By Right of Purchase

It was beaten hard, the team were fresh and fast, and for a while the girl felt the exhilaration of the swift rush through nipping air. The desolate town faded behind her; a grey blur that lifted itself out of the horizon, and was a big birch bluff, came flitting back to her; there was deep stillness, only intensified by the screech of runners and the soft drumming of hoofs. A vast sweep of fleckless azure overhung the glistening plain below. It was not all white, however, for there were shades of grey and dusky purple in the hollows, and the trail was a wavy riband that rose and fell in varying blue. It was beautiful in its own way, and the stinging air stirred her blood like wine. That was for an hour or so; but when the sun dipped, a red, copper ball, amidst a frosty haze, and the blues and greys crept wide across the whiteness of the plain, the cold laid hold of her. Leland, who had scarcely spoken, looked down.

"Are you warm?" he said.

The girl was scarcely willing to admit that she was not; but the frost of the Northwest strikes keen and deep, and, after all, it was his business to attend to her physical comfort.

"No," she said; "I am very cold."

Leland nodded, though there was light enough to show the curious look in his eyes. "Well," he said, "that ought to be excuse enough for me, and it's going to be a good deal colder presently."

He slipped his free arm round her, and drew her to him masterfully. Then he shook the furs higher about her neck with the hand that held the reins, and Carrie, who felt that protest would be useless and undignified, said nothing when she found her shoulder drawn against his breast, though the old fur coat had a faint but unmistakable odour of tobacco and the stable about it.

Leland looked down on her with a little laugh. "After all, that is where you ought to be," he said. "Perhaps, if I am very good to you, you will come there of your own will, by-and-bye."

Carrie said nothing, and, though she felt her cheeks burn, it was not altogether with anger against him. The man had been tactfully considerate, and had deferred to her as she felt that Aylmer would not have done. Indeed, she realised that she owed him a good deal, if only because of the delicacy he had displayed, and which she had scarcely expected from one so much beneath her in station. It was not even so repugnant as she had fancied to lie there warmed by the heat of his body, with his arm about her, and she felt, at least, a comforting confidence in his ability to shelter and protect her. What Leland felt he did not tell her until some time afterwards. He was accustomed to restraint, and, too, the driving occupied most of his attention, for darkness was creeping across the waste, and the snow was deep outside the beaten trail.

Then the cold increased until it grew numbing, and when the pain ceased, all feeling died out of the girl's hands and feet. She gradually grew drowsy, and, looking up now and then with heavy eyes, saw only the dim shapes of the horses projected against the bitter blueness of the night. Still, at times, they plunged into belts of shadow, where there was a crackling under the runners and a flitting by of ghostly trees that vanished when they once more swept out into the awful cold of the open. Now and then Leland called to the horses, but his voice was lost again next moment in the silence it had scarcely broken. A curious sense of the unreality of it all came upon the girl. She almost felt that, if she could cry out, he and the team would vanish, and all would be with her as it had been in England before she met him. Then the drumming of hoofs grew very faint, and with a half-conscious desire for warmth she crept still closer to the silent man, who looked down on her very compassionately, and then, setting his lips, gave his attention again to the team. She remembered nothing further until she roused herself at a pressure on her arm.

"Prospect is close in front of us," said her companion.

She raised herself a trifle, and, looking round with a shiver, saw a half-moon sailing low above a dusky mass of trees. What seemed to be a wooden house stood in the midst of them, and its windows flung out streaks of ruddy light upon the snow. Behind it, she could dimly see a range of strange, shapeless buildings. They did not in the least look like English stables, barns, or granaries. Then there was a sound of voices, and a door swung open, letting out a broader track of brightness, in the midst of which the sleigh pulled up. Shadowy figures appeared here and there, and Leland, who unstrapped the robes, rolled them about her. Then, before she quite realised his purpose, he had lifted her and them together, and was walking stiffly towards the house. In another minute or two he set her down in a little log-walled room which had a tiled stove in the middle of it, and a hard-featured elderly woman came towards her with a kindly smile in her eyes.

"Mrs. Nesbit, Carrie," said the man. "She has been looking after the house for me lately. My wife's 'most frozen, and you'll do what you can to make her comfortable… I suppose those are the fixings from Montreal?"

Mrs. Nesbit said they were, but that they had arrived with one of the sledges too late to be opened that day. Leland pointed to several canvas-covered rolls and bulky cases as he turned to the girl.

"They're curtains and rugs and carpets, and things of that kind," he said. "We don't worry much about them on the prairie, but this room and the next one are your own, unless there are any you like better. We'll get the cases opened to-morrow."

He went out, and it was some little time later when Carrie found him awaiting her in a great bare room. There were antelope heads, guns, axes, rifles, and here and there a splendid cluster of wheat ears, upon the walls, but there was nothing on the floor, and the furniture appeared to consist of a table, a carpenter's bench, a set of bookshelves, and a few lounge chairs. Still, it was well warmed by the big crackling stove, and she sank with a little sigh of physical content into one of the chairs he drew out. Leland, who now wore a jacket of soft white deer-skin, stooped beside her and took one of her still chilly hands in his. It was also the one on a finger of which there gleamed the ring, and he glanced at it with a queer, half-wistful little smile.

"I hope you will be happy here. What I can do to make it home to you will be done," he said.

He stopped a moment, and, seeing she made no response, went on:

"All the way out I have thought of you sitting here. Since my mother, no woman but Mrs. Nesbit has crossed my threshold. It has been all work and loneliness with me. Won't you try to make it different now?"

He laid his other hand gently on her shoulder, and the girl who bore his name felt her cheeks burn as she turned her eyes away. A caress would have been in one sense a very little thing, but she could not bring herself to invite it then, and she was further warned by what she saw in her companion's eyes.

Leland for a moment closed one of his hard hands. Presently he smiled again and, drawing another of the chairs up, sat down beside her.

"Well," he said, "you will get used to me by-and-bye, and I only want to please you in the meanwhile. And now about Mrs. Nesbit. We'll send her away if it would suit you, and you can get somebody from Winnipeg, though I don't know that it wouldn't be better to let Jake do the cooking and cleaning as before. It's quite difficult to get maids in this country, and, when you've had them 'bout a week, they marry somebody. Anyway, that's your business. The one thing to be done is what you like, but if you could see your way to keep Mrs. Nesbit, it would please me."

It was almost the only thing he had asked of her, and she was willing to humour him in this. "Of course," she said. "In fact, I rather like her. Who is she?"

"A widow, the mother of one of the boys who drives a team for me. Wages come down when there's little doing with the snow upon the ground, and he's away railroading. I told him I'd see the old lady was looked after until he came back again."

"But how could you have done that, if I had sent her away?"

"I'd have boarded her out with Custer at The Range, whose wife wants help and can't hire it. Mrs. Nesbit would never have known where the money came from."

Carrie Leland smiled. It was only a few months since she had first set eyes upon the man, but she felt that, if she had been his housekeeper, a device of that kind would not have availed with her. There was no doubt that he had his strong points.

Then another young man came in, and was presented to her as Tom Gallwey. He called her husband "Charley", and spoke with a clean English intonation.

"I'm going round to give the boys their instructions," he said. "We have cleaned out the sod granaries as you cabled. Are we to break into the straw-pile to-morrow?"

"Yes," said Leland. "You'll go on hauling wheat in with every team."

"I suppose you know what has happened to the market? One would fancy it wasn't a good time to sell."

"Still, you'll haul that wheat in. We'll go into the rest to-morrow. Will you come back to supper?"

The young man glanced at Carrie. "If Mrs. Leland will excuse me, I think not," he said, and departed, as he evidently considered, tactfully.

"An Englishman?" said the girl, with a trace of colour in her face.

"I've never asked him, but he talks like one. I struck him shovelling on a railroad, and looking very sick, two or three years ago. Now he gets decent pay for looking after things for me."

Just then another man in weirdly patched blue-jean, who limped in his walk and carried the tray with his left hand, brought in supper. He gazed at Carrie so hard that he spilled some of the contents of the dishes, and, when he went out, she glanced at her husband with a smile.

"I suppose that is another pensioner?" she said.

"No," said Leland. "He earns his pay, and all I did was to make it a little easier for him. He got himself mixed up with a threshing mill at another place a while ago."

"And he naturally came to you?"

Leland's eyes sparkled shrewdly. "Well," he said, "I guess I get my full value out of him. Won't you come to supper?"

Carrie took her place at the head of the table, and found the pork, fried potatoes, apples, flapjacks, and hot corn-cakes much more palatable than she had expected. She also looked very dainty sitting there in the great bare room, and was not displeased when Leland told her so. In fact, the more she saw of him, the more favourably he impressed her, and, though she remembered always that she was a Denham of Barrock-holme, and he a Western farmer of low degree, she did what she could to be gracious to him. It was not until the meal was over that a trace of the bitterness she had felt towards him came back to her.

"I suppose you posted the letter I gave you at Winnipeg?" she said.

Leland showed some little embarrassment. "I did. I was going to talk to you about it in a day or two, because it wouldn't be quite convenient to have Mrs. Heaton out from Chicago just now."

Carrie glanced at him sharply. "You told me I could fill the house with my friends, if I wished."

"I believe I did," said Leland. "Anyway, I meant it. Still, we're not going to worry about that to-night."

Carrie saw that he was resolute, and discreetly changed the subject. She had not yet quite shaken off the effects of the cold, and in another hour rose drowsily from beside the stove.

Leland opened the door, and stood with his hand on it. "Mrs. Nesbit will see you have everything you want," he said. "Don't come down too early – and good-night."

He took the hand she held out, and did not let it go at once. The girl felt her heart beat a wee bit faster than usual, as it had done once or twice before that day. Again she felt that it was only fitting she should offer her cheek to him, but it was more than she could do.

Then he dropped her hand, and made her a little inclination as he once more said, "Good-night."

CHAPTER VII

CARRIE MAKES HER VIEWS CLEAR