The Impostor

“I will do what I can,” said Witham. “Still, I am not sure that a lad of the kind is worth your worrying over, and I am a trifle curious as to what induced you to entrust the mission to me?”

The girl felt embarrassed, but she saw that an answer was expected. “Since you ask, it occurred to me that you could do it better than anybody else,” she said. “Please don’t misunderstand me; but I fancy it is the other man who is leading him away.”

Witham smiled somewhat grimly. “Your meaning is quite plain, and I am already looking forward to the encounter with my fellow-gambler. You believe that I will prove a match for him?”

Maud Barrington, to her annoyance, felt the blood creep to her forehead, but she looked at the man steadily, noticing the quiet forcefulness beneath his somewhat caustic amusement.

“Yes,” she said simply; “and I shall be grateful.”

In another few minutes she was galloping across the prairie, and when she rejoined her aunt and Barrington, endeavoured to draw out the latter’s opinion respecting Courthorne’s venture by a few discreet questions.

“Heaven knows where he was taught it, but there is no doubt that the man is an excellent farmer,” he said. “It is a pity that he is also, to all intents and purposes, mad.”

Miss Barrington glanced at her niece, and both of them smiled, for the Colonel usually took for granted the insanity of any one who questioned his opinions.

In the meanwhile, Witham sat swaying on the driving-seat, mechanically guiding the horses and noticing how the prairie sod rolled away in black waves beneath the great plough. He heard the crackle of fibres beneath the triple shares, and the swish of greasy loam along the mouldboard’s side; but his thoughts were far away, and when he raised his head, he looked into the dim future beyond the long furrow that cut the skyline on the rise.

It was shadowy and uncertain, but one thing was clear to him, and that was that he could not stay in Silverdale. At first he had almost hoped he might do this, for the good land, and the means of efficiently working it, had been a horrible temptation. That was before he reckoned on Maud Barrington’s attractions; but of late he had seen what these were leading him to, and all that was good in him recoiled from an attempt to win her. Once he had dared to wonder whether it could be done, for his grim life had left him self-centred and bitter, but that mood had passed, and it was with disgust he looked back upon it. Now he knew that the sooner he left Silverdale, the less difficult it would be to forget her; but he was still determined to vindicate himself by the work he did, and make her affairs secure. Then, with or without a confession, he would slip back into the obscurity he came from.

While he worked the soft wind rioted about him, and the harbingers of summer passed north in battalions overhead – crane, brent goose, and mallard – in crescents, skeins, and wedges, after the fashion of their kind. Little long-tailed gophers whisked across the whitened sod, and when the great plough rolled through the shadows of a bluff, jack rabbits, pied white and grey, scurried amidst the rustling leaves. Even the birches were fragrant in that vivifying air, and seemed to rejoice as all animate creatures did; but the man’s face grew more sombre as the day of toil wore on. Still, he did his work with the grim, unwavering diligence that had already carried him, dismayed but unyielding, through years of drought and harvest hail, and the stars shone down on the prairie when at last he loosed his second team.

Then, standing in the door of his lonely homestead, he glanced at the great shadowy granaries and barns, and clenched his hand as he saw what he could do if the things that had been forced upon him were rightfully his. He knew his own mettle, and that he could hold them if he would; but the pale, cold face of a woman rose up in judgment against him, and he also knew that because of the love of her, that was casting its toils about him, he must give them up.

Far back on the prairie a lonely coyote howled, and a faint wind, that was now like snow-cooled wine, brought the sighing of limitless grasses out of the silence. There was no cloud in the crystalline ether, and something in the vastness and stillness that spoke of infinity brought a curious sense of peace to him. Impostor though he was, he would leave Silverdale better than he found it, and afterwards it would be of no great moment what became of him. Countless generations of toiling men had borne their petty sorrows before him, and gone back to the dust they sprang from; but still, in due succession, harvest followed seed-time, and the world whirled on. Then, remembering that, in the meanwhile, he had much to do which would commence with the sun on the morrow, he went back into the house and shook the fancies from him.

CHAPTER XII – MASTERY RECOGNIZED

There was, considering the latest price of wheat, a somewhat astonishing attendance in the long room of the hotel at the railroad settlement one Saturday evening. A big stove in the midst of it diffused a stuffy and almost unnecessary heat, gaudy nickelled lamps an uncertain brilliancy, and the place was filled with the drifting smoke of indifferent tobacco. Oleographs, barbaric in colour and drawing, hung about the roughly-boarded walls, and any critical stranger would have found the saloon comfortless and tawdry.

It was, however, filled that night with bronzed-faced men who expected nothing better. Most of them wore jackets of soft black leather or embroidered deerskin, and the jean trousers and long boots of not a few apparently stood in need of repairing, though the sprinkling of more conventional apparel and paler faces showed that the storekeepers of the settlement had been drawn together, as well as the prairie farmers who had driven in to buy provisions or take up their mail. There was, however, but little laughter, and their voices were low, for boisterousness and assertion are not generally met with on the silent prairie. Indeed, the attitude of some of the men was mildly deprecatory, as though they felt that in assisting in what was going forward they were doing an unusual thing. Still, the eyes of all were turned toward the table where a man, who differed widely in appearance from most of them, dealt out the cards.

He wore city clothes, and a white shirt with a fine diamond in the front of it, while there was a keen intentness behind the half-ironical smile in his somewhat colourless face. The whiteness of his long, nervous fingers and the quickness of his gestures would also have stamped him as a being of different order from the slowly-spoken prairie farmers, while the slenderness of the little pile of coins in front of him testified that his endeavours to tempt them to speculation on games of chance had met with no very marked success as yet. Gambling for stakes of moment is not a popular amusement in that country, where the soil demands his best from every man in return for the scanty dollars it yields him, but the gamester had chosen his time well, and the men who had borne the dreary solitude of winter in outlying farms, and now only saw another adverse season opening before them, were for once in the mood to clutch at any excitement that would relieve the monotony of their toilsome lives.

A few were betting small sums with an apparent lack of interest which did not in the least deceive the dealer, and when he handed a few dollars out he laughed a little as he turned to the bar-keeper.

“Set them up again. I want a drink to pass the time,” he said. “I’ll play you at anything you like to put a name to, boys, if this game don’t suit you, but you’ll have to give me the chance of making my hotel bill. In my country I’ve seen folks livelier at a funeral.”

The glasses were handed round, but when the gambler reached out towards the silver at his side, a big bronzed-skinned rancher stopped him.

“No,” he drawled. “We’re not sticking you for a locomotive tank, and this comes out of my treasury. I’ll call you three dollars and take my chances on the draw.”

“Well,” said the dealer, “that’s a little more encouraging. Anybody wanting to make it better?”

A young lad in elaborately-embroidered deerskin with a flushed face leaned upon the table. “Show you how we play cards in the old country,” he said. “I’ll make it thirty – for a beginning.”

There was a momentary silence, for the lad had staked heavily and lost of late, but one or two more bets were made. Then the cards were turned up, and the lad smiled fatuously as he took up his winnings.

“Now, I’ll let you see,” he said. “This time we’ll make it fifty.”

He won twice more in succession, and the men closed in about the table, while, for the dealer knew when to strike, the glasses went round again, and in the growing interest nobody quite noticed who paid for the refreshment. Then, while the dollars began to trickle in, the lad flung a bill for a hundred down.

“Go on,” he said a trifle huskily. “To-night you can’t beat me!”

Once more he won, and just then two men came quietly into the room. One of them signed to the hotel-keeper.

“What’s going on? The boys seem kind of keen,” he said.

The other man laughed a little. “Ferris has struck a streak of luck, but I wouldn’t be very sorry if you got him away, Mr. Courthorne. He has had as much as he can carry already, and I don’t want anybody broke up in my house. The boys can look out for themselves, but the Silverdale kid has been losing a good deal lately, and he doesn’t know when to stop.”

Witham glanced at his companion, who nodded. “The young fool,” he said.

They crossed towards the table in time to see the lad take up his winnings again, and Witham laid his hand quietly upon his shoulder.

“Come along and have a drink while you give the rest a show,” he said. “You seem to have done tolerably well, and it’s usually wise to stop while the chances are going with you.”

The lad turned and stared at him with languid insolence in his half-closed eyes, and, though he came of a lineage that had been famous in the old country, there was nothing very prepossessing in his appearance. His mouth was loose, his face weak in spite of its inherited pride, and there was little need to tell either of the men, who noticed his nervous fingers and muddiness of skin, that he was one who in the strenuous early days would have worn the woolly crown.

“Were you addressing me?” he asked.

“I was,” said Witham quietly. “I was, in fact, inviting you to share our refreshment. You see we have just come in.”

“Then,” said the lad, “it was condemnable impertinence. Since you have taken this fellow up, couldn’t you teach him that it’s bad taste to thrust his company upon people who don’t want it, Dane?”

Witham said nothing, but drew Dane, who flushed a trifle, aside, and when they sat down the latter smiled dryly.

“You have taken on a big contract, Courthorne. How are you going to get the young ass out?” he said.

“Well,” said Witham, “it would gratify me to take him by the neck, but as I don’t know that it would please the Colonel if I made a public spectacle of one of his retainers, I fancy I’ll have to tackle the gambler. I don’t know him, but as he comes from across the frontier it’s more than likely he has heard of me. There are advantages in having a record like mine, you see.”

“It would, of course, be a kindness to the lad’s people – but the young fool is scarcely worth it, and it’s not your affair,” said Dane reflectively.

Witham guessed the drift of the speech, but he could respect a confidence, and laughed a little. “It’s not often I have done any one a good turn, and the novelty has its attractions.”

Dane did not appear contented with this explanation, but he asked nothing further, and the two sat watching the men about the table, who were evidently growing eager.

“That’s two hundred the kid has let go,” said somebody.

There was a murmur of excited voices, and one rose hoarse and a trifle shaky in the consonants above the rest.

“Show you how a gentleman can stand up, boys. Throw them out again. Two hundred this time on the game!”

There was silence and the rustle of shuffled cards; then once more the voices went up. “Against him! Better let up before he takes your farm. Oh, let him face it and show his grit – the man who slings round his hundreds can afford to lose!”

The lad’s face showed a trifle paler through the drifting smoke, though a good many of the cigars had gone out now, and once more there was the stillness of expectancy through which a strained voice rose.

“Going to get it all back. I’ll stake you four hundred.”

Witham rose and moved forward quietly, with Dane behind him, and then stood still where he could see the table. He had also very observant eyes, and was free from the excitement of those who had a risk on the game. Still, when the cards were dealt, it was the gambler’s face he watched. For a brief space nobody moved, and then the lad flung down his cards and stood up with a greyness in his cheeks and his hands shaking.