hand and drew the girl down beside her. She no longer feared adverse fortune and loneliness, and she was filled with a gentle compassion, for she knew how hard a fight Winifred had made, and part at least of what she had borne.

“My dear,” she said, “we will go together.”

Then she opened the second letter, which she had forgotten while they talked.

“They want me to stay at the Grange for a few weeks,” she announced, and smiled. “An hour ago I felt crushed and beaten—and now, though my voice has probably gone for good, I don’t seem to mind. Isn’t it curious that both these letters should have come to sweep my troubles away to-night?”

“No,” answered Winifred, “it’s distinctly natural—just what one would have expected. You wrote to the man in Canada soon after you’d seen the specialist, and his answer was bound to arrive in the next few days.”

“But I certainly didn’t write the folks at the Grange.”

Winifred’s eyes twinkled. “As it happens, I did, two days ago. I ventured to point out their duty to them, and they were rather nice about it in another letter.”

With a little sigh of contentment Agatha stretched herself out in the low chair. “Well,” she said, “it probably wouldn’t have the least effect if I scolded you. I believe I’m horribly worn out, Winny, and it will be a relief unspeakable to get away. If I can arrange to give up those pupils I’ll go to-morrow.”

Winifred made no answer. Kneeling with one elbow resting on the arm of Agatha’s chair, she gazed straight in front of her. Both of the girls were very weary of the long, grim struggle, and now a change was close at hand.

CHAPTER V

THE OLD COUNTRY

It was a still, clear evening of spring when Wyllard, unstrapping the rücksack from his shoulders, sat down beside a frothing stream in a dale of Northern England. On his arrival in London a week or two earlier he had found awaiting him a letter from Mrs. Hastings, who was then in Paris, in which she said that she could not at the moment say when she would go home again, but that she expected to advise him shortly.

After answering the letter Wyllard started North, and, obtaining Agatha’s address from Miss Rawlinson, went on again to a certain little town, which, encircled by towering fells, stands beside a lake in the North Country. He had already recognized that his mission was rather a delicate one, and he decided that it would be advisable to wait until he heard from Mrs. Hastings before calling upon Miss Ismay. There remained the question, what to do with the next few days. A conversation with several pedestrian tourists whom he met at his hotel, and a glance at a map of the hill-tracks decided him. Remembering that he had on several occasions kept the trail in Canada for close on forty miles, he bought a Swiss pattern rücksack, and set out on foot through the fells.

Incidentally, he saw scenery that gave him a new conception of the Old Country. He astonished his new friends, the tourists, who volunteered to show him the way over what they considered a difficult pass. To their great astonishment the brown-faced stranger, who wore ordinary tight-fitting American attire and rather pointed American shoes, went up the mountainside apparently without an effort, and for the credit of the clubs to which they belonged it was incumbent on them to keep pace with him. They did not know that he had carried bags of flour and mining tools over very much higher passes, close up to the limit of eternal snow, but they did know that he set them a difficult pace, and after two days’ climbing they were relieved to part company with him.

A professional guide who overtook them recognized the capabilities of the man when he noticed the way in which he lifted his feet and how he set them down. This, the guide decided, was a man accustomed to walking among the heather, but he was wrong; for it was the trick the bushman learns when he plods through leagues of undergrowth and fallen branches, or the tall grass of the swamps; and it is a memorable experience to make a day’s journey with such a man. For the first hour the thing seems easy, as the pace is never forced, but the speed never slackens; and as the hours go by the novice, who flounders and stumbles, grows horribly weary of trying to keep up with the steady, persistent swing.

Wyllard had traveled since morning along a ridge of fells when he sat down beside the water and contentedly filled his pipe. On the one hand, a wall of crags high above was growing black against the evening light, and the stream, clear as crystal, came boiling down among great boulders. But the young man had wandered through many a grander and more savage scene of rocky desolation, and it impressed him less than the green valley in front of him. He had never seen anything like that either on the Pacific slope or in Western Canada.

Early as it was in the season, the meadows between rock and water were green as emerald, and the hedge-rows, just flushed with verdure, were clipped and trimmed as if their owner loved them. There was not a dead tree in the larch copse which dipped to the stream, and all its feathery tassels were sprinkled with tiny flecks of crimson and wondrous green. Great oaks dotted the meadows, each one perfect in symmetry. It seemed that the men who held this land cared for single trees. The sleek, tame cattle that rubbed their necks on the level hedge-top and gazed at him ruminatively were very different from the wild, long-horned creatures whose furious stampede he had now and then headed off, riding hard while the roar of hoofs rang through the dust-cloud that floated like a sea fog across the sun-scorched prairie. Here, in the quiet vale, all was peace and tranquillity.

Wyllard noticed the pale primroses that pushed their yellow flowers up among the withered leaves, and he took account of the faint blue sheen beneath the beech trunks not far away. There was a vein of artistic feeling in him, and the elusive beauty of these things curiously appealed to him. He had seen the riotous, sensuous blaze of flowers kissed by Pacific breezes, and the burnished gold of wheat that rolled in mile-long waves; but it seemed to him that the wild things of the English North were, after all, more wonderful. They harmonized with the country’s deep peacefulness; their beauty was chaste, fairy-like and ethereal.

By and by a wood pigeon cooed softly somewhere in the shadows, and a brown thrush perched on a bare oak bough began to sing. The broken, repeated melody went curiously well with the rippling murmur of sliding water, and Wyllard, though he could not remember ever having done anything of that sort before, leaned back with a smile to listen. His life had been a strenuous one, passed for the most part in the driving-seat of great plows that rent their ample furrows through virgin prairie, guiding the clinking binders through the wheat under a blazing sun, or driving the plunging dories through the clammy fog over short, slopping seas. Now, however, the tranquillity of the English valley stole in on him, and he began to understand how the love of that well-trimmed land clung to the men out West, who spoke of it tenderly as the “Old Country.”

Then, for he was in an unusually susceptible mood, he took from his pocket a little deerhide case, artistically made by a Blackfoot Indian, and removed from it the faded photograph of an English girl. He had obtained the photograph from the lad who had died among the ranges of the Pacific slope, and it had been his companion in many a desolate camp and on many a weary journey. The face was delicately modeled, and there was a freshness in it which is seldom seen outside the Old Country; but what pleased him most was the serenity in the clear, innocent eyes.

He was not in love with the picture—he would probably have smiled at the notion—but he had a curious feeling that he would meet the girl some day, and that it would then be a privilege merely to speak to her. This was, after all, not so extravagant a fancy as it might appear, for romance, the mother of chivalry and many graces, still finds shelter in the hearts of men who dwell in the wide spaces of the newer lands. Shrewd and practical as these men are, they see visions now and then, and, what is more, with bleeding hands and toil incredible prove them to be realities.

By and by Wyllard put the photograph back into his pocket, and filled his pipe again. It was almost dark before he had smoked it out. The thrush had gone, and only the ripple of the water broke the silence, until he heard footsteps on the stones behind him. Looking around, he saw a young woman moving towards the river. He watched her with a quiet interest, for his perceptions were sharper than usual, and it seemed to him that she was very much in harmony with what he thought of as the key-tone of the place. She was tall and shapely, and she moved with grace. When, poised upon a shelf of rock as if considering the easiest way to the water, she stopped for a moment, her figure fell into reposeful lines, but that was after all only what he had expected, for he had half-consciously studied the Englishwomen whom he had met in the West.

The Western women usually moved, and certainly spoke, with an almost superfluous vivacity and alertness. There was in them a feverish activity, which contrasted with the English deliberation, which had sometimes exasperated him. Now he felt that this slowness of movement was born of the tranquillity of the well-trimmed land, and he realized that it would have troubled his sense of fitness if this girl had clattered down across the stones hurriedly and noisily.

At first he could not see her face, but when she went on a little further it became evident that she desired to cross the river, and was regarding the row of stepping stones somewhat dubiously. One or two had fallen over, or had been washed away by a flood, for there were several wide gaps between them, through which the stream frothed whitely. As soon as Wyllard noticed her hesitation, he rose and moved towards her.

“You want to get across?” he asked.

She was still glancing at the water, and although he was sure that she had not seen him or heard his approach, she turned towards him quietly. Then a momentary sense of astonishment held him in an embarrassed scrutiny, for it was her picture at which he had gazed scarcely half an hour before, and he would have recognized the face anywhere.

“Yes,” she answered. “It is rather a long way around by the bridge, but some of the stones seem to have disappeared since I last came this way.”

She spoke, as Wyllard had expected, softly and quietly. Because he was first of all a man of action, Wyllard forthwith waded into the river. Then he turned and held out his hand to her.

“It isn’t a very long step. You ought to manage it,” he said.

The girl favored him with a swift glance of uncertainty. At first she had supposed him to be one of the walking tourists or climbers who usually invaded the valleys at Easter; but they were, for the most part, young men from the cities, and this stranger’s face was darkened by the sun. There was also an indefinite suggestion of strength in the poise of his lean, symmetrical figure, which could only have come from strenuous labor in the open air. She noticed that while the average Englishman would have asked permission to help her, or would have deprecated the offer, this stranger did nothing of the kind. He stood with the water frothing about his ankles, holding out his hand.

She had no hesitation about accepting Wyllard’s aid, and, while he waded through the river, she stepped lightly from stone to stone until she came to a wide gap, where the stream was deep. She stopped a moment, gazing at the foaming water, until the man’s hand tightened on her fingers, and she felt his other hand rest upon her waist.

“Now,” he assured her, “I won’t let you fall.”

She was on the other side of the gap in another moment. Wondering uneasily why she had obeyed the compelling pressure, but glad to see that the stranger’s face was perfectly unmoved, and that he was evidently quite unconscious of having done anything unusual, she crossed without mishap. When they stood on the shingle he dropped her hand.

“Thank you,” she said. “I’m afraid you got rather wet.”

The man laughed, and he had a pleasant laugh. “Oh,” he replied, “I’m used to it.” There was a little silence and he asked: “Isn’t there a village with a hotel in it, a mile or two from here?”

“Yes,” the girl answered, “this is the way. The path goes up to the highroad through the larch wood.”

She turned into the path, and, though she had not expected him to accompany her, the man walked beside her. Still she did not resent it. His manner was deferential, and she liked his face, while there was, after all, no reason why he should stay behind when he was going the same way. He walked beside her silently for several minutes as they went on through the gloom of the larches, where a sweet, resinous odor crept into the still evening air, and then he looked up as they came to a towering pine.

“Have you many of those trees over here?” he asked.

A light dawned upon the girl, for, though he had spoken without a perceptible accent, she had been slightly puzzled by something in his speech and appearance.

“I believe they’re not uncommon. You are an American?”

Wyllard laughed. “No,” he replied. “I was born in Western Canada, but I think I’m as English as you are, in some respects, though I never quite realized it until to-night. It isn’t exactly because my father came from this country, either.”

The girl was astonished at this answer, and still more at the indefinite something in his manner which seemed to indicate that he expected her to understand, as, indeed, she did. Her only dowry had been an expensive education and she remembered that the influence of the isle she lived in had in turn fastened on Saxons, Norsemen, Normans, and made them Englishmen. What was more, so far as she had read, those who had gone out South or Westwards had carried that influence with them, and, under all their surface changes, and sometimes their grievances against the Motherland, were, in the great essentials, wholly English still.

“But,” she remarked at random, “how can you be sure that I’m English?”

It was quite dark in among the trees, but she fancied there was a smile in her companion’s eyes.

“Oh,” he answered simply, “you couldn’t be anything else!”

She accepted this as a compliment, though she knew that it had not been his intention to flatter her. His general attitude since she had met him scarcely suggested such, a lack of good taste. She was becoming mildly interested in the stranger, but she possessed several essentially English characteristics, and it did not appear advisable to encourage him too much. She said nothing further, and it was he who spoke first.

“I wonder,” he said, “if you knew a young lad who went out to Canada a few years ago. His name was Pattinson—Henry Pattinson.”

“No,” the girl answered quickly. “I certainly did not. But the name is not an uncommon one. There are a good many Pattinsons in the North.”

Wyllard was not surprised by this answer. He had reasons for believing that the name under which the lad he had befriended had enrolled himself was not the correct one. It would, of course, have been easy to describe the boy, but Wyllard was shrewd, and noticing that there was now a restraint in the girl’s manner he could not speak prematurely. He was aware that most of the English are characterized by a certain reserve, and apt to retire into their shells if pressed too hard. He did not, however, mean to let this girl elude him altogether.

“It really doesn’t matter,” he responded. “I shall no doubt get upon his trail in due time.”

They reached the highroad a minute or two later, and the girl turned to him.

“Thank you again,” she said. “If you go straight on you will come to the village in about a quarter of an hour.”

She turned away and left him standing with his soft hat in his hand. He stood quite still for almost a minute after she had gone. When he reached the inn its old-world simplicity delighted him. It was built with thick walls of slate, and roofed with ponderous flags. In Canada, where the frost was Arctic, they used thin cedar shingles. The room in which his meal was spread was paneled with oak that had turned black with age. Great rough-hewn beams of four times the size that anybody would have used for the purpose in the West supported the low ceiling. There was a fire in the wide hearth and the ruddy gleam of burnished copper utensils pierced the shadows. The room was large, but there was only a single candle upon the table. He liked the gloomy interior, and he felt that a garish light would somehow be out of harmony.

By and by his hostess appeared to clear the things away. She was a little, withered old woman, with shrewd, kindly eyes, and a russet tinge in her cheeks.

“There’s a good light, and company in the sitting-room,” she said. “We’ve three young men staying with us. They’ve been up the Pike.”

“I’d sooner stay here, if I may,” replied Wyllard. “I don’t quite know yet if I’ll go on to-morrow. One can get through to Langley Dale by the Hause, as I think you call it?”

The wrinkled dame said that pedestrians often went that way.

“There are some prosperous folks—people of station—living round here?” Wyllard asked casually.

“There’s the vicar. I don’t know that he’s what you’d call prosperous. Then there’s Mr. Martindale, of Rushyholme, and Little, of the Ghyll.”

“Has any of them a daughter of about twenty-four years of age?” Wyllard described the girl he had met to the best of his ability.

It was evident that the landlady did not recognize the description, but she thought a moment.

“No,” she answered, “there’s nobody like that; but I did hear that they’d a young lady staying at the vicarage.”

She changed the subject abruptly, and Wyllard once more decided that the English did not like questions.

“You’re a stranger, sir?” she inquired.

“I am,” said Wyllard. “I’ve some business to attend to further on, but I came along on foot, to see the fells, and I’m glad I did. It’s a great and wonderful country you’re living in. That is,” he added gravely, “when you get outside the towns. There are things in some of the cities that most make one ill.”

He stood up. “That tray’s too heavy for you. Won’t you let me carry it?”

The landlady was plainly amazed at his words, but she made it clear that she desired no assistance. When she went out Wyllard, who sat down again, took out the photograph. He gazed at it steadfastly.

“There’s rather more than mere prettiness there, but I don’t know that I want to keep it now,” he reflected. “It’s way behind the original. She has grown since it was taken—just as one would expect that girl to grow.”

He lighted his pipe and smoked thoughtfully until he arrived at a decision.

“One can’t force the running in this country. They don’t like it,” he said. “I’ll lie by a day or two, and keep an eye on that vicarage.”

In the meanwhile his hostess was discussing him with a niece.

“I’m sure I don’t know what that man is,” she informed the younger woman. “He has got the manners of a gentleman, but he walks like a fell shepherd, and his hands are like a navvy’s. A man’s hands now and then tell you a good deal about him. Besides, of all things, he wanted to carry his tray away. Said it was too heavy for me.”

“Oh,” replied her niece, “he’s an American. There’s no accounting for them.”

CHAPTER VI

HER PICTURE

Wyllard stayed at the inn three days without seeing anything more of the girl whom he had met beside the stream, although he diligently watched for her. He had long felt it was his duty to communicate with the relatives of the lad that he had befriended, and the fact that he had found the girl’s photograph in the young Englishman’s possession made it appear highly probable that she could assist him in tracing the family. Apart from this, he could not quite analyze his motives for desiring to see more of the Englishwoman, though he was conscious of the desire. Her picture had been a companion to him in his wanderings, and now and then he had found a certain solace in gazing at it. Now that he had seen her in the flesh he was willing to admit that he had never met any woman who had made such an impression on him.

It was, of course, possible for him to call at the vicarage, but though he meant to adopt that course as a last resort, there were certain objections to it. He did not know the girl’s name, and there was nobody to say a word for him. So far as his experience went, the English were apt to be reticent and reserved to a stranger. It seemed to him that, although the girl might give him the information which he required, their acquaintance probably would terminate then and there. She would, he decided, be less likely to stand upon her guard if he could contrive to meet her casually without prearrangement.

On the fourth day fortune favored him, for he came upon her endeavoring to open a tottering gate where a stony hill track led off from the smooth white road. As it happened, he had received a letter from Mrs. Hastings that morning, fixing the date of her departure, and it was necessary for him to discharge the duty with which Hawtrey had saddled him as soon as possible. The Grange, where he understood Miss Ismay was then staying, lay thirty miles away across the fells, and he had decided to start early on the morrow. That being the case, it was clear that he must make the most of this opportunity; but he realized that it would be advisable to proceed circumspectly. Saying nothing, he set his shoulder to the gate, and lifting it on its decrepit hinges swung it open.

“Thank you,” said the girl. Remembering that the words were the last that she had said to him, she smiled, as she added: “It is the second time you have appeared when I was in difficulties.”

In spite of his resolution to proceed cautiously, a twinkle crept into Wyllard’s eyes, and suggested that the fact she had mentioned was not so much of a coincidence as it probably appeared. She saw the look that told her what he was thinking, and was about to pass on, when he stopped her with a gesture.

“The fact is, I have been looking out for you the last three days,” he confessed.

He feared the girl had taken alarm at this candid statement, and spread his hands out deprecatingly. “Won’t you hear me out?” he added. “There’s a matter I must put before you, but I won’t keep you long.”

The girl was a little puzzled, and naturally curious. It struck her as strange that his admission should have aroused in her very little indignation; but she felt that it would be unreasonable to suspect this man of anything that savored of impertinence. His manner was reassuring, and she liked his face.

“Well?” she said inquiringly.

Wyllard waved his hand toward a big oak trunk that lay just inside the gate.

“If you’ll sit down, I’ll get through as quick as I can,” he promised. “In the first place, I am, as I told you, a Canadian, who has come over partly to see the country, and partly to carry out one or two missions. In regard to one of them I believe you can help me.”

The girl’s face expressed a natural astonishment.

“I could help you?”

Wyllard nodded. “I’ll explain my reasons for believing it later on,” he said. “In the meanwhile, I asked you a question the other night, which I’ll now try to make more explicit. Were you ever acquainted with a young Englishman, who went to Canada from this country several years ago? He was about twenty then, and had dark hair and dark eyes. That, of course, isn’t an unusual thing, but there was a rather curious white mark on his left temple. If he was ever a friend of yours, that scar ought to fix it.”

“Oh!” cried the girl, “that must have been Lance Radcliffe. I was with him when the scar was made—ever so long ago. We heard that he was dead. But you said his name was Pattinson.”

“I did,” declared Wyllard gravely. “Still, I wasn’t quite sure about the name being right. He’s certainly dead. I buried him.”

His companion made an abrupt movement, and he saw the sudden softening of her eyes. There was, however, only a gentle pity in her face, and nothing in her manner suggested the deeper feeling that he had half expected.

“Then,” she said, “I am sure that his father would like to meet you. There was some trouble between them—I don’t know which was wrong—and Lance went out to Canada, and never wrote. Major Radcliffe tried to trace him through a Vancouver banker, and only found that he had died in the hands of a stranger who had done all that was possible for him.” She turned to Wyllard with a look which set his heart beating faster than usual. “You are that man?”

“Yes,” said Wyllard simply, “I did what I could for him. It didn’t amount to very much. He was too far gone.”

Briefly he repeated the story that he had told to Hawtrey, and, when he had finished, her face was soft again, for what he said had stirred her curiously.

“But,” she commented, “he had no claim on you.”

Wyllard lifted one hand with a motion that disclaimed all right to commendation. “He was dying in the bush. Wasn’t that enough?”

The girl made no answer for a moment or two. She had earned her living for several years, and she was to some extent acquainted with the grim realities of life. She did not know that while there are hard men in Canada the small farmers and ranchers of the West—and, perhaps above all, the fearless free lances who build railroads and grapple with giant trees in the forests of the Pacific slope—are as a rule, distinguished by a splendid charity. With them the sick or worn-out stranger is seldom turned away. Watching the stranger covertly, she understood that this man whom she had seen for the first time three days before had done exactly what she would have expected of him.

“I saw a great deal of Lance Radcliffe—when I was younger,” she said. “His people still live at Garside Scar, close by Dufton Holme. I presume you will call on them?”

Wyllard said that he purposed doing so, as he had a watch and one or two other mementos that they might like to have, and she told him how to reach Dufton Holme by a round-about railway journey.

“There is one point that rather puzzles me,” she said, after she had made it plain how he was to find the Radcliffe family. “How did you know that I could tell you anything about him?”

Wyllard thrust his hand into his pocket, and took out a little leather case.

“You are by no means a stranger to me,” he remarked as he handed her the photograph. “This is your picture; I found it among the dead lad’s things.”

The girl, who started visibly, flashed a keen glance at him. It was evident that he had not intended to produce any dramatic effect. She flushed a little.

“I never knew he had it,” she asserted. “Perhaps he got it from his sister.” She paused, and then, as if impelled to make the fact quite clear, added, “I certainly never gave it to him.”

Wyllard smiled gravely, for he recognized that while she was clearly grieved to hear of young Radcliffe’s death, she could have had no particular tenderness for the unfortunate lad.

“Well,” he said, “perhaps he took it in the first place for the mere beauty of it, and it afterwards became a companion—something that connected him with the Old Country. It appealed in one of those ways to me.”

Again she flashed a sharp glance at him, but he went on unheeding:

“When I found it I meant to keep it merely as a clew, and so that it could be given up to his relatives some day,” he added. “Then I fell into the habit of looking at it in my lonely camp in the bush at night, and when I sat beside the stove while the snow lay deep upon the prairie. There was something in your eyes that seemed to encourage me.”

“To encourage you?”

“Yes,” Wyllard assented gravely, “I think that expresses it. When I camped in the bush of the Pacific slope we were either out on the gold trail—and we generally came back ragged and unsuccessful after spending several months’ wages which we could badly spare—or I was going from one wooden town to another without a dollar in my pocket and wondering how I was to obtain one when I got there. For a time it wasn’t much more cheerful on the prairie. Twice in succession the harvest failed. Perhaps Lance Radcliffe felt as I did.”

The girl cut him short. “Why didn’t you mention the photograph at once?”

Wyllard smiled at her. “Oh,” he explained, “I didn’t want to be precipitate—you English folk don’t seem to like that. I think”—and he seemed to consider—“I wanted to make sure you wouldn’t be repelled by what might look like Colonial brusquerie. You see, you have been over snow-barred divides and through great shadowy forests with me. We’ve camped among the boulders by lonely lakes, and gone down frothing rapids. I felt—I can’t tell you why—that I was bound to meet you some day.”

His frankness was startling, but the girl showed neither astonishment nor resentment. She felt certain that this stranger was not posing or speaking for effect. It did not occur to Wyllard that he might have gone too far, and for a moment or two he leaned against the gate, while she looked at him with what he thought of as her gracious English calm.

Pale sunshine fell upon them, though the larches beside the road were rustling beneath a cold wind, and the song of the river came up brokenly out of the valley. An odor of fresh grass floated about them, and the dry, cold smell of the English spring was in the air. Across the valley dim ghosts of hills lighted by evanescent gleams rose out of the east wind grayness with shadowy grandeur.

Then Wyllard aroused himself. “I wonder if I ought to write Major Radcliffe and tell him what my object is before I call,” he said. “It would make the thing a little easier.”

The girl rose. “Yes,” she assented, “that would, perhaps, be wiser.” She glanced at the photograph which was still in her hand. “It has served its purpose. I scarcely think it would be of any great interest to Major Radcliffe.”

She saw his face change as she made it evident that she did not mean to give the portrait back to him. There was, at least, one excellent reason why she would not have her picture in a strange man’s hands.

“Thank you,” she said, “for the story. I am glad we have met; but I’m afraid I have already kept my friends waiting for me.”

She turned away, and it occurred to Wyllard that he had made a very indifferent use of the opportunity, since she had neither asked his name nor told him hers. It was, however, evident that he could not well run after her and demand her name, and he decided that he could in all probability obtain it from Major Radcliffe. Still, he regretted his lack of adroitness as he walked back to the inn, where he wrote two letters when he had consulted a map and his landlady. Dufton Holme, he discovered, was a small village within a mile or two of the Grange where, as Miss Rawlinson had informed him, Agatha Ismay was then staying. One letter was addressed to her, and he formally asked permission to call upon her with a message from George Hawtrey. The other was to Major Radcliffe, and in both he said that an answer would reach him at the inn which his landlady had informed him was to be found not far from both of the houses he intended to visit.

He set out on foot next morning, and, after climbing a steep pass, followed a winding track across a waste of empty moor until he struck a smooth white road, which led past a rock-girt lake and into a deep valley. It was six o’clock in the morning when he started, and three in the afternoon when he reached the inn, where he found an answer to one of the letters awaiting him. It was from Major Radcliffe, who desired an interview with him as soon as possible.

Within an hour he was on his way to the Major’s house, where a gray-haired man, whose yellow skin suggested long exposure to a tropical sun, and a little withered lady were waiting for him. They received him graciously, but there was an indefinite something in their manner and bearing which Wyllard, who had read a great deal, recognized, though he had never been brought into actual contact with it until then. He felt that he could not have expected to come across such people anywhere but in England, unless it was at the headquarters of a British battalion in India.

He told his story tersely, softening unpleasant details and making little of what he had done. The gray-haired man listened gravely with an unmoved face, though a trace of moisture crept into the little lady’s eyes. There was silence for a moment or two when he had finished, and then Major Radcliffe, whose manner was very quiet, turned to him.

“You have laid me under an obligation, which I could never wipe out, even if I wished it,” he said. “It was my only son you buried out there in Canada.”

He broke off for a moment, and his quietness was more marked than ever when he went on again.

“As you have no doubt surmised, we quarreled,” he said. “He was extravagant and careless—at least I thought that then—but now it seems to me that I was unduly hard on him. His mother”—and he turned to the little lady with an inclination that pleased Wyllard curiously—“was sure of it at the time. In any case, I took the wrong way, and he went out to Canada. I made that, at least, easy for him—and I have been sorry ever since.”

He paused again with a little expressive gesture. “It seems due to him, and you, that I should tell you this. When no word reached us I had inquiries made, through a banker, who, discovering that he had registered at a hotel as Pattinson, at length traced him to a British Columbian silver mine. He had, however, left the mine shortly before my correspondent learned that he had been employed there, and all that the banker could tell me was that an unknown prospector had nursed my boy until he died.”

Wyllard took out a watch and the clasp of a workman’s belt from his pocket, and laid them gently on Mrs. Radcliffe’s knee. He saw her eyes fill, and turned his head away.

“I feel that you may blame me for not writing sooner, but it was only a very little while ago that I was able to trace you, and then it was only by a very curious—coincidence,” he explained presently.

He did not consider it advisable to mention the photograph. It seemed to him that the girl would not like it. Nor, though he was greatly tempted, did he care to make inquiries concerning her just then. In another moment or two the Major spoke again.

“If I can make your stay here pleasanter in any way I should be delighted,” he said. “If you will take up your quarters with us I will send down to the inn for your things.”

Wyllard excused himself, but when Mr. Radcliffe urged him to dine with them on the following evening he hesitated.

“The one difficulty is that I don’t know yet whether I shall be engaged then,” he said. “As it happens, I’ve a message for Miss Ismay, and I wrote offering to call upon her at any convenient hour. So far, I have heard nothing from her.”

“She’s away,” Mrs. Radcliffe informed him. “They have probably sent your letter on to her. I had a note from her yesterday, however, and expect her here to-morrow. You have met some friends of hers in Canada?”

“Gregory Hawtrey,” said Wyllard. “I have promised to call upon his people, too.”

He saw Major Radcliffe glance at his wife, and he noticed a faint gleam in Mrs. Radcliffe’s eyes.

“Well,” she observed, “if you promise to come I will send word over to Agatha.”

Wyllard agreed to this, and went away a few minutes later. He noticed the tact and consideration with which his new friends had refrained from indicating any sign of the curiosity they naturally felt, for Mrs. Radcliffe’s face had suggested that she understood the situation, which was beginning to appear a little more difficult to him. It was, it seemed, his task to explain delicately to a girl brought up among such people what she must be prepared to face as a farmer’s wife in Western Canada. He was not sure that this task would be easy in itself, but it was rendered much more difficult by the fact that Hawtrey would expect him to accomplish it without unduly daunting her. Her letter certainly had suggested courage, but, after all, it was the courage of ignorance, and he had now some notion of the life of ease and refinement her English friends enjoyed. He was beginning to feel sorry for Agatha Ismay.

CHAPTER VII

AGATHA DOES NOT FLINCH

The next evening Wyllard sat with Mrs. Radcliffe in a big low-ceilinged room at Garside Scar. He looked about him with quiet interest. He had now and then passed a day or two in huge Western hotels, but he had never seen anything quite like that room. The sheer physical comfort of its arrangements appealed to him, but after all he was not one who had ever studied his bodily ease very much, and what he regarded as the chaste refinement of its adornment had a deeper effect than a mere appeal to the material side of his nature. Though he had lived for the most part in the bush and on the prairie, he had somehow acquired an artistic susceptibility.

The furniture was old, and perhaps a trifle shabby, but it was of beautiful design. Curtains, carpets and tinted walls formed a harmony of soft coloring, and there were scattered here and there dainty works of art, little statuettes from Italy, and wonderful Indian ivory and silver work. A row of low, stone-ribbed windows pierced the front of the room. Looking out he saw the trim garden lying in the warm evening light. Immediately beneath the windows ran a broad graveled terrace, which was evidently raked smooth every day, and a row of urns in which hyacinths bloomed stood upon its pillared wall. From the middle of the terrace a wide stairway led down to the wonderful velvet lawn, which was dotted with clumps of cupressus with golden gleams in it, and beyond the lawn clipped yews rose smooth and solid as a rampart of stone.

It all impressed him curiously—the order and beauty of it, the signs of loving care. It gave him a key, he fancied, to the lives of the cultured English people, for there was no sign of strain and fret and stress and hurry here. Everything, it seemed, went smoothly with rhythmic regularity, and though it is possible that many Englishmen would have regarded Garside Scar as a very second-rate country house, and would have seen in Major Radcliffe and his wife nothing more than a somewhat prosy old soldier and a withered lady old-fashioned in her dress and views, this Westerner had what was, perhaps, a clearer vision. Wyllard could imagine the Major standing fast at any cost upon some minute point of honor, and it seemed to him that Mrs. Radcliffe, with all the graces of an earlier age and the smell of the English lavender upon her garments, might have stepped down from some old picture. Then he remembered that, after all, Englishwomen lived somewhat coarsely in the Georgian days, and that he had met in Western Canada hard-handed men grimed with dust and sweat who also could stand fast by a point of honor. Though the fact did not occur to him, he had, for that matter, done it more than once himself.

He recalled his wandering thoughts as his hostess smiled at him.

“You are interested in all you see?” she asked frankly.

“Yes,” said Wyllard. “In fact, I’d like to spend some hours here and look at everything. I’d begin at the pictures and work right around.”

Mrs. Radcliffe’s smile suggested that she was not displeased.

“But you have been in London?”

“I have,” said Wyllard. “I had one or two letters to persons there, and they did all they could to entertain me. Still, their places were different; they hadn’t the—charm—of yours. It’s something which I think could exist only in these still valleys and in cathedral closes. It strikes me more because it is something I’ve never been accustomed to.”

Mrs. Radcliffe was interested, and fancied that she partly understood his attitude.

“Your life is necessarily different from ours,” she suggested.

Wyllard smiled. “It’s so different that you couldn’t realize it. It’s all strain and effort from early sunrise until after dusk at night. Bodily strain of aching muscles, and mental stress in adverse seasons. We scarcely think of comfort, and never dream of artistic luxury. The money we make is sunk again in seed and extra teams and plows.”

“After all, a good many people are driven rather hard by the love of money here.”

“No,” Wyllard rejoined gravely, “that’s not it exactly. At least, not with the most of us. It’s rather the pride of wresting another quarter-section from the prairie, taking—our own—by labor, breaking the wilderness. You”—and he added this as if to explain that he could hardly expect her quite to grasp his views—“have never been out West?”

His hostess laughed. “I have stayed down in the plains through the hot season in stifling cantonments, and have once or twice been in Indian cholera camps. Besides, I have seen my husband sitting, haggard and worn with fever, in his saddle holding back a clamorous crowd that surged about him half-mad with religious fury. There were Hindus and Moslems to be kept from flying at each other’s throats, and at a tactless word or sign of wavering, either party would have pulled him down.”

“You’ll have to forgive me”—Wyllard’s gesture was deprecatory, though his eyes twinkled. “The notion that we’re the only ones who really work, or, at least, do anything worth while, is rather a favorite one out West. No doubt it’s a delusion. I should have known that all of us are born like that.”

Mrs. Radcliffe forgave him readily, if only for the “all of us,” which struck her as especially fortunate. A few minutes later there were voices in the hall, and then the door opened, and the girl whom he had met at the stepping stones came in. She was dressed in trailing garments which became her wonderfully, and he noticed now the shapely delicacy of her hands and the fine, ivory pallor of her skin. Mrs. Radcliffe turned to him.

“I had better present you formally to Miss Ismay,” she said. “Agatha, this is Mr. Wyllard, who I understand has brought you a message from Canada.”

There was no doubt that Wyllard was blankly astonished, and for a moment the girl was clearly startled, too.

“You!” was all she said.

She held out her hand before she turned to speak to Mrs. Radcliffe. It was a relief to both when dinner was announced.

Wyllard sat next to his hostess, and was not sorry that he was called upon to take part only in casual general conversation. He thought once or twice that Miss Ismay was unobtrusively studying him. It was nearly an hour after the dinner when Mrs. Radcliffe left them alone in the drawing-room.

“You have, no doubt, a good deal to talk about, and you needn’t join us until you’re ready,” she said. “The Major always reads the London papers after dinner.”

Agatha sat in a low chair near the hearth, and it occurred to Wyllard, who took a place opposite her, that she was too delicate and dainty, too over-cultivated, in fact, to marry Hawtrey. This was rather curious, since he had hitherto regarded his comrade as a typical well-educated Englishman; but it now seemed to him that there was a certain streak of coarseness in Gregory. The man, it suddenly flashed upon him, was self-indulgent, and the careless ease of manner, which he had once liked, was too much in evidence.

Agatha turned to him.

“I understand that Gregory is recovering rapidly?” she said.

Wyllard assured her that Hawtrey was convalescing, and Agatha said quietly, “He wants me to go out to him.”

Wyllard felt that if a girl of that sort had promised to marry him he would not have sent for her, but would have come in person, if he had been compelled to pledge his last possessions, or crawl to the tideway on his hands and knees. For all that he was ready to defend his friend.

“I’m afraid it’s necessary,” he said. “Gregory was quite unfit for such a journey when I left, and he must be ready to commence the season’s campaign with the first of the spring. Our summer is short, you see, and with our one-crop farming it’s indispensable to get the seed in early. In fact, he will be badly behind as it is.”

This was not particularly tactful, since, without intending it, he made it evident that he felt his comrade had been to some extent remiss; but Agatha smiled.

“Oh,” she replied, “I understand! You needn’t labor with excuses. But doesn’t the same thing apply to you?”

“It certainly did. Now, however, things have become a little easier. My holding is larger than Gregory’s, and I have a foreman who can look after it for me.”

“Gregory said that you were a great friend of his.”

Wyllard seized this opportunity. “He was a great friend of mine and I like to think it means the same thing. In fact it’s reasonably certain that he saved my life for me.”

“Ah!” exclaimed Agatha; “that is a thing he didn’t mention. How did it come about?”

Wyllard was glad to tell the story. He was anxious to say all he honestly could in Hawtrey’s favor.

“We were at work on a railroad trestle—a towering wooden bridge, in British Columbia. It stretched across a deep ravine with great boulders and there was a stream in the bottom of it. He stood high up on a staging close beneath the rails. A fast freight, a huge general produce train came down the track, with one of the new big locomotives hauling it, and when the cars went banging by above us we could hardly hold on to the bridge. The construction foreman was a hustler, and we had to get the spikes in. I was swinging the hammer when I felt the plank beneath me slip. The train, it seems, had jarred loose the bolt around which we had our lashings. For a moment I felt that I was going down into the gorge, and then Gregory leaned out and grabbed me. He had only one free hand to do it with, and when he felt my weight one foot swung out from the stringer he had sprung to. It seemed certain that I would pull him with me, too. We hung like that for a space—I don’t quite know how long.”

He paused for a moment, apparently feeling the stress of it again, and there was a faint thrill in his voice when he went on.

“It was then,” he said, “I knew just what kind of man Gregory Hawtrey was. Anybody else would have let me go; but he held on. I got my hand on some of the framing, and he swung me on to the stringer.”

He saw the gleam in Agatha’s eyes. “Oh!” she cried, “that is just what he must have done. He was like that always—impulsive, splendidly generous.”

Wyllard felt that he had succeeded, though he knew that there were men on the prairie who called his comrade slackly careless, instead of impulsive. Agatha spoke again.

“But Gregory wasn’t a carpenter,” she said.

“In those days when money was scarce we had to be whatever we could. There wasn’t much specialization of handicrafts out there then. The farmer whose crop was ruined took up the railroad shovel, or borrowed a saw from somebody and set about building houses, or anything else that was wanted.”

“Of course!” replied Agatha. “Besides, he was always wonderfully quick. He could learn any game by just watching it a while. He did all he undertook brilliantly.”

It occurred to Wyllard that Gregory had, at least, made no great success of farming; but that occupation, as practiced on the prairie, demands a great deal more than quickness and what some call brilliancy from the man who undertakes it. He must, as they say out there, possess the capacity for staying with it—the grim courage to hold fast the tighter under each crushing blow, when the grain shrivels under the harvest frost, or when the ragged ice hurtling before a roaring blast does the reaping. It was, however, evident that this girl had an unquestioning faith in Gregory Hawtrey, and once more Wyllard felt compassionate towards her. He wondered if she would have retained her confidence had Hawtrey spent those four years in England instead of Canada, for it was clear from the contrast between her and her picture that she had grown in many ways since she had given her promise to her lover. He had said what he could in Hawtrey’s favor, but now he felt that something was due to the girl.

“Gregory told me to explain what things are like out there,” he said. “I think it is because they are so different from what you are accustomed to that he has waited so long. He wanted to make them as easy as possible for you, and now he would like you to realize what is before you.”

He was surprised at the girl’s quick comprehension, for she glanced around the luxurious room with a faint smile.

“You look on me as part of—this? I mean it seems to you that I fit in with my surroundings, and would be in harmony only with them?”

“Yes,” answered Wyllard gravely, “I think you fit in with them excellently.”

Agatha laughed. “Well,” she said, “I was once, to a certain extent, accustomed to something similar; though, after all, one could hardly compare the Grange with Garside Scar. Still, that was some time ago, and I have earned my living for several years now. That counts for something, doesn’t it?”

She glanced down at her dress. “For instance, this is the result of a great deal of self-denial, though the cost of it was partly worked off in music lessons, and the stuff was almost the cheapest I could get. I sang at concerts—and it was part of my stock in trade. After all, why should you think me capable only of living in luxury?”

“I didn’t go quite that far.”

She laughed again. “Then is Canada such a very dreadful place? I have heard of other Englishwomen going out there as farmers’ wives. Do they all live unhappily?”

“No,” replied Wyllard, “at least, they show no sign of it, and some of them and the city-born Canadians are, I think, the salt of this earth. Probably it’s easy to be calm and gracious in such a place as this—though naturally I don’t know since I’ve never tried it—but when a woman who toils from sunrise to sunset most of the year keeps her sweetness and serenity, it’s a very different and much finer thing. But I’ll try to answer the other question. The prairie isn’t dreadful; it’s a land of sunshine and clear skies. Heat and cold—and we have them both—don’t worry one there. There’s optimism in the crystal air. It’s not beautiful like these valleys, but it has its beauty. It is vast and silent, and, though our homesteads are crude and new, once you pass the breaking, it’s primevally old. That gets hold of one somehow. It’s wonderful after sunset in the early spring, when the little cold wind is like wine, and it runs white to the horizon with the smoky red on the rim of it melting into transcendental green. When the wheat rolls across the foreground in ocher and burnished copper waves, it is more wonderful still. One sees the fulfillment of the promise, and takes courage.”

“Then,” asked Agatha, who had scarcely suspected him of such appreciation of nature, “what is there to shrink from?”

“In the case of a small farmer’s wife, the constant, never-slackening strain. There’s no hired assistance. She must clean the house, and wash, and cook, though it’s not unusual for the men to wash the plates.”

The girl evidently was not much impressed, for she laughed.

“Does Gregory wash the plates?” she asked.

Wyllard’s eyes twinkled. “When Sproatly won’t,” he said. “Still, in a general way they do it only once a week.”

“Ah,” observed Agatha, “I can imagine Gregory hating it. As a matter of fact, I like him for it.”

“Then the farmer’s wife must bake, and mend her husband’s clothes. Indeed, it’s not unusual for her to mend for the hired man, too. Besides that, there are always odds and ends of tasks, but the time when you feel the strain most is in the winter. Then you sit at night, shivering as a rule, beside the stove in an almost empty log-walled room, reading a book you have probably read three or four times before. Outside, the frost is Arctic; you can hear the roofing shingles crackle now and then; and you wake up when the fire burns low. There’s no life, no company, rarely a new face, and if you go to a dance or a supper somewhere, perhaps once a month, you ride back on a bob-sled and are frozen almost stiff beneath the robes.”

“Still,” interposed Agatha, “that does not last.”

The man understood her. “Oh!” he said, “one makes progress—that is, if one can stand the strain—but, as the one way of doing it is to sow for a larger harvest and break fresh sod every year, there can be no slackening in the meanwhile. Every dollar must be guarded and plowed into the soil again.”

He broke off, feeling that he had done all that could reasonably be expected of him, and Agatha asked one question.

“A woman who didn’t slacken could make the struggle easier for the man, couldn’t she?”

“Yes,” Wyllard assured her, “in every way. Still, she would have a great deal to bear.”

Agatha’s face softened. “Ah,” she commented, “she would not grudge the effort in the case of one she loved.”

She looked up again with a smile. “I wonder,” she added, “if you really thought I should flinch.”

“When I first heard of it, I thought it quite likely. Then when I read your letter my doubts vanished.”

He saw that he had not been judicious, for there was, for the first time, a trace of hardness in the girl’s expression.

“He showed you that?” she asked.

“One small part of it,” assured Wyllard. “I want to say that when I first saw this house, and how you seemed fitted to it, my misgivings about Gregory’s decision troubled me once more. Now,”—and he made an impressive gesture—“they have vanished altogether, and they’ll never come back again.”

He spoke as he felt. This girl, he knew, would feel the strain; but it seemed to him that she had strength enough to bear it cheerfully. In spite of her daintiness, she was one who, in time of stress, could be depended on. He often remembered afterwards how they had sat together in the luxuriously furnished room, she leaning back in her big, low chair, with the soft light on her delicately tinted face. By and by he looked at her.

“It’s curious that I had your photograph ever so long, and never thought of showing it to Gregory,” he observed.

Agatha smiled. “I suppose it is,” she admitted. “After all, except that it might have been a relief to Major Radcliffe if he had met you sooner, the fact that you didn’t show it to Gregory doesn’t seem of any particular consequence.”

Wyllard was not quite sure of this. He had thought about this girl often, and certainly had been conscious of a curious thrill of satisfaction when he had met her at the stepping-stones. That feeling had suddenly disappeared when he had learned that she was his comrade’s promised wife. He had, however, during the last hour or two made up his mind to think no more of her.

“Well,” he declared, “the next thing is to arrange for Mrs. Hastings to meet you in London, or, perhaps, at the Grange. Her husband is a Canadian, a man of education, who has quite a large homestead not far from Gregory’s. Her relatives are people of station in Montreal, and I feel sure that you’ll like her.”

They decided that he was to ask Mrs. Hastings to stay a few days at the Grange, and then he looked at the girl somewhat diffidently.

“She suggests going in a fortnight,” he said.

Agatha smiled at him. “Then,” she said, “I must not keep her waiting.”

She rose and they went back together to join their hostess.

CHAPTER VIII

THE TRAVELING COMPANION

A gray haze, thickened by the smoke of the city, drove out across the water when the Scarrowmania lay in the Mersey, with her cable hove short, and the last of the flood-tide gurgling against her bows. A trumpeting blast of steam swept high aloft from beside her squat funnel, and the splash of the slowly turning paddles of the two steam tugs that lay alongside mingled with the din it made. A gangway from one of them to the Scarrowmania’s forward deck, and a stream of frowsy humanity that had just been released from overpacked emigrant boarding-houses poured up it. There were apparently representatives of all peoples and languages among that unkempt horde—Britons, Scandinavians, Teutons, Italians, Russians, Poles—and they moved on in forlorn apathy, like cattle driven to the slaughter. One wondered how they had raised their passage money, and how many years’ bitter self-denial it had cost them to provide for their transit to the land of promise.

At the head of the gangway stood the steamboat doctors, for the Scarrowmania was taking out an unusual number of passengers, and there were two of them. They were immaculate in blue uniform, and looked very clean and English by contrast with the mass of frowsy aliens. Beside them stood another official, presumably acting on behalf of the Dominion Government, though there were few restrictions imposed upon Canadian immigration then, nor, for that matter, did anybody trouble much about the comfort of the steerage passengers. Each steamer carried as many as she could hold.

As the stream poured out of the gangway, the doctor glanced at each newcomer’s face, and then seizing him by the wrist uncovered it. Then he looked at the official, who made a sign, and the man moved on. Since this took him two or three seconds, one could have fancied that he either possessed peculiar powers, or that the test was a somewhat inefficient one.

A group of first-class passengers, leaning on the thwartship rails close by, looked on, with complacent satisfaction or half-contemptuous pity. Among them stood Mrs. Hastings, Miss Winifred Rawlinson, and Agatha. It was noticed that Wyllard, with a pipe in his hand, sat on a hatch forward, near the head of the gangway. Agatha drew Mrs. Hastings’ attention to it.

“Whatever is Mr. Wyllard doing there?” she asked.

Mrs. Hastings, who was wrapped in furs, to protect her from the sting in the east wind, smiled at her.

“That,” she answered, “is more than I can tell you; but Harry Wyllard seems to find an interest in what other folks would consider most unpromising things, and, what is more to the purpose, he is rather addicted to taking a hand in them. It is a habit that costs him something now and then.”

Agatha asked nothing further. She was interested in Wyllard, but she was at the moment more interested in the faces of those who swarmed on board. She wondered what the emigrants had endured in the lands that had cast them out; and what they might still have to bear. It seemed to her that the murmur of their harsh voices went up in a great protest, an inarticulate cry of sorrow. While she looked on the doctor held back a long-haired man who, shuffling in broken boots, was following a haggard woman. The physician drew him aside, and after he had consulted with the other official, two seamen hustled the man towards a second gangway that led to the tug. The woman raised a wild, despairing cry. She blocked the passage, and a quarter-master drove her, expostulating in an agony of terror, forward among the rest. Nobody appeared concerned about this alien’s tragedy, except one man, and Agatha was not surprised when Wyllard rose and quietly laid his hand upon the official’s shoulder.

A parley appeared to follow, somebody gave an order, and when the alien was led back again the woman’s cries subsided. Agatha looked at Mrs. Hastings and once more a smile crept into the older woman’s eyes.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Hastings, “I guessed he would feel that he had to interfere. That is a man who can’t see any one in trouble.” She added, with a little whimsical sigh, “He had a bonanza harvest last fall, anyway.”

They moved aft soon afterwards, and the Scarrowmania was smoothly sliding seawards with the first of the ebb when Agatha met Wyllard. He glanced at the Lancashire sandhills, which were fading into a pale ocher gleam amid the haze over the starboard hand, and then at the long row of painted buoys that moved back to them.

“You’re off at last! The sad gray weather is dropping fast astern,” he said. “Out yonder, the skies are clear.”

“Thank you,” replied Agatha, “I’m to apply that as I like? As a matter of fact, however, our days weren’t always gray. But what was the trouble when those steerage people came on board?”

Wyllard’s manner, she noticed, was free alike from the complacent self-satisfaction which occasionally characterizes the philanthropist, and from any affectation of diffidence.

“Well,” he answered, “there was something wrong with that woman’s husband. Nothing infectious, I believe, but they didn’t seem to consider him a desirable citizen. They make a warning example of somebody with a physical infirmity now and then. The man, they decided, must be put ashore again. In the meanwhile, somebody else had hustled the woman forward, and it looked as if they would take her on without him. The tug was almost ready to cast off.”

“How dreadful!” said Agatha. “But what did you do?”

“Merely promised to guarantee the cost of his passage back if they would refer his case to the immigration people at the other end. It is scarcely likely that they’ll make trouble. As a rule, they only throw out folks who are certain to become a charge on the community.”

“But if he really had any infirmity, mightn’t it lead to that?”

“No,” Wyllard responded dryly. “I would engage to give him a fair start if it was necessary. You wouldn’t have had that woman landed in Montreal, helpless and alone, while the man was sent back again to starve in Poland?”

He saw a curious gleam in Agatha’s eyes, and added in a deprecating manner, “You see, I’ve now and then limped without a dollar into a British Columbian mining town.”

The girl was touched with compassion, but there was another matter that must be mentioned, though she felt that the time was inopportune.

“Miss Rawlinson, who had only a second-class ticket, insists upon being told how it is that she has been transferred to the saloon.”

Wyllard’s eyes twinkled, but she noticed that he was wholly free from embarrassment, which was not quite the case with her.

“Well,” he said, “that’s a matter I must leave you to handle. Anyway, she can’t go second-class now. One or two of the steerage exchanged when they saw their quarters, for which I don’t blame them, and they have filled up every room.”

“You haven’t answered the question.”

Wyllard waved his hand. “Miss Rawlinson is your bridesmaid, and I’m Gregory’s best man. It seems to me it’s my business to do everything just as he would like it done.”

He left her a moment later, and, though she did not know how she was to explain the matter to Miss Rawlinson, who was of an independent nature, it occurred to her that he, at least, had found a rather graceful way out of the difficulty. The more she saw of this Western farmer, the more she liked him.

It was after dinner when she next met him and the wind had changed. The Scarrowmania was steaming head-on into a glorious northwest breeze. The shrouds sang; chain-guy, and stanchion, and whatever caught the wind, set up a deep-toned throbbing; and ahead ranks of little, white-topped seas rolled out of the night. A half-moon, blurred now and then by wisps of flying cloud, hung low above them, and odd spouts of spray that gleamed in the silvery light leaped up about the dipping bows. Wyllard was leaning on the rail when Agatha stopped beside him. She glanced towards the lighted windows of the smoking-room not far away.

“How is it you are not in there?” she asked, noticing that he held a cigar in his hand.

“I was,” answered Wyllard. “It’s rather full, and it seemed that they didn’t want me. They’re busy playing cards, and the stakes are rather high. In a general way, a steamboat’s smoking-room is less of a men’s lounge than a gambling club.”

“And you object to cards?”

“Oh, no!” Wyllard replied with a smile. “They merely make me tired, and when I feel I want some excitement for my money I get it another way. That one seems tame to me.”

“What sort of excitement do you like?”

The man laughed. “There are a good many that appeal to me. Once it was collecting sealskins off other people’s beaches, and there was zest enough in that, in view of the probability of the dory turning over, or a gunboat dropping on to you. Then there was a good deal of very genuine excitement to be got out of placer-mining in British Columbia, especially when there was frost in the ranges, and you had to thaw out your giant-powder. Shallow alluvial workings have a way of caving in when you least expect it of them. After all, however, I think I like the prairie farming best.”

“Is that exciting?”

“Yes,” returned Wyllard, “if you do it in one way. The gold’s there—that you’re sure of—piled up by nature during I don’t know how many thousand years, but you have to stake high, if you want to get much of it out. One needs costly labor,—teams—no end of them—breakers, and big gang-plows. The farmer who has nerve enough drills his last dollar into the soil in spring, but if he means to succeed it costs him more than that. He must give the sweat of his tensest effort, the uttermost toil of his body—all, in fact, that has been given him. Then he must shut his eyes tight to the hazards against him, or look at them without wavering—the drought, the hail, the harvest frost, I mean. If his teams fall sick, or the season goes against him, he must work double tides. Still, it now and then happens that things go right, and the red wheat rolls ripe right back across the prairie. I don’t know that any man could want a keener thrill than the one he feels when he drives in the binders!”

Agatha had imagination, and she could realize something of the toil, the hazard, and the exultation of that victory.

“You have felt it often?” she inquired.

“Twice we helped to fill a big elevator,” Wyllard answered. “But I’ve been very near defeat.”

The girl looked at him thoughtfully. It seemed that he possessed the power of acquisition, as well as a wide generosity that came into play when by strenuous effort success had been attained. So far as her experience went, these were things that did not invariably accompany each other.

“And when the harvest comes up to your expectations, you give your money away?” she asked with a lifting of her brows.

Wyllard laughed. “You shouldn’t deduce too much from a single instance. Besides, that Pole’s case hasn’t cost me anything yet.”

Mrs. Hastings joined them, and when Wyllard strolled away the women passed some time leaning on the rails, and looking at the groups of shadowy figures on the forward deck. The attitude of the steerage passengers was dejected and melancholy, but one cluster had gathered around a man who stood upon the hatch.

“Oh,” he declared, “you’ll have no trouble. Canada’s a great country for a poor man. He can sleep beneath a bush all summer, if he can’t strike anything he likes.”

This did not appear particularly encouraging, but the orator went on: “Been over for a trip to the Old Country, and I’m glad I’m going back again. Went out with nothing except a good discharge, and they made me Sergeant of Canadian Militia. After that I was armorer to a rifle club. There’s places a blame long way behind the Dominion, and I struck one of them when we went with Roberts to Afghanistan. It was on that trip I and a Pathan rolled all down a hill, him trying to get his knife arm loose, and me jabbing his breastbone with my bayonet before I got it into him. I drove it through to the socket. You want to make quite sure of a Pathan.”

Miss Rawlinson winced at this. “Oh,” she cried, “what a horrible man!”

“It was ’most as tough as when you went after Riel, and stole the Scotchman’s furs,” suggested a Canadian.

The sergeant let the jibe go by. He said: “Louis’s bucks could shoot! We had them corraled in a pit, and every time one of the boys from Montreal broke cover he got a bullet into him. Did any of you ever hear a dropped man squeal?”

Agatha had heard sufficient, and she and her companions turned away, but as they moved across the deck the sergeant’s voice followed her.

“Oh, yes,” he said, “a grand country for a poor man. In the summer he can sleep beneath a bush.”

For some reason this eulogy haunted Agatha when she retired to her stateroom that night, and she wondered what awaited all those aliens in the new land. It occurred to her that in some respects she was situated very much as they were. For the first time, vague misgivings crept into her mind as she realized that she had cut herself adrift from all to which she had been accustomed. She felt suddenly depressed and lonely.

The depression had, however, almost vanished when, awakening rather early next morning, she went up on deck. A red sun hung over the tumbling seas that ran into the hazy east astern. The waves rolled up in crested phalanxes that gleamed green and incandescent white ahead. The Scarrowmania plunged through them with a spray cloud flying about her dipping bows. She was a small, old-fashioned boat, and because she carried 3,000 tons of railway iron she rolled distressfully. Her tall spars swayed athwart the vivid blueness of the morning sky with the rhythmic regularity of a pendulum. The girl was not troubled by any sense of sea-sickness. The keen north-wester that sang amid the shrouds was wonderfully fresh; and, when she met Wyllard crossing the saloon deck, her cheeks were glowing from the sting of the spray, and her eyes were bright.

“Where have you been?” she asked.

“Down there,” answered Wyllard, pointing to the black opening in the fore-hatch that led to the steerage quarters. “An acquaintance of mine who’s traveling forward asked me to take a look round, and I’m rather glad I did. When I’ve had a word with the chief steward I’m going back again.”

“You have a friend down there?”

“I met the man for the first time yesterday, and rather took to him. One of your naval petty officers, forcibly retired. He can’t live upon his pension, that is why he’s going out to Canada. Now you’ll excuse me.”

“I wonder,” ventured Agatha, “if you would let me go back with you?”

Wyllard looked at her curiously. “Well,” he said, with an air of reflection, “you’ll probably have to face a good deal that you don’t like out yonder, and in one way you won’t suffer from a little preparatory training. This, however, is not a case where sentimental pity is likely to relieve anybody. It’s the real thing.”

“I think I told you at Garside Scar that I haven’t lived altogether in luxury!” she replied.

Wyllard, who made no comment, disappeared, and merely signed to her when he came back. They reached the ladder that led down into the gloom beneath the hatch, and Agatha hesitated when a sour and musty odor floated up to her. She went down, however, and a few moments later stood, half-nauseated, gazing at the wildest scene of confusion her eyes had ever rested on. A little light came down the hatchway, and a smoky lamp or two swung above her head, but half the steerage deck was wrapped in shadow, and out of it there rose a many-voiced complaining. Flimsy, unplaned fittings had wrenched away, and men lay inert amid the wreckage, with the remains of their last meal scattered about them. There were unwashed tin plates and pannikins, knives, and spoons, sliding up and down everywhere, and the deck was foul with slops of tea, and trodden bread, and marmalade. Now and then, in a wilder roll than usual, a frowsy, huddled object slid groaning down the slant of slimy planking, but in every case the helpless passenger was fully dressed. Steerage passengers, in fact, seldom take off their clothes. For one thing, all their worldly possessions are, as a rule, secreted among their garments, and for another, most of those hailing from beyond the Danube have never been accustomed to disrobing. In the midst of the confusion, two half-sick steward lads were making ineffective efforts to straighten up the mess.

Agatha made out that a swarm of urchins were huddled together in a helpless mass along one side of the horrible place. The sergeant was haranguing them, while another man, whom she supposed to be the petty officer, pulled them to their feet one by one. A good deal of his labor was wasted, for the Scarrowmania was rolling viciously, and as soon as a few were placed upright half of them collapsed again. Wyllard glanced towards the boys compassionately.

“I believe most of them have had nothing to eat since they came on board, though it isn’t the company’s fault,” he said. “There’s food enough served out, but before we picked the breeze up the men laid hands upon it first and half of it was wasted in the scramble. Then it seems they pitched these youngsters out of their berths.”

“Don’t they belong to anybody?” Agatha asked. “Is there no one to look after them?”

Wyllard smiled. “I believe one of your charitable institutions is sending them out, and there seems to be a clergyman, who has a curate and a lay assistant to help him, in charge of them. The assistant won’t be available while this rolling lasts, and the other two very naturally prefer the saloon. In a way, that’s comprehensible.”

He left her, and proceeded to help the man who was dragging the urchins to their feet.

“Get up!” commanded the sergeant. “Get up, and fall in. Dress from the left, and number off, the ones who can stand.”

It appeared that the lads had been drilled, for they scrambled into a line that bent and wavered each time the Scarrowmania’s bows went down. After that, every other lad stepped forward at the word. The order was, “Left turn. March, and fall in on deck,” and when they feebly clambered up the ladder Wyllard, who turned to Agatha, pointed to a door in a bulkhead of rough white wood.

“It should have been locked, but I fancy you can get in that way, and up through another hatch,” he remarked. “The single women, and women with children, are in yonder, and if you want to be useful there’s a field for you. Get as many as possible up on deck.”

Agatha left him, and her face was rather white when at last she came up into the open air, with about a dozen forlorn, draggled women trailing helplessly after her. The lads were now sitting down in a double line on deck, each with a tin plate and a steaming pannikin in front of him. There were at least a hundred of them, and a man with a bronzed face and the stamp of command upon him was giving them the order of the voyage. He was the one she had already noticed.

“You’ll turn out at the whistle at half-past six,” he said. “Shake mattresses, roll up blankets, and prepare for berth inspection. Then, at the next whistle, you’ll fall in on deck stripped to the waist for washing parade. Fourth files numbering even are orderlies in charge of the plates and pannikins.”

“And,” announced the sergeant, “any insubordination will be sharply dealt with. Now, when I was with Roberts in Afghanistan——”

Wyllard, who was standing close by, turned to Agatha.

“I don’t think we’ll be wanted. You have probably earned your breakfast.”

They went back to the saloon deck, and the girl smiled when he looked at her inquiringly.

“It was a little horrible, but I hadn’t so many to deal with,” she said. “Do you, and those others, expect to bring any order out of that chaos?”

“No,” answered Wyllard, “with a little encouragement they’ll do it themselves. That is, the English, Danes, and Germans. One can trust them to evolve a workable system. It’s in their nature. You can trace most things that tend to wholesome efficiency back to the old Teutonic leaven. By and by, they’ll proceed to put some pressure on the Latins, Slavs, and Jews.”

“But is it your business to offer them that encouragement?”

Wyllard laughed. “Strictly speaking, it isn’t in the least, but unnecessary chaos is hateful, and, any way, I’m not the only one who doesn’t seem to like it. There’s the petty officer, and our friend, the sergeant, who was with Roberts in Afghanistan.”

Agatha said nothing further. She was a little surprised to feel that she was anxious to keep this man’s good opinion, though that was not exactly why she had nerved herself for the venture into the single women’s quarters. Leaving him out altogether, it seemed to her that there was something rather fine in the way that the sergeant and the petty officer who was going out almost penniless to Canada, had saddled themselves with the task of looking after those helpless lads. It was wholly unpaid labor, for which the men who preferred to remain within the safe limits of the saloon deck would presumably get the credit. After all, she decided, there were, no doubt, men in every station who helped to keep the world sweet and clean, and she believed that Wyllard was to be counted among them. He certainly differed in many ways from Gregory, but then Gregory was unapproachable. She did not remember that it was four years since she had seen Hawtrey, and that her ideas had been a little unformed then.

In the evening, Mrs. Hastings, with whom he was evidently a favorite, happened to speak of Wyllard, and the efforts he was making in the steerage, and Agatha asked a question.

“Does he often undertake this kind of thing?”

“No,” Mrs. Hastings answered with a smile. “Any way, not on so large a scale. He’s very far from setting up as a professional philanthropist, my dear. I don’t remember his offering to point out duty to other folks, and I don’t think he goes about in search of an opportunity of benefiting humanity. Still, when an individual case thrusts itself beneath his nose, he generally does what he can.”

“I’ve heard people say that the individual method only perpetuates the trouble,” remarked Agatha.

Mrs Hastings shook her head. “That,” she said, “is a subject I’m not well posted on, but it seems to me that if other folks only adopted Harry Wyllard’s simple plan, there would be considerably less need for organized charity.”

CHAPTER IX

THE FOG

During the next two days before a moderate gale the Scarrowmania shouldered her way westwards through the big, white-topped combers that rolled down upon her under a lowering sky. There were no luxurious, steam-propelled hotels in the Canadian trade at this time, and loaded deep with railway metal as she was, the vessel slopped in the green seas everywhere, and rolled her streaming sides out almost to her bilge. She shivered and rattled horribly when her single screw swung clear and the tri-compound engines ran away.

Wyllard went down to the steerage every now and then, and Agatha, who contrived to keep on her feet, not infrequently accompanied him. She was glad of his society, for Mrs. Hastings was seldom in evidence, and no efforts could get Miss Rawlinson out of her berth. The gale blew itself out at length, and the evening after it moderated Agatha was sitting near the head of one fiddle-guarded table in the saloon waiting for dinner, which the stewards had still some difficulty in bringing in. Wyllard’s place was next to hers, but he had not appeared, nor had the skipper, who, however, did not invariably dine with the passengers. One of the two doors which led from the foot of the branching companion stairway into either side of the saloon stood open, and presently she saw Wyllard standing just outside it.

He beckoned to the doctor, who sat at the foot of her table, and the physician merely raised his brows a trifle. He was a rather consequential person, and it was evident to the girl that he resented being summoned by a gesture. She did not think anybody else had noticed Wyllard, and she waited with some curiosity to see what he would do. He made a sign with a lifted hand, and she felt that the doctor would obey it, as, in fact, he did, though his manner was very far from conciliatory. By dint of listening closely, she could hear their conversation.

“I’m sorry to trouble you just now,” apologized Wyllard, “and I didn’t come in because that would have set everybody wondering what you were wanted for; but one of those boys forward has been thrown down the ladder, and has cut his head.”

“Ah!” said the doctor. “I’ll see to him—after dinner.”

“It’s a nasty cut,” declared Wyllard. “He’s losing a good deal of blood.”

“Then I would suggest that you apply to my assistant.”

“As I don’t know where he is, I have come to you.”

The doctor made a sign of impatience. “Well,” he said “you have told me, which I think is as far as your concern in the matter goes. I may add that I’m not accustomed to dictation on behalf of a steerage passenger.”

Agatha saw Wyllard slip between the doctor and the entrance to the saloon, but she saw also the skipper appear a few paces behind them, and glance at them sharply. He was usually a silent man, at home in the ice and the clammy fog, but not a great acquisition in the saloon.

“Something wrong down forward, Mr. Wyllard? They were making a great row a little while ago,” the skipper said.

“Nothing very serious,” Wyllard answered. “One of the boys has cut his head.”

The skipper turned towards the doctor and Agatha guessed that he had overheard part of the conversation. “Don’t you think you had better go—at once?” suggested the skipper.

The doctor evidently did, for he disappeared; and Wyllard, who entered the saloon with the skipper, sat down at Agatha’s side.

“How do you do it?” she asked.

“What?” returned Wyllard, beginning his dinner.

“We’ll say persuade other folks to see things as you do.”

“You evidently mean the skipper, and I suppose you heard something of what was going on. In this case, I’m indebted to his prejudices. He’s one of the old type—a seaman first of all—and what we call bluff, and you call bounce, has only one effect upon men of his kind. It gets their backs up.”

Agatha thought that he did not like it, either, but she changed the subject.

“There really was a row forward,” she said. “What was the trouble over? You were, no doubt, somewhere near the scene of it.”

Wyllard laughed. “I sat upon the steerage ladder, and am afraid I cheered the combatants on. It was really a glorious row. They hammered each other with tin plates, and some of them tried to use hoop-iron knives, which fortunately doubled up. They broke quite a few of the benches, and wrecked the mess table, but so far as I noticed the only one seriously hurt was a little chap who was quietly looking on.”

“And you encouraged them?”

“I certainly did. It was a protest against dirt, disorder, and the slothfulness that’s a plague to the community. Isn’t physical force warranted when there’s no other remedy?”

A gray-haired Canadian looked up. “Yes,” he agreed, “I guess it is. The first man who pulled his gun in British Columbia was hanged right away, and they’ve scarcely had to make an example of another since then, though it was quite a while ago.”

He paused, and smiled approvingly. “A mess of any kind worries us, and we don’t take long to straighten it out. Same feeling’s in the Germans and Scandinavians. I’ll say that for them, any way. Your friends swept up the steerage?”

“They took the Slavs and Jews, and pitched them down the second hatch on to the orlop deck. Things will go smoothly now our crowd is on top.”

“Your crowd?” said Agatha.

The Canadian nodded. “That’s what he meant,” he said. “There are two kinds of folks you and the rest of them are dumping into Canada. One’s the kind that will get up and hustle, break land, and build new homes—log at first, frame and stone afterwards. They go on from a quarter-section and a team of oxen to the biggest farm they can handle, and every fresh furrow they cut enriches all of us. The other kind want to sit down in the dirt and take life easily, as they’ve always done. The dirt worries everybody else, and we’ve no use for them. By and by our Legislature will have to wake up and stop them from getting in.”

He went on with his dinner, but his observations left Agatha thoughtful. She was beginning to understand one side of Wyllard’s character. He, it seemed, stood for practical efficiency. There was a driving force in him that made for progress and order. It was apparently his mission to straighten things out. Some persons of his kind, she reflected, now and then made a good deal of avoidable trouble; but there was in this man, at least, a half-whimsical toleration, which rendered that an unlikely thing in his particular case. Besides, she had already recognized that she was in some respects fortunate in having such a man for her companion.

Her deck chair was always set out in the most sheltered and comfortable place. If there was anything to be seen he almost invariably appeared with a pair of powerful glasses. She was watched over, her wishes were anticipated, and the man was seldom obtrusively present when she felt disposed to talk to somebody else. It struck her that she had thought a great deal about him during the last few days, and rather less than usual about Gregory, which was partly the reason she did not walk up and down the deck with him, as usual, after dinner that evening.

Three or four days later, the Scarrowmania ran into the Bank fog, and burrowed through it with whistle hooting dolefully at regular intervals. Now and then an answering ringing of bells came out of the clammy vapor, and the half-seen shape of an anchored schooner loomed up, rolling wildly on gray slopes of sea. Once, too, a tiny dory, half filled with lines and buoys, slid by plunging on the wash flung off by the Scarrowmania’s bows, and Agatha understood that the men in her had escaped death by a hairsbreadth. They were cod fishers, Wyllard told her, and he added that there was a host of them at work somewhere in the sliding haze. She imagined, now and then, that the fog had a depressing effect on him, and that when the dory lay beneath the rail there had been an unusual look in his face.

A breeze came out of the northwest, with the sting of the ice in it, but the fog did not lift, and the Scarrowmania plunged on through it with spray-wet decks and the gray seas smashing about her bows. It was bitterly cold and the raw wind pierced to the bone, but the voyage was rapidly shortening.

One evening Agatha paced the deck with Wyllard. The girl was in a strangely unsettled mood. Perhaps it was merely the gloom of the sea and sky reacting upon her that caused her to look forward to the landing with a certain half-conscious shrinking. They stopped by the rails presently, looking out upon the tumbling seas that, tipped with livid froth, rolled out of the sliding haze, and the dreariness of the surroundings intensified the girl’s depression. There was something unpleasantly suggestive in the sight of the fog that hid everything, for Agatha had been troubled with a half-apprehensive longing to see what lay before her. She noticed the lookout, a lonely, shapeless figure, standing amid the spray that whirled about the plunging bows. By and by she saw him turn and wave an arm toward the bridge behind her, and she heard a hoarse cry. What it meant she could not tell, but in another moment the Scarrowmania’s whistle shrieked.

A gray shape burst out of the vapor and grew with astonishing swiftness into dim tiers of slanted sailcloth swaying above a strip of hull that moved amid a broad white smear of foam. It was a brig under fore-course and topsails, and as the girl watched the vessel it sank to the tilted bowsprit, and a big gray and white sea foamed about the bows.

“Aren’t we dreadfully near?” she asked.

Wyllard did not answer. He was gazing up at the bridge, and once more the whistle gave a warning blast. It seemed that the two vessels could hardly pass clear of each other.

Wyllard laid a hand upon Agatha’s shoulder.

“The skipper’s starboarding. We’ll go around to the stern,” he said.

His grasp was reassuring, and Agatha watched the straining curves of canvas and the line of half-submerged hull. The brig rose with streaming bows, swung high above the sea, sank again, and vanished with bewildering suddenness into a belt of driving fog.

Agatha was not sure that there had been any peril, but it was certainly past now, and she was rather puzzled by her sensations when Wyllard had held her shoulder. For one thing, she had felt instinctively that she was safe with him. She decided not to trouble herself about the reason for this, and presently she looked up at him. The expression that she had noticed now and then was once more in his face.

“I don’t think you like the fog any more than I do,” she said.

“No,” responded Wyllard, with a quiet forcefulness that startled her. “I hate it.”

“Why?”

“It recalls something that still gives me a very bad few minutes every once in a while. It has been worrying me again to-night.”

“I wonder,” said Agatha simply, “if you would care to tell me?”

The man looked down on her. “I haven’t told it often, but you shall hear,” he replied. “It’s a tale of a black failure.” He stretched out a hand and pointed to the ranks of tumbling seas. “It was very much this kind of night, and we were lying, reefed down, off one of the Russians’ beaches, when I asked for volunteers. I got them—two boats’ crews of the finest seamen that ever handled oar or sealing rifle.”

“But what did you want them for?”

“A boat from another schooner had been cast ashore. It was blowing hard, as it usually does where the Polar ice comes down into the Behring Sea. They’d been shooting seals. We meant to bring the men off if we could manage it.”

“Wouldn’t one boat have been enough?”

“No,” answered Wyllard dryly, “we had three, and I think that was one cause of the trouble. There was one from the other schooner. You see, those seals belonged to the Russians, and we free-lances could shoot them only off shore. I’m not sure that the men in the wrecked boat had been fishing outside the limit.”

Agatha did not press for further particulars, and he went on.

“We managed to make a landing, though one boat went up bottom uppermost. I fancy they must have broken or lost an oar then. We got the wrecked men, but we had trouble while we were getting the boats off again. The surf was running in savagely, and the fog shut down as solid as a wall. Any way, we pulled off, and went out with a foot of water in one boat. One of the rescued men took my oar when I let it go.”

“Why did you let it go?”

Wyllard laughed in a grim fashion.

“My head was laid open with a sealing club,” he said. “Some of the other men had their scratches, but they managed to row. For one thing, they knew they had to. They had reasons for not wanting to fall into the Russians’ hands. Well, we cleared the beach, and once or twice, as I tried to bale, there was a shout somewhere near us, and the loom of a vanishing boat. It was all we could make out, for the sea was slopping into the boat, and the spray was flying everywhere. If there had been only two boats we probably would have found out our misfortune, and perhaps would have set it straight. As it was, we couldn’t tell that it was the same boat that had hailed us.”

He broke off for a moment, and then added quietly:

“Two boats reached the schooners. There was a nasty sea running then, and it blew viciously hard next day. There were three men in the other.”

“Ah!” cried Agatha, “they were drowned?”

Wyllard made a forceful gesture. “I’m not quite sure. That’s the trouble. At least, the boat was nowhere on the beach next day, and it’s difficult to see how the men could have faced the sea that piled up when the gale came down. In all probability, they had an oar short, and the boat rolled them out when a comber broke upon her in the darkness.” The girl saw him close one hand tight as he added, “If one only knew!”

“What would have befallen them if they had reached shore?”

“It’s difficult to say. They could have been handed over to the Russian authorities. Still, sealers poaching up there have simply disappeared.”

He stopped again, and glanced out at the gathering darkness. “Now,” he concluded, “you see why I hate the fog.”

“But you couldn’t help it,” said Agatha.

“Well,” answered Wyllard, “I asked for volunteers, and the money that is now mine came out of those schooners. It’s just possible those men are living still—somewhere in Northern Asia. I only know that they disappeared.”

He abruptly began to talk of something else, and by and by Agatha went down to the saloon, where Miss Rawlinson, who had not been much in evidence during the voyage, presently made her appearance.

“Aren’t you going into the music-room to play for Mr. Wyllard—as usual?” she inquired.

Agatha was disconcerted. She had fallen into the habit of spending half an hour or longer in the little music-room every evening, with Wyllard standing near the piano; but now her friend’s question seemed to place a significance upon the fact.

“No,” she replied, “I don’t think I am.”

“Then the rest of them will wonder whether you have fallen out with him.”

“Fallen out with him?”

Winifred laughed. “They’ve naturally been watching both of you, and, in a general way, there’s only one decision they could have arrived at.”

Agatha flushed a little, but Winifred went on.

“I don’t mind admitting that if a man of that kind was to fall in love with me, I’d black his boots for him,” she said. She added, with a rueful gesture, “Still, it’s most unlikely.”

Agatha looked at her with a little glint in her eyes.

“He is merely Gregory’s deputy,” she said, with a subconscious feeling that the word “deputy” was not a fortunate one. “In that connection, I should like to point out that you can estimate a man’s character by that of his friends.”

“Oh,” rejoined Winifred, “then if Mr. Wyllard’s strong points merely heighten Gregory’s virtues, I’ve nothing more to say. Any way, I’ll reserve my homage until I’ve seen Gregory. Perfection among men is scarce nowadays.”

She turned away, and left Agatha thoughtful. In the meanwhile, Mrs. Hastings came upon Wyllard alone in the music-room.

“You look quite serious,” she remarked.

“I’ve been thinking about Miss Ismay and Gregory,” Wyllard replied. “In fact, I feel a little anxious about them.”

“In what way?”

“Without making any reflections upon Gregory, I somewhat feel sorry for the girl.”

Mrs. Hastings nodded. “As a matter of fact, that’s very much what I felt from the first,” she admitted. “Still, you see, there’s the important fact that she’s fond of him, and it should smooth out a good many difficulties. Anyway, she’s evidently rather a courageous person.”

Wyllard sat silent a moment or two. “I wasn’t troubling about the material difficulties—lack of wealth and all that,” he said. “I was wondering if she really could be fond of him. It is some years since she was much in his company.”

“Hawtrey is not a man to change.”

“That,” returned Wyllard, “is just the trouble. I’ve no doubt he’s much the same, but one could fancy that Miss Ismay has changed a good deal since she last saw him. She’ll look for considerably more than she was probably content with then.”

“In any case, it isn’t your affair.” Mrs. Hastings smiled significantly.

“In one sense it certainly isn’t; but I can’t help feeling a little troubled about the thing. You see, Gregory is quite an old friend.”

“And the girl is going to marry him,” said Mrs. Hastings, raising her eyebrows.

Wyllard rose. “That reminder,” he said, “is quite uncalled for. I would like to assure you of it.”

He went out, and Mrs. Hastings sat still in a reflective mood.

“If she begins to compare him with Hawtrey, there can be only one result,” she said.

The fog had almost gone next morning, and pale sunshine streamed down upon a a froth-flecked sea. A bitter wind, however, still came out of the hazy north, and the Scarrowmania’s plates were crusted with ice where the highest crests of the tumbling seas reached them. The spray froze, and the decks grew slippery. When darkness came, nobody but the seamen faced the stinging cold. Agatha felt the engines stop late that night, and when she went out next morning the decks were white, and she could see dim ghosts of sliding pines through a haze of falling snow that became bewilderingly thick at times, but the steamer slid on through it with whistle hooting. At last toward sunset the snow cleared away and Agatha stood shivering under a deck-house. She looked about her with a curiously heavy heart.

A gray haze stretched across the great river, which was dim and gray, and odd wisps of pines rose raggedly beneath the white hills that cut against a gloomy, lowering sky. Deck-house, boat, and stanchion dripped, and every now and then the silence was broken by a doleful blast of the whistle. Nothing moved on the still, gray water, there was no sign of life ashore, and they seemed to be steaming into a great desolation.

Presently, Wyllard appeared from somewhere, and, after a glance at her face, slipped his hand beneath her arm, and led her down to the lighted saloon. There her heart grew a little lighter. Once more she was conscious of the feeling that she was safe with him.

CHAPTER X

DISILLUSION

The long train was speeding smoothly across the vast white levels of Assiniboia, when Agatha, who sat by a window, looked up as the conductor strode through the car. Mrs. Hastings asked him a question, and he stopped a moment.

“Yes,” he said, “we’ll be in Clermont inside half an hour.”

He went on, and Mrs. Hastings smiled at Agatha.

“We’re a little late, and Gregory will be waiting for us in the station now,” she announced. “No doubt he’s got the wagon fixed up right, but I’d like to feel sure of it. There’s a long drive before us, and I want to reach the homestead before it’s dark.”

Agatha said nothing, but a faint tinge of color crept into her cheeks, and Mrs. Hastings was glad to see it, for she had noticed that the girl was looking pale and haggard. The strain of the last few months that she had spent in England was beginning to tell on her. She had borne it courageously, but a reaction had set in, and the trip had been fatiguing. The Scarrowmania had plunged along, bows under, against fresh northwesterly gales most of the way across the Atlantic, and there is very little comfort on board a small, deeply-loaded steamer when she rolls her rails in, and lurches with thudding screw swung clear over big, steep-sided combers. Moreover, Agatha had scarcely slept during the few days and nights that she had spent in the train. It takes time to become accustomed to the atmosphere of a heated sleeper, and since she had landed she had been in a state of not unnatural nervous tension.

She had found it difficult to preserve an outward serenity, the previous day. When, at last, the great train ran into the depôt at Winnipeg, where Gregory had arranged to meet them, it was with a thrill of expectancy and relief that she stood upon the car platform. There was, however, no sign of Gregory, and, though Wyllard handed her a telegram from him a few minutes later, the fact that he had not arrived had a depressing effect on her. Quiet as she usually was, the girl was highly strung. Something had gone wrong with Hawtrey’s wagon while he was driving in to the railroad, and as the result of it he had missed the Atlantic train. She could not blame him for the accident, but for all that his absence was an unpleasant shock.

Feeling that her companions’ eyes were upon her, she turned, and looking out of the window found no encouragement in what she saw. The snow had gone, and a vast expanse of grass ran back to the horizon! But it was a dingy, grayish-white, and not green, as it had been in England. The sky was low and gray, too, and the only thing that broke the dreary monotony of lifeless color was the formless, darker smear of a birch bluff that rose out of the empty levels. Her heart throbbed unpleasantly fast as the few remaining minutes slipped away. She started when a dingy mass of something that looked like buildings lifted itself above the prairie.

“The Clermont elevators,” said Mrs. Hastings. “We’ll be in directly.”

The mass separated itself into two or three tall component blocks. A huddle of little wooden houses grew into shape beneath them, and a shrill whistle came ringing back above the slowing cars. A willow bluff, half filled with old cans and garbage, flitted by, a big bell began tolling, and Agatha rose when Mrs. Hastings took up her furs from a seat close by. After that, the girl found herself standing on the platform of the car, though she did not quite know how she got there, for she was sensible only of the fact that in another moment or two she would greet the lover whom she had not seen for four years.

Though she paid no great attention to them the surroundings had a depressing effect on her. There was, however, very little to see. The mass of the great elevators that were silhouetted against a lowering sky, the little cluster of houses, and the sea of churned-up mire between them and the track comprised Clermont. There appeared to be no station except a big water tank and a rather unsightly shed, about which stood a group of blurred and shapeless figures. It seemed very cold, and Agatha shivered as she felt the raw wind strike through her.

One of the figures detached itself from the rest and grew clearer. The man wore an old skin coat spattered with flakes of mire, and his long boots were covered with clots of mud. His fur cap looked greasy, and the fur had been rubbed off it in patches. But while Agatha noticed these things it was Hawtrey’s face that struck her most distinctly, and she became conscious of an astonishment which was mixed with vague misgivings as she gazed at it, for it had subtly changed since she had last seen it. The joyous sparkle that she remembered had gone out of the eyes. They were harder, bolder, than they used to be. The mouth was slack—it looked almost sensual—and the man’s whole personality seemed to have grown coarser. As she thrust the disconcerting fancies from her the car stopped.

“SHE WAS CONSCIOUS OF A CERTAIN SHRINKING FROM HIS EMBRACE” Page 107

In another moment Hawtrey sprang up on the platform, and his arms were about her. That brought the blood to her face, but she felt none of the thrill that she had expected. Indeed, she was conscious of a certain shrinking from his embrace. He must have lifted her down, for, when she was next aware of the presence of the friends with whom she had traveled, she stood beside the track with Mrs. Hastings, a man whom she supposed to be Mr. Hastings, Winifred and Wyllard about her. Another man also was standing close by, apparently waiting until they noticed him. He was covered with mire, his skin coat was very dilapidated, and Agatha thought that his boots never had been cleaned. His hair, which had evidently been badly cut, straggled out from under his old fur cap.

Gregory apparently explained something to Mrs. Hastings. “No,” he said, “I’m sorry it can’t be for another week. Horribly unfortunate. It seems they’ve sent the Methodist on down the line, and we’ll have to wait for the Episcopalian. He’ll be at Lander’s for a few days.”

Agatha’s cheeks flamed, for she realized that it was her wedding of which they were speaking; but it brought her a curious relief to hear that it had been deferred. A moment or two later Gregory turned to her with questions about his people in England.

Winifred had separated herself from the group. She was standing near her baggage, which had been flung out beside the track, when Wyllard strode up to her.

“Feeling rather out of it? I do, any way,” he remarked. “Since we appear superfluous, we may as well make the most of the opportunity, especially as it will probably save you a long drive. There’s a man here who wants to see you.”

Winifred had felt forlorn a few moments earlier, but the announcement Wyllard made was reassuring, and she brightened perceptibly as he signaled to a man who was standing a little further along the track. The stranger wore rather good store clothes, and his manner was brisk and wholly business-like. It was a certain relief to the girl to see that he evidently regarded her less as a personality than as a piece of commercial machinery, of which apparently he had been asked to make use. She had found it easier to get on with men who looked upon her as merely part of the office equipment.

“Mr. Hamilton is in charge of the elevator yonder,” explained Wyllard, pointing to one of the huge buildings.

Then he introduced Miss Rawlinson.

The elevator man made her the curtest of bows and proceeded to arrange matters with a rapidity which almost took her breath away.

“Typist and stenographer?” he asked. “Know anything about keeping accounts?”

Winifred admitted that she possessed these qualifications and Hamilton appeared to reflect for a moment or two.

“Well,” he said, “in a fortnight we’ll give you a show. You can start at—” and he mentioned terms which rather astonished Winifred. “If you can keep things straight we may raise you later.”

“Won’t you want to see any testimonials?” she asked.

“No,” answered Hamilton. “I’ve seen a good many and I’m inclined to believe some of the folks who showed them to me must have bought them.” He waved his hand. “Mr. Wyllard assures me that you’ll do, and that’s quite enough for me.”

It struck Winifred as curious that, while Agatha had written to Hawtrey on her behalf, it was Wyllard who had secured her the opportunity for which she had longed.

“There’s another matter,” she said hesitatingly, when she was left with Wyllard, “I’ll have to live here?”

Wyllard smiled. “I’ve seen to that, though if you don’t like my arrangements you can alter them afterwards. Mrs. Sandberg will take you in. She’s a Scotch Calvinist, and even if she isn’t particularly amiable you’ll be in safe hands. We’ll consider it as fixed, but you’re to stay with Mrs. Hastings for a fortnight. Sproatly”—he signed to the man in the skin coat—“will you get Miss Rawlinson’s baggage into your wagon?”

The man took off his fur cap. “If Miss Rawlinson would like to see Mrs. Sandberg, I’ll drive her round,” he suggested. “We’ll catch you in a league or so. Gregory has a bit of patching to do on his off-side trace.”

“He might have had things straight for once,” grumbled Wyllard half-aloud.

Winifred permitted Sproatly to help her into his wagon—a high, narrow-bodied vehicle, mounted on tall, spidery wheels—but she had to hold fast to the seat while they jolted across the track and through a sea of mire into the unpaved street of the little town. She liked Sproatly’s voice and manner, though she was far from prepossessed by his appearance. Two or three minutes later he stopped before a little wooden house, where they were received by a tall, hard-faced woman, who frowned at the man.

“Ye’ll tak’ your patent medicines somewhere else. I’m wanting none,” she said.

Sproatly grinned. “You needn’t be afraid of them. They couldn’t hurt you. I was talking to a Winnipeg doctor who’d a notion of coming out a day or two ago. I told him if he did he’d have to bring an ax along.”

Then he explained that Wyllard had sent Miss Rawlinson there, and the woman favored her with a glance of careful scrutiny.

“Weel,” she said, “ye look quiet, anyway.” She added, as if further satisfied, “I’ll make ye a cup of tea if ye can wait.”

Sproatly assured her that they had not time to accept her hospitality. The girl went into the house for a few moments and returned to the wagon with relief in her face.

“I think I owe Mr. Wyllard a good deal,” she said.

Sproatly laughed. “You’re not exactly unusual in that respect,” he declared as he started the horses. “But you had better hold tight. These beasts are less than half broken.”

He flicked the horses with the whip, and they went across the track at a gallop, hurling great clods of mud left and right, while the group of loungers who still stood about the station raised a shout.

“Got any little pictures with nice motters on them?” asked one, and another flung a piece of information after the jolting wagon.

“There’s a Swede down at Branker’s wants a bottle that will limber up a wooden leg,” he said.

Sproatly grinned, and waved his hands to them before he turned to Winifred.

“We have to get through before dark, if possible, or I’d stop and sell them something sure,” he said. “Parts of the trail further on are simply horrible.”

It occurred to Winifred that the road was far from good as it was, for spouts of mud flew up beneath the sinking hoofs and wheels, and she was already unpleasantly spattered.

“You think you would have succeeded making a sale?” she asked with amusement in her eyes.

“Oh, yes,” Sproatly answered confidently. “If I couldn’t plant something on to them when they’d given me a lead like that, I’d be no use in this business. At present, my command of Western phraseology is my fortune.”

“You sell things, then?”

Sproatly pointed to two big boxes in the bottom of the wagon. “Anything from cough cure to hair restorer, besides a general purpose elixir that’s specially prepared for me. It’s adaptable to any complaint and season. All you have to do”—and he lowered his voice confidently—“is to put on a different label.”

Winifred laughed when she met his eyes.

“What happens to the people who buy it?” she inquired.

“Most of them are bachelors, and tough. They’ve stood their own cooking so long that they ought to be impervious to anything, and if anybody’s really sick I hold off and tell him to wait until he can get a doctor. A sensitive conscience,” he added reflectively, “is quite a handicap in this business.”

“You have always been in it?” asked Winifred.

“No,” replied Sproatly, “although you mightn’t believe it, I was raised with the idea that I should have my choice between the Church and the Bar. The idea, however, proved—impracticable—which is rather a pity. It has seemed to me that a man who can work off cough cures and cosmetics on to healthy folks and talk a scoffer off the field, ought to have made his mark in either calling.”

He looked at her as if for confirmation of this view, but Winifred, who laughed again, glanced at the two wagons that, several miles away, moved across the gray-white sweep of prairie.

“Shall we overtake them?” she asked.

“We’ll probably come up with Gregory. I’m not sure about Wyllard.”

“He drives faster horses?”

“That’s not quite the reason. Gregory has patched up one trace with a bit of string, and odd bolts are rather addicted to coming out of his wagon. Sometimes it makes trouble. I’ve known the team to leave him sitting on the prairie, thinking of endearing names for them, while they came home with the pole.”

“Does he generally let things fall into that state?”

Sproatly was evidently on his guard.

“Well,” he rejoined, “it’s certainly that kind of wagon.”

He flicked the team again, and the jolting rendered it difficult for Winifred to ask any more questions. The prairie sod was soft with the thaw, and big lumps of it stuck to the wheels, which every now and then plunged into ruts the other vehicles had made.

In the meanwhile, Agatha and Hawtrey had found it almost impossible to sustain a conversation. It was a relief to the girl to be able to sit silent and observant beside the man whom she had promised to marry. The string-patched trace still held, and the wagon pole was a new one. The white grass was tussocky and long, and the trail here and there had been churned into quagmire. Hawtrey had packed the thick driving-robe high about Agatha and had slipped one arm about her waist beneath it; but she was conscious that she rather suffered this than derived any satisfaction from it. She strove to assure herself that she was jaded with the journey, which was, in fact, the case, and that the lowering sky, and the cheerless waste they were crossing, had occasioned the dejection that she felt. There was not a tree upon the vast sweep of bleached grass which ran all around her to the horizon. It was inexpressibly lonely, a lifeless desolation, with only the plowed-up trail to show that man had ever traversed it. The raw wind which came across the prairie set her shivering.

She was forced, however, to admit that her weariness and the dreary surroundings did not quite explain everything. Gregory’s first embrace had brought her no happiness, and now the close pressure of his arm left her quite unmoved. This was disconcerting; but while she would admit no definite reason for it, there was creeping upon her a vague consciousness that the man beside her was not the one of whom she had so often thought in England. He seemed different—almost, in fact, a stranger—though she could not exactly tell where the change in him began. His laughter jarred upon her. Some of the things he said appeared almost inane, and others were tinged with a self-confidence that did not become him. It seemed to her that he was shallow and lacking in comprehension. Once she found herself comparing him with another man. She broke off that train of thought abruptly, and once more endeavored to find the explanation in herself. Weariness had produced this captious, hypercritical fit, and by and by she would become used to him, she said.

Hawtrey was, at least, not effusive, for which she was thankful. When they reached a smoother stretch of road he began to talk of England.

“I suppose you saw a good deal of my folks when you were at the Grange,” he said.

“No,” answered Agatha, “I saw them once or twice.”

“Ah!” he replied, with a trace of sharpness, “then they were not particularly agreeable?”

It seemed to Agatha that he was tactless in suggesting anything of the kind, but she replied candidly.

“One could hardly go quite so far as that,” she told him. “Still, I couldn’t help a feeling that it was rather an effort for them to be gracious to me.”

“They did what they could to make things pleasant when they were first told of our engagement.”

Agatha was too weary to be altogether on her guard. His relatives’ attitude had wounded her, and she answered without reflection.

“I have fancied that was because they never quite believed it would lead to anything.”

She knew this was the truth now, though it was the first time the explanation had occurred to her. Gregory’s relatives, who were naturally acquainted with his character, had not expected him to carry out his promise. She felt that she had been injudicious in what she told him when she heard his harsh laugh.

“I’m afraid they never had a very great opinion of me,” he remarked.

“Then,” said Agatha, looking up at him, “it will be our business to prove them wrong; but I can’t help feeling that you have undertaken a big responsibility, Gregory. There must be so much that I ought to do, and I know so little about your work in this country.” She turned, and glanced with a shiver at the dim, white prairie. “The land looks so forbidding and unyielding. It must be very hard to turn it into wheat fields—to break it in.”

It was merely a hint of what she felt, and it was rather a pity that Hawtrey, who lacked imagination, usually contented himself with the most obvious meaning of the spoken word. Things might have gone differently had he responded with comprehending sympathy.

“Oh,” he said, with a laugh that changed her mood, “you’ll learn, and I don’t suppose it will matter a great deal if you don’t do it quickly. Somehow or other one worries through.”

She felt that this was insufficient, though she remembered that his haphazard carelessness had once appealed to her. Now she realized that to undertake a thing light-heartedly was a very different matter from carrying it out successfully. Then it once more occurred to her that she was becoming absurdly hypercritical, and she strove to talk of other things.

She did not find it easy, nor, though he made the effort, did Hawtrey. There was a restraint upon him, for when he first saw her he had been struck by the change in the girl. She was graver than he remembered her, and, it seemed, very much more reserved. He had tried and failed, as he thought of it, to strike any response in her. He became uneasily conscious that he could not talk to her as he could to Sally Creighton. There was something wanting in him or her, but he could not at the moment tell what it was. Still, he assured himself, things would be different next day, for the girl was evidently very tired.

The creeping dusk settled down upon the wilderness. The horizon narrowed, and the stretch of grass before them grew dim. The trail they now drove into grew rapidly rougher, and it was quite dark when they came to the brink of a declivity still at least a league from the Hastings homestead. It was one of the steep ravines that seam the prairie. A birch bluff rose on either side, and a little creek flowed through the hollow.

Hawtrey swung the whip when they reached the top, and the team plunged furiously down the slope. He straightened himself in his seat with both hands on the reins, and Agatha held her breath when she felt the light vehicle tilt as the wheels on one side sank deep in a rut. Something seemed to crack, and she saw the off horse stumble and plunge. The other horse flung its head up, Hawtrey shouted something, and there was a great smashing and snapping of undergrowth and fallen branches as they drove in among the birches. The team stopped, and Hawtrey, who sprang down, floundered noisily among the undergrowth, while another thud of hoofs and rattle of wheels grew louder behind them up the trail. In a minute or two Hawtrey came back and lifted Agatha down.

“It’s the trace broken. I had to make the holes with my knife, and the string’s torn through,” he explained. “Voltigeur got it round his feet, and, as usual, tried to bolt. We’ll make the others pull up and take you in.”

They went back to the trail together, and reached it just as Hastings reined in his team. Hastings got down and walked back with Hawtrey to the stalled wagon. It was a minute or two before they reappeared again, and Mrs. Hastings, who had alighted, drew Hawtrey aside.

“I almost think it would be better if you didn’t come any further to-night,” she said.

“Why?” Gregory asked sharply.

“I can’t help thinking that Agatha would prefer it. For one thing, she’s rather jaded, and wants quiet.”

“You feel sure of that?”

There was something in the man’s voice which suggested that he was not quite satisfied, and Mrs. Hastings was silent a moment.

“It’s good advice, Gregory,” she said. “She’ll be better able to face the situation after a night’s rest.”

“Does it require much facing?” Hawtrey asked dryly.

Mrs. Hastings turned from him with a sign of impatience. “Of course it does. Anyway, if you’re wise you’ll do what I suggest, and ask no more questions.”

Then she got into the wagon, and Hawtrey stood still beside the trail, feeling unusually thoughtful as they drove away.

CHAPTER XI

AGATHA’S DECISION

It was with an expectancy which was toned down by misgivings that Hawtrey drove over to the homestead where Agatha was staying the next afternoon. The misgivings were not unnatural, for he had been chilled by the girl’s reception of him on the previous day, and her manner afterwards had, he felt, left something to be desired. Indeed, when she drove away with Mrs. Hastings, he had considered himself an injured man.

His efforts to mend the harness, and extricate the wagon in the dark, which occupied him for an hour, had helped partly to drive the matter from his mind, and when he reached his homestead rather late that night he went to sleep, and slept soundly until sunrise. Hawtrey was a man who never brooded over his troubles beforehand, and this was one reason why he did not always cope with them successfully when they could no longer be avoided.

When he had eaten his breakfast, however, he became sensible of a certain pique against both Mrs. Hastings and Agatha. In planning for the day he was forced to remember that he had no hired man, and that there was a good deal to be done. He decided that it might be well to wait until the afternoon before he called on Agatha, and for several hours he drove his team through the crackling stubble. His doubts and irritation grew weaker as he worked, and when, later, he drove into sight of the Hastings homestead, his buoyant temperament was beginning to reassert itself. Clear sunshine streamed down upon the prairie out of a vault of cloudless blue, and he felt that any faint shadow that might have arisen between him and the girl could be readily swept away. He was a little less sure of this when he saw Agatha, who sat near an open window, in a scantily furnished match-boarded room. She had not slept at all. Her eyes were heavy, but there was a look of resolution in them which seemed out of place just then, and it struck him that she had lost the freshness which had been her distinguishing charm in England.

She rose when he came in, and then, to his astonishment, drew back a pace or two when he moved impulsively towards her.

“No,” she said, with a hand raised restrainingly, “you must hear what I have to say, and try to bear with me. It is a little difficult, Gregory, but it must be said at once.”

Gregory stood still, gazing at her with consternation in his face, and for a moment she looked steadily at him. It was a painful moment, for she was gifted with a clearness of vision which she almost longed to be delivered from. She saw that the impression which had brought her a vague sense of dismay on the previous afternoon was wrong. The trouble was that he had not changed at all. He was what he had always been, and she had merely deceived herself when she had permitted her girlish fancy to endow him with qualities and graces which he had never possessed. There was, however, no doubt that she had still a duty toward him.

He spoke first with a trace of hardness in his voice.

“Then,” he rejoined, “won’t you sit down? This is naturally a little—embarrassing—but I’ll try to listen.”

Agatha sank into a seat by the open window, for she felt physically worn out, and before her there was a task from which she shrank.

“Gregory,” she began, “I feel that we have come near making what might prove to be a horrible mistake.”

“We?” repeated Hawtrey, while the blood rose into his weather-darkened face. “That means both of us.”

“Yes,” asserted Agatha, with a steadiness that cost her an effort.

Hawtrey went a step nearer to her. “Do you want me to admit that I’ve made a mistake.”

“Are you quite sure you haven’t?”

She flung the question at him sharply with tense apprehension, for, after all, if Gregory was sure of himself, there was only one course open to her. He leaned upon the table, gazing at her, and as he studied her face his indignation melted, and doubts crept into his mind.

She looked weary, and grave, almost haggard, and it was a fresh, light-hearted girl with whom he had fallen in love in England. The mark of the last two years of struggle was plain on her. He tried to realize what he had looked for when he had asked her to marry him, and could not get a clear conception of his vision. In the back of his mind was a half-formulated idea that he had dreamed of a cheerful companion, somebody to amuse him. She scarcely seemed likely to be entertaining now.

Gregory was not a man who could face a crisis collectedly, and his thoughts became confused until one idea emerged from them. He had pledged himself to her, and the fact laid a certain obligation upon him. It was his part to overrule any fancies she might be disposed to indulge in.

“Well,” he said stoutly, “I’m not going to admit anything of that kind. The journey has been too much for you. You haven’t got over it yet.” He lowered his voice, and his face softened. “Aggy, dear, I’ve waited four years for you.”

His words stirred her, for they were certainly true, and his gentleness had also its effect. The situation was becoming more and more difficult, since it seemed impossible to make him understand that he would in all probability speedily tire of her. To make it clear that she could never be satisfied with him was a thing from which she shrank.

“How have you passed those four years?” she asked, to gain time.

For a moment his conscience smote him. He remembered the trips to Winnipeg, and the dances to which he had escorted Sally Creighton. It was, however, evident that Agatha could have heard nothing of Sally.

“I spent them in hard work. I wanted to make the place comfortable for you,” he answered. “It is true”—and he added this with a twinge of uneasiness, as he remembered that his neighbors had done much more with less incentive—“that it’s still very far from what I would like, but things have been against me.”

The speech had a far stronger effect than he could have expected, for Agatha remembered Wyllard’s description of what the prairie farmer had to face. Those four years of determined effort and patient endurance, as she pictured them, counted heavily against her in the man’s favor. It flashed upon her that, after all, there might have been some warrant for the view that she had held of Gregory’s character when he had fallen in love with her. He was younger then. There must have been latent possibilities in him, but the years of toil had killed them and hardened him. It was for her sake he had made the struggle, and now it seemed unthinkable that she should renounce him because he came to her with the dust and stain of it upon him. For all that, she was possessed with a feeling that she would involve them both in disaster if she yielded. Something warned her that she must stand firm.

“Gregory,” she said, “I seem to know that we should both be sorry afterwards if I kept my promise.”

Hawtrey straightened himself with a smile that she recognized. She had liked him for it once, for it had then suggested the joyous courage of untainted youth. Now, however, it struck her as merely hinting at empty, complacent assurance. She hated herself for the fancy, but it would not be driven away.

“Well,” he replied, “I’m quite willing to face that hazard. I suppose this diffidence is only natural, Aggy, but it’s a little hard on me.”

“No,” replied the girl with emphasis, “it’s horribly unnatural, and that’s why I’m afraid. I should have come to you gladly, without a misgiving, feeling that nothing could hurt me if I was with you. I wanted to do that, Gregory—I meant to—but I can’t.” Then her voice fell to a tone that had vibrant regret in it. “You should have made sure—you should have married me when you last came home.”

“But I’d nowhere to take you. The farm was only half-broken prairie, the homestead almost unhabitable.”

Agatha winced at this. It was, no doubt, true, but it seemed horribly petty and commonplace. His comprehension stopped at such details as these, and he had given her no credit for the courage which would have made light of bodily discomfort.

“Do you think that would have mattered? We were both very young then, and we could have faced our troubles and grown up together. Now we’re not the same. You let me grow up alone.”

Hawtrey shrugged his shoulders. “I haven’t changed,” he told her as she looked at him with deep-seeing eyes.

He contented himself with that, and Agatha grew more resolute. There was not a spark of imagination in him, scarcely even a spark of the passion which, if it had been strong enough, might have swept her away in spite of her shrinking. He was a man of comely presence, whimsical, and quick, as she remembered, at light badinage, but when there was a crisis to be grappled with he somehow failed. His graces were on the surface. There was no depth in him.

“Aggy,” he added humbly, when he should have been dominant and forceful, “it is only a question of a little time. You will get used to me.”

“Then,” pleaded the girl, who clutched at the chance of respite, “give me six months from to-day. It isn’t very much to ask, Gregory.”

Gregory wrinkled his brows. “It’s a great deal,” he answered slowly. “I feel that we shall drift further and further apart if once I let you go.”

“Then you feel that we have drifted a little already?”

“I don’t know what has come over you, Aggy, but there has been a change. I’m what I was, and I want to keep you.”

Agatha rose and turned towards him a white face. “If you are wise you will not urge me now,” she said.

Hawtrey met her gaze for a moment, and then made a sign of acquiescence as he turned his eyes away. He recognized that this was a new Agatha, one whose will was stronger than his. Yet he was astonished that he had yielded so readily.

“Well,” he agreed, “if it must be, I can only give way to you, but I must be free to come over here whenever I wish.” Suddenly a thought struck him. “But you may hare to go away,” he added, with sudden concern. “If I am to wait six months, what are you to do in the meanwhile?”

Agatha smiled wearily. Now that the respite had been granted her, the question he had raised was not one that caused her any great concern.

“Oh,” she answered, “we can think of that later. I have borne enough to-day. This has been a little hard upon me, Gregory.”

“I don’t think it has been particularly easy for either of us,” returned Hawtrey, with grimness. “Anyway, it seems that I’m only distressing you.” There was a baffled, puzzled look in his face. “Naturally, this is so unexpected that I don’t know what to say. I’ll come back when I feel I’ve grasped the situation.”

Taking one of her hands, he stooped and kissed her cheek.

“My dear,” he said, “I only want to make it as easy as I can. You’ll try to think of me favorably.”

He went out and left her sitting beside the open window. A warm breeze swept into the room; outside a blaze of sunshine rested on the prairie. The ground about the house was torn up with wheel ruts, for the wooden building rose abruptly without fence or garden from the waste of whitened grass. Close to the house stood a birch-log barn or stables, its sides curiously ridged and furrowed where the trunks were laid on one another. Further away rose a long building of sod, and a great shapeless yellow mound with a domed top towered behind it. It was most unlike a trim English rick, and Agatha wondered what it could be. As a matter of fact, it was a not uncommon form of granary, the straw from the last thrashing flung over a birch-pole framing. Behind it ran a great breadth of knee-high stubble, blazing ocher and cadmium in the sunlight. It had evidently extended further than it did, for a blackened space showed where a fire had been lighted to destroy it. In the big field Hastings was plowing. Clad in blue duck he plodded behind his horses, which stopped now and then when the share jarred against a patch of still frozen soil. Further on two other men, silhouetted in blue against the whitened grass, drove spans of slowly moving oxen that hauled big breaker plows, and the lines of clods that lengthened behind them gleamed in the sunlight a rich chocolate-brown. Beyond them the wilderness ran unbroken to the horizon.

Agatha gazed at it all vacantly, but the newness and strangeness of it reacted upon her. She felt very desolate and lonely, but she remembered that she must still grapple with a practical difficulty. She could not stay with Mrs. Hastings indefinitely, and she had not the least notion where to go or what she was to do. She was leaning back in her chair wearily with half-closed eyes when her hostess came in and looked at her with a smile that suggested comprehension. Mrs. Hastings was thin, and seemed a trifle worn, but she had shrewd, kindly eyes. She wore a plain print dress which was dusted here and there with flour.

“So you have sent him away!” she exclaimed.

It was borne in upon Agatha that she could be candid with this woman who had already guessed the truth.

“Yes,” she replied, “for six months. That is, we are not to decide on anything until they have passed. I felt we must get used to each other. It seemed best.”

“To you. Did it seem best to Gregory?”

A flush crept into Agatha’s face. Though his acquiescence had been a relief to her, she felt that he might have made a more vigorous protest.

“He gave in to me,” she answered.

Mrs. Hastings looked thoughtful. “Well,” she observed, “I believe you were wise, but that opens up another question. What are you going to do in the meanwhile?”

“I don’t know,” confessed Agatha apathetically. “I suppose I shall have to go away—to Winnipeg, most probably. I could teach, I think.”

“How are you and Gregory to get used to each other if you go away?”

Agatha made a helpless gesture. “I hadn’t looked at it in that light.”

“Are you very anxious to get used to him?”

Agatha shrank from the question; but there was a constraining kindliness in the older woman’s eyes.

“I daren’t quite think about it yet. I mean to try. I must try. I seem to be playing an utterly contemptible, selfish part, but I could not marry him—now!”

Mrs. Hastings crossed the room, and sat down by her side.

“My dear,” she said, “as I told you, I think you are doing right, and I believe I know how you feel. Everybody prophesied disaster when I came out to join Allen from a sheltered home in Montreal, and at the beginning my life here was not easy to me. It was all so different, and there were times when I was afraid, and my heart was horribly heavy. If it hadn’t been for Allen I think I should have given in and broken down. He understood, however. He never failed me.”

Agatha’s eyes grew misty, and she turned her head away.

“Yes,” she replied, “that would make it wonderfully easier.”

“You must forgive me,” apologized Mrs. Hastings. “I was tactless, but I didn’t mean to hurt you. Well, one difficulty shouldn’t give us very much trouble. Why shouldn’t you stay here with me?”

Agatha turned towards her abruptly with a look of relief in her face, which faded quickly. She liked this woman, and she liked her husband, but she remembered that she had no claim on them.

“Oh,” she declared, “it is out of the question.”

“Wait a little. I’m proposing to give you quite as much as you will probably care to do. There are my two little girls to teach, and I think they have rather taken to you. I can scarcely find a minute for their lessons, and, as you have seen, there is a piano which has only a few of the keys broken. Besides, we have only one Scandinavian maid who smashes everything that isn’t made of indurated fiber, and I’m afraid she’ll marry one of the boys in a month or two. It was only by sending the kiddies to Brandon and getting Mrs. Creighton, a neighbor of ours, to look after Allen, who insisted on my going, that I was able to get to Paris with some Montreal friends. In any case, you’d have no end of duties.”

“You are doing this out of—charity!”

Mrs. Hastings laughed. “A week or two ago, Allen wrote to some friends of his in Winnipeg asking them to send me anybody.”

The girl’s eyes shone mistily. “Oh!” she cried, “you have lifted one weight off my mind.”

“I think,” observed Mrs. Hastings, “the others will also be removed in due time.”

After that she talked cheerfully of other matters, and Agatha listened to her with a vague wonder at her own good fortune in falling in with such a friend.

There are in that country many men and women who are unfettered by conventions. They stretch out an open hand to the stranger and the outcast. Toil has brought them charity in place of hardness, and still retaining, as some of them do, the culture of the cities, they have outgrown all the petty bonds of caste. The wheat-grower and the hired-man eat together. Rights are good-humoredly conceded in place of being fought for, and the sense of grievance and half-veiled suspicion common elsewhere among employes are exchanged for an efficient co-operation. It must, however, be admitted that there are also farmers of another kind, from whom the hired man has occasionally some difficulty in extracting his covenanted wages by personal violence.

The two women had been talking a long time when a team and a jolting wagon swept into sight, and Mrs. Hastings rose as the man who drove pulled up his horses.

“It’s Sproatly; I wonder what has brought him here,” she remarked.

The man sprang down from the wagon and walked towards the house. She gazed at him almost incredulously.

“He’s quite smart,” she added. “I don’t see a single patch on that jacket, and he has positively got his hair cut.”

“Is that an unusual thing in Mr. Sproatly’s case?” Agatha inquired.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Hastings. “It’s very unusual indeed. What is stranger still, he has taken the old grease-spotted band off his hat, after clinging to it affectionately for the last twelve months.”

Agatha thought that the soft hat, which fell shapelessly over part of Sproatly’s face, needed something to replace the discarded band; but in another moment he entered the room. He shook hands with them both.

“You are looking remarkably fresh, but appearances are not invariably to be depended on, and it’s advisable to keep the system up to par,” he said with a smile. “I suppose you don’t want a tonic of any kind?”

“I don’t,” declared Mrs. Hastings resolutely; “Allen doesn’t, either. Besides, didn’t you get into some trouble over that tonic?”

“It was the cough cure,” explained Sproatly with a grin. “I sold a man at Lander’s one of the large-sized bottles, and when he had taken some he felt a good deal better. Then he seems to have argued the thing out like this: if one dose had relieved the cough, a dozen should drive it out of him altogether, and he took the lot. He slept for forty-eight hours afterward, and when I came across him at the settlement he attacked me with a club. The fault, I may point out, was in his logic. Perhaps you would like some pictures. I’ve a rather striking oleograph of the Kaiser. It must be like him, for two of his subjects recognized it. One hung it up in his shanty; the other asked me to hold it out, and then pitched a stove billet through the middle of it. He, however, produced his dollar; he said he felt so much better after what he’d done that he didn’t grudge it.”

“I’m afraid we’re not worth powder and shot,” said Mrs. Hastings. “Do you ever remember our buying any tonics or pictures from you?”

“I don’t, though I have felt that you ought to have done it.” Sproatly, who paused a moment, turned towards Agatha with a little whimsical bow. “The professional badinage of an unlicensed dealer in patent medicines may now and then mercifully cover a good deal of embarrassment. Miss Ismay has brought something pleasantly characteristic of the Old Country along with her.”

His hostess disregarded the last remark. “Then if you didn’t expect to sell us anything, what did you come for?”

“For supper,” answered Sproatly cheerfully. “Besides that, to take Miss Rawlinson out for a drive. I told her last night it would afford me considerable pleasure to show her the prairie. We could go round by Lander’s and back.”

“Then you will probably come across her somewhere about the straw-pile with the kiddies.”

Sproatly took the hint, and when he went out Mrs. Hastings laughed.

“You would hardly suppose that was a young man of excellent education!” she exclaimed. “So it’s on Winifred’s account he has driven over; at first I fancied it was on yours.”

Agatha was astonished, but she smiled. “If Winifred favors him with her views about young men he will probably be rather sorry for himself. He lives near you?”

“No,” said Mrs. Hastings. “In the summer he lives in his wagon, or under it, I don’t know which. Of course, if he’s really taken with Winifred he will have to alter that.”

“But he has only seen her once—you can’t mean that he is serious.”

“I really can’t speak for Sproatly, but it would be quite in keeping with the customs of the country if he was.”

A minute or two later Agatha saw Winifred in the wagon when it reappeared from behind the straw-pile, and Mrs. Hastings turned toward the window.

“She has gone with him,” she commented significantly. “Unfortunately, he has taken my kiddies too. If he brings them back with no bones broken it will be a relief to me.”

CHAPTER XII

WANDERERS

Agatha had spent a month with Mrs. Hastings. When they were driving over to Wyllard’s homestead one afternoon, the older woman pulled up her team while they were still some little distance away from their destination, and looked about her with evident interest. On the one hand, a vast breadth of torn-up loam ran back across the prairie, which was now faintly flecked with green. On the other, plowing teams were scattered here and there across the tussocky sod, and long lines of clods that flashed where the sunlight struck their facets trailed out behind them. The great sweep of grasses that rustled joyously before a glorious warm wind, gleamed luminously, and overhead hung a vault of blue without a cloud in it. Trailing out across it, flocks of birds moved up from the south.

“Harry is sowing a very big crop this year, and most of it on fall back-set,” she observed. “He has, however, horses enough to do that kind of thing, and, of course, he does it thoroughly.” She glanced toward the place where the teams were hauling unusually heavy plows through the grassy sod. “This is virgin prairie that he’s breaking, and he’ll probably put oats on it. They ripen quicker. He ought to be a rich man after harvest unless the frost comes, or the market goes against him. Some of his neighbors, including my husband, would have sown a little less and held a reserve in hand.”

Agatha remembered what Wyllard had told her one night on board the Scarrowmania, and smiled, for she fancied that she understood the man. He was not one to hedge, as she had heard it called, or cautiously hold his hand. He staked boldly, but she felt that this was not only for the sake of the money that he might hope to gain. It was part of his nature—the result of an optimistic faith or courage that appealed to her, and sheer love of effort. She also guessed that his was not a spasmodic, impulsive activity. She could imagine him holding on as steadfastly with everything against him, exacting all that men and teams and machines could do. It struck her as curious that she should feel so sure of this; but she admitted that it was the case.

Sitting in the driving-seat of a big machine that ripped broad furrows through the crackling sod, he was approaching them. Four horses plodded wearily in front of the giant plow until he thrust one hand over, and there was a rattle and clanking as he swung them and the machine around beside the wagon. Then he got down, and stood smiling up at Agatha with his soft hat in his hand and the sunlight falling full upon his weather-darkened face. It was not a particularly striking face, but there was something in it, a hint of restrained force and steadfastness, she thought, which Gregory’s did not possess, and for a moment or two she watched him covertly.

He wore an old blue shirt, open at the throat and belted into trousers of blue duck, and she noticed the fine symmetry of his spare figure. The absence of any superfluous flesh struck her as in keeping with her view of his character. The man was well-endowed physically; but apart from the strong vitality that was expressed in every line of his pose he looked clean, as she vaguely described it to herself. There was an indefinable something about him that was apparently born of a simple, healthful life spent in determined labor in the open air. It became plainer, as she remembered other men upon whom the mark of the beast was unmistakably set. Mrs. Hastings broke the silence.

“Well,” she said, “we have driven over as we promised. I’ve no doubt you will give us supper, but we’ll go on and sit with Mrs. Nansen in the meanwhile. I expect you’re too busy to talk to us.”

Wyllard laughed, and it occurred to Agatha that his laugh was wholesome as well as pleasant.

“I generally am busy,” he admitted. “These horses have been at it since sun-up, and they’re rather played out now. I’ll talk to you as long as you will let me after supper, which will soon be ready.”

Agatha noticed that though the near horse’s coat was foul with dust and sweat he laid his brown hand upon it, and it seemed to her that the gentleness with which he did it was very suggestive.

Mrs. Hastings, who had been scrutinizing the field, asked, “What’s to be the result of all this plowing if we have harvest frost or the market goes against you?”

“Quite a big deficit,” answered Wyllard cheerfully.

“And that doesn’t cause you any anxiety?”

“I’ll have had some amusement for my money.”

Mrs. Hastings turned to Agatha. “He calls working from sunrise until it’s dark, and afterwards now and then, amusement!” She looked back at Wyllard. “I believe it isn’t quite easy for you to hold your back as straight as you are doing, and that off-horse certainly looks as if it wanted to lie down.”

Wyllard laughed. “It won’t until after supper, anyway. There are two more rows of furrows still to do.”

“I suppose that is a hint!” Mrs. Hastings glanced at Agatha when the wagon jolted on.

“That man,” she said, “is a great favorite of mine. For one thing, he’s fastidious, though he’s fortunately very far from perfect in some respects. He has a red-hot temper, which now and then runs away with him.”

“What do you mean by fastidious?”

“It’s a little difficult to define, but I certainly don’t mean pernicketty. Of course, there is a fastidiousness which makes one shrink from unpleasant things, but Harry’s is the other kind. It impels him to do them every now and then.”

Agatha made no answer. She was uneasily conscious that it might not be advisable to think too much about this man, and in another minute or two they reached the homestead. The house was a plain frame building that had grown out of an older and smaller one of logs, part of which remained. It was much the same with the barns and stables, for, while they were stoutly built of framed timber or logs, one end of most of them was lower than the rest, and in some cases consisted of poles and sods. Even to her untrained eyes all she saw suggested order, neatness, and efficiency. The whole was flanked and sheltered by a big birch bluff, in which trunks and branches showed through a thin green haze of tiny opening leaves.

A man whom Wyllard had sent after them took the horses.

Agatha commented on what she called the added-to look of the buildings.

“The Range,” said Mrs. Hastings, “has grown rapidly since Harry took hold. The old part represents the high-water mark of his father’s efforts. Of course,” she added reflectively, “Harry has had command of some capital since a relative of his died, but I never thought that explained everything.”

They entered the house, and a gray-haired Swedish woman led them through several match-boarded rooms into a big, cool hall. She left them there for a while, and Agatha was absorbed for a minute or two with her impressions of the house. It was singularly empty by comparison with the few English homesteads that she had seen. There were no curtains nor carpets nor hangings of any kind, but it was commodious and comfortable.

“What can a bachelor want with a place like this?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” answered Mrs. Hastings; “perhaps it’s Harry’s idea of having everything proportionate. The Range is quite a big, and generally a prosperous, farm. Besides, it’s likely that he doesn’t contemplate remaining a bachelor forever. Indeed, Allen and I sometimes wonder how he has escaped marriage for so long.”

“Is ‘escaped’ the right word?” Agatha asked.

“It is,” asserted Mrs. Hastings with a laugh. “You see, he’s highly eligible from our point of view, but at the same time he’s apparently invulnerable. I believe,” she added dryly, “that’s the right word, too.”

The Swedish housekeeper appeared again and they talked with her until she went to bring in the six o’clock supper. Soon after the table was laid Wyllard and the men came in. Wyllard was attired as when Agatha had last seen him, except that he had put on a coat. He led his guests to the head of the long table, but the men—there were a number of them—sat below, and evidently had no diffidence about addressing question or comment to their employer.

The men ate with a voracious haste, but that appeared to be the custom of the country, and Agatha could find no great fault with their manners or conversation. The talk was, for the most part, quaintly witty, and some of the men used what struck her as remarkably fitting and original similes. Indeed, as the meal proceeded, she became curiously interested.

The windows were open wide, and a sweet, warm air swept into the barely furnished room. The spaciousness of the room impressed her, and she was pleased with the evident unity of these brown-faced, strong-armed toilers with their leader. At the head of the table he sat, self-contained, but courteous and responsive to all alike, and though they were in an essentially democratic country, she felt that there was something almost feudal in the relations between him and his men. She could not imagine them to be confined to the mere exaction of so much labor and the expectation of payment of wages due. She was pleased that he had not changed his clothing.

So strong was Agatha’s interest that she was surprised when the meal was finished. Afterward, she and Mrs. Hastings talked with the housekeeper for a while, and an hour had slipped away when Wyllard suggested that he should show her the slough beyond the bluff.

“It’s the nearest approach to a lake we have until you get to the alkali tract,” he said.

Agatha went with him through the shadow of the wood, and when they came out among the trees he found her a seat upon a fallen birch. The house and plowing were hidden now, and they were alone on the slope to a slight hollow, in which half a mile of gleaming water lay. Its surface was broken here and there by tussocks of grass and reeds, and beyond it the prairie ran back unbroken, a dim gray waste, to the horizon. The sun had dipped behind the bluff, and the sky had become a vast green transparency. There was no wind now, but a wonderful exhilarating freshness crept into the cooling air, and the stillness was broken only by the clamor of startled wildfowl which Agatha could see paddling in clusters about the gleaming slough.

“Those are ducks—wild ones?” she asked.

“Yes,” answered Wyllard; “ducks of various kinds. Most of them the same as your English ones.”

“Do you shoot them?”

Agatha was not greatly interested, but he seemed disposed to silence, and she felt, for no very clear reason, that it was advisable to talk of something.

“No,” he said, “not often, anyway. If Mrs. Nansen wants a couple I crawl down to the long grass with the rifle and get them for her.”

“The rifle? Doesn’t the big bullet destroy them?”

“No,” returned Wyllard. “You have to shoot their head off or cut their neck in two.”

“You can do that—when they’re right out in the slough?” asked Agatha, who had learned that it is much more difficult to shoot with a rifle than a shotgun, which spreads its charge.

Wyllard smiled. “Generally; that is, if I haven’t been doing much just before. It depends upon one’s hands. We have our game laws, but as a rule nobody worries about them, and, anyway, those birds won’t nest until they reach the tundra by the Polar Sea. Still, as I said, we never shoot them unless Mrs. Nansen wants one or two for the pot.”

“Why?”

“I don’t quite know. For one thing, they’re worn out; they just stop here to rest.”

His answer appealed to the girl. It did not seem strange to her that the love of the lower creation should be strong in this man, who had no hesitation in admitting that the game laws were no restraint to him. When these Lesser Brethren, worn with their journey, sailed down out of the blue heavens, he believed in giving them right of sanctuary.

“They have come a long way?” she asked.

Wyllard pointed towards the south. “From Florida, Cuba, Yucatan; further than that, perhaps. In a day or two they’ll push on again toward the Pole, and others will take their places. There’s a further detachment arriving now.”

Looking up, Agatha saw a straggling wedge of birds dotted in dusky specks against the vault of transcendental blue. The wedge coalesced, drew out again, and dropped swiftly, and the air was filled with the rush of wings; then there was a harsh crying and splashing, and she heard the troubled water lap among the reeds until deep silence closed in upon the slough again.

“The migrating instinct is strangely interesting,” she said.

A curious look crept into Wyllard’s eyes.

“It gives the poor birds a sad destiny, I think; they’re wanderers and strangers without a habitation; there’s unrest in them. After a few months on the tundra mosses to gather strength and teach the young to fly, they’ll unfold their wings to beat another passage before the icy gales. Some of us, I think, are like them!”

Agatha could not avoid the personal application.

“You surely don’t apply that to yourself,” she said. “You certainly have a habitation—the finest, isn’t it, on this part of the prairie?”

“Yes,” answered Wyllard slowly; “I suppose it is. I’ve now had a little rest and quietness too.”

His last remark did not appear to call for an answer, and Agatha sat silent.

“Still,” he went on reflectively, “I have a feeling that some day the call will come, and I shall have to take the trail again.” He paused, and looked at her before he added, “It would be easier if one hadn’t to go alone, or, since that would be necessary, if one had at least something to come back to when the journey was done.”

“Must you heed the call?” asked Agatha, who was puzzled by his steady gaze.

“Yes,” he said with gravity, “the call will come from the icy North if it ever comes at all.”

There was another brief silence. Agatha wondered what he was thinking of, but he soon told her.

“I remember how I came back from there last time,” he said. “We were rather late that season, and out of our usual beat when the gale broke upon us in the gateway of the Pole, between Alaska and Asia. We ran before it with a strip of the boom-foresail on one vessel and a jib that blew to ribands every now and then. The schooner was small, ninety tons or so, and for a week she scudded with the gray seas tumbling after her, white-topped, out of the snow and spume. The waves ranged high above her taffrail, curling horribly, but one did not want to look at them. The one man on deck had a line about him, and he looked ahead, watching the vessel screwing round with hove-up bows as she climbed the seas. If he’d let her fall off or claw up, the next wave would have made an end of her. He was knee-deep half the time in icy brine, and his hands had split and opened with the frost, but the sweat dripped from him as he clung to the jarring wheel. The helmsmen had another trouble which preyed on them. They were thinking of the three men they had left behind.

“Well,” he added, “we ran out of the gale, and I had bitter words to face when we reached Vancouver. As one result of the trouble I walked out of the city with four or five dollars in my pocket—though there was a share due to me. Then in an open car I rode up into the ranges to mend railroad bridges in the frost and snow. It was not the kind of home-coming one would care to look forward to.”

“Ah!” Agatha cried with a shudder, “it must have been horribly dreary.”

The man met her eyes. “Yes,” he said, “you—know. You came here from far away, I think a little weary, too, and something failed you. Then you felt yourself adrift. There were—it seemed—only strangers around you, but you were wrong in one respect; you were by no means a stranger to me.”

He had been leaning against a birch trunk, but now he moved a little nearer, and stood gravely looking down on her.

“You have sent Gregory away?” he questioned.

“Yes,” answered Agatha, and, startled, as she was, it did not occur to her that the mere admission was misleading.

Wyllard stretched out his hands. “Then won’t you come to me?”

The blood swept into the girl’s face. For the moment she forgot Gregory, and was conscious only of an unreasoning impulse which prompted her to take the hands held out to her. She rose and faced Wyllard with burning cheeks.

“You know nothing of me,” she said. “Can you think that I would let you take me out of charity?”

“Again you’re wrong—on both points. As I once told you, I have sat for hours beside the fire beneath the pines or among the boulders with your picture for company. When I was worn out and despondent you encouraged me. You have been with me high up in the snow on the ranges, and through leagues of shadowy bush. That is not all. There were times when, as we drove the branch line up the gorge beneath the big divide, all one’s nature shrank from the monotony of brutal labor. The paydays came around, and opportunities were made for us to forget what we had borne, and had still to bear. Then you laid a restraining hand on me. I could not take your picture where you could not go. Is all that to count for nothing?”

He held out his arms to her. “As to the other question, can you get beyond the narrow point of view? We’re in a big, new country where the old barriers are down. We’re merely flesh and blood—red blood—and we speak as we feel. Admitting that I was sorry for you—I am—how does that tell against me—or you? There’s one thing only that counts at all—I want you.”

Agatha was stirred with an emotion that made her heart beat wildly. He had spoken with a force and passion that had nearly swept her away with it. The vigor of the new land throbbed in his voice, and, flinging aside all cramping restraints and conventions, he had claimed her as primitive man claimed primitive woman. Her whole being responded to his love and Gregory faded out of her mind; but there was, after all, pride in her, and she could not quite bring herself to look at life from his point of view. All her prejudices and her traditions were opposed to it. He had made a mistake when he had admitted that he was sorry for her. She did not want his compassion, and she shrank from the thought that she would marry him—for shelter. It brought to her a sudden, shameful confusion as she remembered the haste with which marriages were arranged on the prairie. Then, as the first unreasoning impulse which had almost compelled her to yield to him passed away, she reflected that it was scarcely two months since she had met him in England. It was intolerable that he should think that she would be willing to fall into his arms merely because he had held them out to her.

“It is a little difficult to get beyond one’s sense of what is fit,” she said. “You—I must say again—can’t know anything about me. You have woven fancies about that photograph, but you must recognize that I’m not the girl you have created out of your reveries. In all probability she is wholly unreal, unnatural, visionary.” Agatha contrived to smile, for she was recovering her composure. “Perhaps it is easy when one has imagination to endow a person with qualities and graces that could never belong to them. It must be easy”—though she was unconscious of it, there was a trace of bitterness in her voice—“because I know I could do it myself.”

Again the man held out his arms. “Then,” he said simply, “won’t you try? If you can only feel sure that the person has the qualities you admire it is possible that he could acquire one or two.”

Agatha drew back. “And I’ve changed ever so much since that photograph was taken!” she exclaimed with a catch in her voice.

Wyllard admitted it. “Yes,” he said, “I recognized that; you were a little immature then. I know that now—but all the graciousness and sweetness in you has grown and ripened. What is more, you have grown just as I seemed to know you would. I saw that clearly the day we met beside the stepping-stones. I would have asked you to marry me in England, only Gregory stood in the way.”

The color ebbed suddenly out of the girl’s face as she remembered.

“Gregory,” she declared in a strained voice, “stands in the way still. I didn’t send him away altogether. I’m not sure I made that clear.”

Wyllard stood very still for a moment or two.

“I wonder,” he said, “if there’s anything significant in the fact that you gave me that reason last. He failed you in some way?”

“I’m not sure that I haven’t failed him; but I can’t go into that.”

Again Wyllard stood silent. Then he turned to her with a strong restraint in his face.

“Gregory is a friend of mine,” he said, “there is, at least, one very good reason why I should remember it, but it seems that somehow he hadn’t the wit to keep you. Well, I can only wait, but when the time seems ripe I shall ask you again. Until then you have my promise that I will not say another word that could distress you. Perhaps I had better take you back to Mrs. Hastings now.”

Agatha turned away, and they walked back together silently.

CHAPTER XIII

THE SUMMONS

Mrs. Hastings was standing beside her wagon in the gathering dusk when Agatha and Wyllard joined her. After Wyllard had helped the two women into the vehicle she looked down at him severely as she gathered up the reins.

“By this time Allen will have had to put the kiddies to bed,” she said. “Christina, as you might have borne in mind, goes over to Branstock’s every evening. Anyway, you’ll drive across and see him about that team as soon as you can; come to supper.”

“I’ll try,” promised Wyllard with a certain hesitation. Mrs. Hastings turned to Agatha as they drove away.

“Why did he look at you before he answered me?” she asked, and laughed, for there was just light enough left to show the color in the girl’s cheek. “Well,” she added, “I told Allen he was sure to be the first.”

Agatha looked at her in evident bewilderment, but she nodded. “Yes,” she said, “of course, I knew it would come. Everybody knows by now that you have fallen out with Gregory.”

“But, as I told you, I haven’t fallen out with him.”

“You certainly haven’t married him, and if you have said ‘No’ to Harry Wyllard because you would sooner take Gregory after all, you’re a singularly unwise young woman. Anyway, you’ll have to meet Harry when he comes to supper. Allen’s fond of a talk with him; I can’t have him kept away.”

“I was a little afraid of that,” replied Agatha slowly. “What makes the situation more difficult is that he told me he would ask me again.”