Harding of Allenwood

"Not much, but I heard the boys talking about it at the railroad store. It's a settlement of high-toned Britishers with more money than sense. They play at farming and ride round the country on pedigree horses."

"The horse the boy rode was certainly a looker!" Harding commented, swinging his ax once more.

As it sliced out a chip with a ringing thud, and another, and yet another, the boy returned, accompanied by a well-mounted older man with a sallow face and very dark eyes and a languidly graceful air. The man was plainly dressed but he wore the stamp Harding had noticed on the youngster; and again there flashed through Harding's mind the half-indistinct thought that these people were familiar to him.

"I understand that you insist upon cutting this timber," Kenwyne began.

"Yes," Harding replied. "And I was surprised when your friend here said it belonged to Colonel Mowbray."

"He went too far, but it does belong to him in a sense. The Colonel founded the settlement when very few other people thought of leaving Manitoba, and he had the usual option of cutting all the wood he wanted on unoccupied land. We have always got it here, and as we have done all the road-making and general improvements in the neighborhood, we have come to look upon it as our own."

"Is that your bridge across the creek?"

"Yes; and it's not a bad job, I think. We had a good deal of trouble digging out the grade in the ravine."

"Well, interfering with bridges is not a habit of mine; so we'll let your trail stand. But I could make you divert it to the proper road reserve."

"Ah!" exclaimed Kenwyne. "That sounds significant."

"Precisely. This bluff and the section it stands on belong to me; the transfer was registered at the land office a week ago."

"Then I think there's nothing more to be said."

"Oh," Harding responded with a smile, "you might tell your Colonel that when he wants any lumber he may cut it if he'll let me know!"

Kenwyne laughed.

"Thanks!" he said. "It's a generous offer, but I can't promise that Colonel Mowbray will avail himself of your permission. I wish you good afternoon."

He rode away with his companion, and an hour later Harding and Devine threw their axes on their shoulders and struck out across the prairie. The sun had dipped, the air was getting cool, and on the clean-cut western horizon a soft red flush faded beneath a band of vivid green.

At the foot of a low rise the men stopped.

"I'll be around the first thing in the morning," Devine said.

"Then you're not coming to supper?"

"No," Devine answered reluctantly; "I guess not. I've been over twice this week, and Hester has enough to do without extra cooking for me."

"As you wish," said Harding, and they separated in a friendly manner.

When he was alone Harding went on briskly, walking with an elastic step and looking far ahead across the shadowy plain. It was a rich land that stretched away before him, and a compact block of it belonged to him. It was virgin soil, his to do with as he liked. He thought that he could make good use of it; but he had no illusions; he knew all about prairie farming, and was prepared for a hard struggle.

Crossing the rise, he headed for a glow of light that flickered in the gloom of a small birch bluff, and presently stopped at a tent pitched among the trees. Two big red oxen were grazing by the edge of the bluff, a row of birch logs lay among the grass beside a pile of ship-lap boards, and some more of the boards had been roughly built into a pointed shack. In front of this a young girl bent over a fire that burned between two logs. All round, except where the wood broke the view, the wilderness rolled away, dim and silent.

Hester Harding looked up with a smile when her brother stopped. She resembled him, for she had his direct, thoughtful glance and fine proportions. Her face and hands were browned by sun and wind, but, although she had worked hard from childhood, she wore no coarsening stamp of toil. Her features were good, and the plain print dress she had made in her scanty spare time became her.

"Tired, Craig?" she asked in a pleasant voice.

"Not quite as fresh as I was at sun-up," Harding smiled. "We got through a good deal of work to-day and I'll soon be able to make a start with the house. We'll have to rush the framing to get finished before the frost."

While they ate their simple supper they talked about his building plans, and he answered her questions carefully; for Hester had keen intelligence, and had shared his work and ambitions for the past few years. For the most part, their life had been hard and frugal. Until Craig reached the age of eighteen, he had helped his father to cultivate his patch of wheat-soil in an arid belt of North Dakota. Then the father had died, leaving about a thousand dollars besides his land and teams, and the lad had courageously taken up the task of supporting his mother and sister. Two years afterward, Mrs. Harding died, and Craig, at the age of twenty, set himself to consider the future.

During his management of the farm he had made more money than his father had ever made, but the land was poor and incapable of much improvement. On the other hand, Dakota was getting settled and homesteads were becoming valuable, and Craig determined to sell out and invest the money in a larger holding in a thinly populated part of Manitoba. Hester went with him to Canada; and when the advancing tide of settlement reached their new home, Craig sold out again, getting much more than he had paid for his land, and moved west ahead of the army of prairie-breakers which he knew would presently follow him. It was a simple plan, but it needed courage and resourcefulness. He spoke of it to Hester when he lighted his pipe after the meal.

"It was a notion of Father's that one should try to anticipate a big general movement," he remarked. "'Keep a little in front; the pioneers get the pickings,' he once told me. 'If you follow the main body, you'll find the land swept bare.' He had a way of saying things like that; I learned a good deal from him."

"He knew a good deal," said Hester thoughtfully. "He was more clever than you are, Craig, but he hadn't your habit of putting his ideas into practise. I've sometimes thought he must have lost heart after some big trouble long ago, and only made an effort now and then for Mother's sake. It's strange that we know nothing about him except that he came from the Old Country."

Craig had often wondered about his father, for the man had been somewhat of an enigma to him. Basil Harding had lived like his neighbors, who were plain tillers of the soil, and he never spoke of his English origin, but now and then he showed a breadth of thought and refinement of manner that were not in keeping with his environment. Mrs. Harding was the daughter of a Michigan farmer, a shrewd but gentle woman of practical turn of mind.

"I wonder," Craig said, "how much Mother knew?"

"She must have known something. Once or twice, near the end, I think she meant to tell us, for there was something troubling her, but the last stroke came so suddenly, and she never spoke." Hester paused, as if lost in painful memories, and then went on: "It was very strange about that money you got."

Craig nodded. When he was twenty-one a Winnipeg lawyer had turned over to him five thousand dollars on condition that he remain in Canada, and make no attempt to communicate with his father's relatives.

"Yes," he said. "And something happened this afternoon that puzzled me."

He told Hester about his meeting with the men from Allenwood.

"The curious thing about it," he added, "is that as I watched the boy sitting on his fine blooded horse and heard him speak, I felt as if I'd once lived among high-toned English people and could somehow understand what he was thinking. But of course I never had a horse like his, and we were born in a rough shack on a poor Dakota farm. Can one inherit one's ancestors' feelings and memories?"

"It's very strange," mused Hester.

Harding laughed.

"Well, anyway, I'm a farmer," he said. "I stand upon my own feet – regardless of ancestors. What I am is what I make of myself!"

He moved off toward the tent.

"It's getting late," he called back to her.

But for a long time Hester sat beside the sinking fire. Her brother, whom she loved and admired, differed slightly, but noticeably in one or two respects, from any of the prairie farmers she had known. Though it was hard to procure books, he had read widely and about other subjects than agriculture. Odd tricks of thought and speech also suggested the difference; but she knew that nobody else except her mother had noticed it, for, to all intents, Craig was merely a shrewd, hard-working grower of wheat.

Then the girl's face grew gentle as she thought of Fred Devine. He had proved very constant and had several times made what was then a long and adventurous journey to see her. Now, when his father had given him a few hundred dollars, he had followed Craig, and she was ready to marry him as soon as he could make a home for her. At present he was living in a dug-out in a bank, and must harvest his first crop before he could think about a house.

When the fire had died down to a few smoldering coals, Hester got up and looked about her. The moon hung, large and red, above the prairie's rim; the air was sharp and wonderfully exhilarating. Behind the tent the birch leaves rustled softly in the bluff, and in the distance a coyote howled. There was no other sound; it was all very still and strangely lonely; but the girl felt no shrinking. On her mother's side she sprang from a race of pioneers, and her true work was to help in the breaking of the wilderness.

CHAPTER II

PORTENTS OF CHANGE

The moon was above the horizon when Kenwyne pulled up his horse to a walk opposite Allenwood Grange. The view from this point always appealed to the artist in Kenwyne. The level plain was broken here by steep, sandy rises crowned with jack-pines and clumps of poplar, and a shallow lake reached out into the open from their feet. A short distance back from its shore, the Grange stood on a gentle slope, with a grove of birches that hid the stables and outbuildings straggling up the hill behind.

As Kenwyne saw it in the moonlight across the glittering water, the house was picturesque. In the center rose a square, unpretentious building of notched logs; but from this ship-lap additions, showing architectural taste, stretched out in many wings, so that, from a distance, the homestead with its wooded back-ground had something of the look of an old English manor house. It was this which made the colonists of Allenwood regard it with affection. Now it was well lighted, and the yellow glow from its windows shone cheerfully across the lake.

The foundations of the place had been laid in unsettled times, after the Hudson Bay fur-traders had relinquished their control of the trackless West, but before the Dominion Government had established its authority. The farmers were then spreading cautiously across the Manitoban plain, in some fear of the Metis half-breeds, and it was considered a bold adventure when the builder of the Grange pushed far out into the prairies of the Assiniboine. He had his troubles, but he made his holding good, and sold it to Colonel Mowbray, who founded the Allenwood settlement.