By Right of Purchase

"Well," said Leland, "I may see you there. There are some new harrows and seeders I have to wire about, but I don't expect to get in until daylight to-morrow."

"You are going to drive all night?"

"I may get an hour's sleep before I go. You see, I have to be back by noon to-morrow. Our summer is short, and there is a good deal to do. The grain that goes in late is quite often frozen."

He pointed as if in explanation to the great sweep of furrows that ran back narrowing all the way to where Prospect nestled like a doll's house beneath its bluff. With a great trampling, two other teams came up just then. They went by amidst a ripping and crackling of fibres as the prairie opened up beneath the gleaming shares, and Leland nodded with a little quiet smile.

"Oh, yes," he said; "little time to do it in, and a good deal to do. Some of us were born to feel that way."

"Not all," said Eveline Annersly. "There are, as you know, men who waste their substance to while the day away. You are not that sort. Perhaps it's fortunate for you."

Leland smiled again. "I don't quite know. There's a great order and system that runs things, though I can't quite get the hang of it – I haven't time. Every man works in this country, as all Nature does. Those little grasses have been ten thousand years building up the black loam I'm making wheat of. The mallard, the brent goose, and the sandhill crane – you can see them coming up from the south in their skeins and wedges all day long – have to hunt their food from the shores of the Caribbean to the Pole. Well, one feels there must be a balance struck some day, and the men who don't do anything are having the soft things now."

He laughed good-humouredly, and stroked one of the horses that turned its head to nibble affectionately at his shoulder. "I'll be sorry for this by and by, but you have a habit of making me give myself away."

"Then we will be practical. Are you going to sow all that ploughing?"

"I am. I expect to break two hundred acres more. There are folks who want the wheat, and we'll feed the world some day."

"But wheat is going down."

"It is," and Leland's face grew a trifle hard. "No bottom to the market, apparently. That's why I'm buying new machines and cutting things down and down. We must have everything that can save or earn a dollar at Prospect now."

Carrie Leland was struck by something in her husband's face. It was a comely face, as well as forceful, clean-skinned in spite of its deepness of tint, and there was a clearness in the steady eyes that is only seen in those of such men as he. There was also in his features a suggestion of endurance and optimism that, in fact, was strongest in the time of stress and struggle. Sun and wind, fruitful soil and barren, nipping frosts, drought and devastating hail, all these were things to be grappled with or profited by with equal willingness. He and his kind in new countries give without stint all they have been given, from the sweat of tense effort each and every day to the smiling courage that cuts down hours of rest and goes on sowing when seasons are adverse and markets fall away; and there is, in turn, usually set upon them plainly the symbol of man's dominion over the material world. The patient beasts that toiled with him recognised it, and again one of them muzzled his shoulder and caught at his arm.

"And," said Mrs. Annersly, "if the market still goes down?"

Leland laughed an optimist's soft laugh. "Then we will go under, I and the rest. That is, for a time. Nothing can stop us long, and we will start again. Carrie, I am thankful, is provided for."

He struck the horse with the palm of his hand. "I have been keeping you, and there is a good deal to do."

The big team stamped and strained; he swung himself into the driving-seat, and, with a crackling of fibres, the great plough rolled away. Mrs. Annersly smiled as Carrie shook the reins.

"If I were twenty years younger, I almost think I should fall in love with your husband," she said. "There is a breadth of view and forcefulness Reggie Urmston could never attain even in his simplicity, and his egotism becomes him. It's the quiet assurance of a man who knows what he can do, and rather thinks that he is doing a good bit. He takes all the risk, and you are provided for. Carrie, do you know what that man gave, or lent – it's much the same thing – to your father?"

"No," said Carrie, with the spot of colour once more in her cheek. "He would never tell me, and how could I ask him? It is a hateful subject – why should you mention it?"

Mrs. Annersly looked out over the prairie, a curious smile in her eyes.

"Your husband is cutting down even his hours of sleep," she said. "He is driving in forty miles to the railroad when his work is done to-night, while Branscombe Denham is building peach-houses at Barrock-holme."

Carrie flushed crimson, and flicked the team with the whip. "You," she said, "are the only friend I have, and yet you sometimes take a curious pleasure in tormenting me. Do you expect me to turn against my own flesh and blood?"

"We have it on good authority that the wife should cleave to her husband, and they are one. There are, of course, people nowadays, and probably always have been, who think they know better."

The girl caught her breath. "Ah," she said, "you don't quite understand. If he were in difficulties I would face them with him cheerfully, but he would never let me. It was not said in bitterness, but when he told you I was provided for, it hurt me. Why should I be safe, who helped to ruin him?"

Eveline Annersly glanced at her with gravely questioning eyes. "My dear, I rather fancy you have almost thrown a great treasure away."

"Whether the thing was of great value I do not know, and it is scarcely likely I shall ever know. I certainly threw it just as far as I was able to, and, though I do not know whether I was wise or not, it is done, and there is no use in being sorry."

Then she swung the whip again, and sent the light waggon flying headlong down a long grassy slope. Mrs. Annersly found it advisable to hold on, and in any case she had said her say. Her words must lie with the rest she had dropped, until in due time they should bear their fruit. Eveline Annersly was old enough to be somewhat of an optimist too.

In the meanwhile, Leland went on with his ploughing, and, save for an hour's halt at noon to rest the teams, and for the six o'clock supper, toiled until a wondrous green transparency, through which the pale stars peeped, hung over the prairie. Then, when the cold clear air was invigorating as wine, he led the weary beasts to the stables, and, after walking stiffly to the homestead, flung himself into a chair, aching and drowsy.

"Jake," he said to the man who was busy in the room, "I'll want some coffee in an hour or so. Make it black and strong."

Then Gallwey came in, and they sat for an hour going over a file of accounts from which Leland made extracts on a sheet. He laid it down at last, and pointed to a bundle of papers on a dusty shelf.

"I was worrying over them before I slept last night, and I'm no wiser now," he said. "The one thing certain is that wheat is going down, and what it will touch next harvest is rather more than any man can tell. One has too many climates from California to New Zealand to reckon with. If we stop right now and sow, we'd come out just clear as the market stands. I had expected to have quite a pile in hand, but with the drop in values the bank balance against me needed considerable meeting."

"It certainly did. I was a trifle astonished when you cabled me to arrange for the credit at Winnipeg. You were, in view of your usual habits, singularly extravagant for once."

"I was," and Leland laughed somewhat harshly. "Still, under the circumstances, it wasn't quite unnatural. Anyway, we have wiped it out, and it has crippled me for the next campaign."

Gallwey asked no injudicious questions, but he wondered how his comrade, who had distinctly inexpensive tastes, had got rid of all the money he had apparently spent in England. Mrs. Leland was not an extravagant woman, so far as he was aware.

"The question is, how we should meet a further drop," he said.

"That's not very difficult, unless the drop is too big. We have for fixed charges the upkeep of this homestead, besides wages, and the feeding of the boys we can't do without, and the working horses. That's not going to alter more than a little, anyway. Well, we have the seed, and there are broken horses on the run, so it's going to cost us just a few teamsters' wages, and the threshing to put oats in on as many extra acres as we can break. You see, we get a bigger crop on much the same cost."

"And the fall breaking?"

"Wheat," said Leland. "Every acre."

Gallwey drew in his breath. He knew his comrade's boldness, but this was almost incredible. Cautious men were already holding their hand, but Leland purposed to sow more freely than ever.

"It will be a huge crop," he said. "About the biggest that was ever raised in this country. Now, of course, within a margin, there's a good deal in your notion in increasing the ratio of production to dead charges, but, after all, you can't sow a third as much again without its costing you something. Well, if the price drops far enough to make that a loss?"

Leland laughed again. "Then," he said, "it will be one of the biggest smashes ever known in this country; but nobody's going to lose very much when they've taken the land and stock from me. It's tolerably steep chances, but they're all on me."

Gallwey's uneasiness showed itself in his face. The magnitude of the risk almost dismayed him, but while he sat silent Leland made a little gesture.

"Tell Jake to bring that coffee in, and see the waggon's ready," he said. "I'll be off, and let the team go easy. They'll put me on to the wire at the depot at five o'clock when the stopping freight comes through. I should be back by noon. You'll start every man as usual."

He drank the bitter coffee to keep himself awake, and climbed into his waggon, while Gallwey shook his head as he watched him jolt away into the shadowy prairie.

"It's a big thing, almost too big for any other man," he said. "It was the confounded bank balance against him that drove him into it. I wonder how he spent all that money, or if Mrs. Leland knows."

CHAPTER XII

LELAND'S PROTEST

There were two breakfasts served in the Occidental Hotel, which, dilapidated and weather-scarred, stands at the foot of the unpaved street of a desolate little town beside the railroad track. Most men commence their work early in the prairie country, so the first meal was laid at six; but there was another from eight to nine when a train came in. This was a somewhat unusual concession to the needs of the few passengers who alighted there, because throughout most of the Northwest no self-respecting hotel cook would prepare a meal out of the fixed hours, not even for a cabinet minister or a railroad director. Nor would the proprietor vary a dish, for in his estimation what suffices the plainsman is quite good enough for anybody else.

The table had just been cleared when a small and select company of men who had nothing in particular to do pulled their chairs up to the stove, on which as many of them as could find room put their feet. It had not been lighted that morning, or black-leaded for many days, but habit was strong in them. There are, even in countries where most men are hard workers, a few who spend their lives lounging on hotel verandahs and sitting round the stove. Nobody unused to it would, in all probability, have cared to linger there, for there are few places of entertainment so wholly desolate and uninviting as the general room of the average prairie hotel.

Its walls were obviously made of dressed boards, and had even borne a coat of paint at one time; but they were bare and dirty now. Two lonely German oleographs of more than usually barbaric type hung on rusty nails. Cigar-ends and burnt matches littered the uncarpeted floor. Benches without backs to them ran along either side of the uncovered table. The rest of the furniture consisted of the rusty stove and a few chairs, which the loungers monopolised. Two of the group wore store-clothing, with trousers so tight that one wondered how they ever got them on, and two wore blue jean in sad need of patching. They had rough, dark faces, relieved by no sign of amiability or unusual intelligence; but they could talk. Loafers and tramps usually can.