By Right of Purchase

CHAPTER XXIV

LELAND MAKES SURE

The nights were growing longer, dusk was creeping up from the eastward across the leagues of whitened grass an hour earlier than it had done when they cut the hay. Leland stood outside the homestead door with a few newly opened letters in his hand. The waggon of the man who had brought them was just then lurching over the crest of the rise, and Carrie stood watching it, near her husband's side. His face was a trifle sombre, but he smiled when she glanced at him inquiringly.

"From my broker in Winnipeg," he said. "He doesn't know what to make of the market, and I can't blame him. Wheat's lower than I ever remember it, but the bears are still working their hardest to hammer prices down. In a month or so they'll have the whole wheat of the West flung into the market to make it easier for them; but they don't seem to have it quite so much their own way as I had expected. One could almost fancy that somebody was buying quietly. Anyway, there's a man willing to take most of my crop off me, when it's ready, at a little under to-day's nominal figure. You see, the Prospect hard red's first-grade for milling."

"If you sold, how would you stand?" asked Carrie.

"Very close to ruin. The cattle run would certainly have to go, but that wouldn't count so much. It's less than half stocked now."

"Why can't you hold?"

"The trouble is that all accounts must be met at harvest, and I've got to have at least five thousand dollars to wipe out the most pressing ones. The rest might be carried over at a stiff interest. Then there are wages, harvesting and threshing. Besides, if I held the grain up, I'd be taking a big risk. It may go down another two or three cents or even more, when every man west of Winnipeg rushes his crop in, and that would turn me out upon the prairie."

"Still, you mean to hold?" Carrie looked at him steadily, with a little gleam in her eyes.

"I almost think I do."

Carrie laid her hand upon his arm. The faint flush in her cheeks was born of pride. "Well," she said, "that pleases me. It is like you, Charley. Hold it, dear, every bushel, and, before you yield an inch, let them break you if they can."

She turned abruptly and glanced at the tall wheat which rolled back, dusky green with faint opal gleams in it, across the great level and over the swell of rise into the smoky crimson that lingered in the western' sky.

"It's yours," she said proudly. "You made it grow, and do you think I don't know what it has cost you? You have gone without sleep for it, and worn yourself to skin and bone. Perhaps you have always worked hard, but, I think, never quite so cruelly hard as you have done this year."

She stopped and gazed fondly on him. Then she went on.

"Oh," she said, "I understand – everything. Charley, dear, it isn't without a reason you are so thin and gaunt and brown, and your hands – the hands that have done so much for me – are hard and scarred. Still, I want them to hold on to what is yours. You have made the splendid wheat grow, and you won't let anybody rob you of it now."

Leland smiled, though it was evident that he was stirred.

"Well," he said, "it would be a little easier to stop them doing it if I knew where to get five thousand dollars, which is one thousand pounds. Of course, I owe a great deal more, but with that in hand to settle the odd accounts that must be met, I needn't force my wheat on the market for a month or so."

"Oh," said Carrie with a little laugh, "there will not be the least difficulty about the money. I am going to give it to you – two thousand pounds if you want it."

Leland stared at her in evident astonishment. "My dear, I never knew you had so much, and, if you have, it must be every penny that belongs to you. I couldn't let you strip yourself of everything for me."

"What have you been doing ever since I came to Prospect? Still, that doesn't matter. You must humour me. Do you think, after all you have done, I could stand by and see you ruined when there was anything that belonged to me? Charley, you must use this money. Can't you see that you must, if it's only to show that you have forgiven me?"

She turned swiftly, and threw an arm about his shoulder. "If you don't, you will almost make me hate you again. You don't want that? Then you will make no more silly objections. We are going into this fight together."

Leland made a little gesture of surrender. "Well," he said slowly, "since you have made your mind up, I can't say no. I don't think it would be much use, anyway. But it will be a big risk, my dear."

"But," said Carrie, "that is one of the things that appeal to me. Still, it's all decided. You shall have a cheque for ten thousand dollars. That's right, isn't it? Now tell me what is in the rest of the letters."

She drew back from him a little. When Leland looked at her smilingly, a faint flush crept into her cheek again.

"Oh," she said, "I know what you are thinking. I always do. Still, you see, it isn't entirely my fault that I'm different from the girl you married. And now tell me about the other letters."

Leland handed her one of them with an illuminated device at the top of it. "It's an annual function, one of the biggest in Winnipeg, and women attend it. Everybody with a stake in the country will be there, and they want to make me a steward. My broker's on the committee, and Prospect is rather a big farm, you see. I am requested to bring Mrs. Leland along with me."

Carrie's eyes brightened. After all, it was lonely at Prospect, and she had played her part in two London seasons. Now and then she felt a longing to move among people of her own station again, and the prospect of attending the function was undeniably attractive. Her dresses would not be out of fashion yet, and, after the long months on the dusty prairie, it would be delightful to appear for once attired becomingly at a brilliant assembly. There were also eminent names upon the invitation, and she felt that, apart from any pleasure she might derive, it would be a source of satisfaction to see her husband among the notables of the land.

"You would like to go?" he asked.

"I would like it better than anything."

Leland appeared thoughtful. "I would like to see you there. You could put on the bracelet I saw you with and the crescent in your hair."

"No," said Carrie, who looked away from him, "I think I would sooner go very plainly – that is, if I could go at all."

The trace of eagerness in her voice was not lost upon the man, and he stood silent a moment before he made a little resolute gesture.

"Well," he said, "we'll go. It's the first little pleasure of that kind I have been able to offer you, and I daresay Gallwey will see the guards ploughed just as well as I could."

"There is some reason why you shouldn't go, after all?" and Carrie glanced at him sharply. "You are too busy."

"I'm not quite sure there is. I expect it's mostly fancy, but a man gets into the way of thinking that when there's anything of consequence to be done he should see it done himself. Now those fire-guards" – and he pointed to a belt of furrows that cut off the homestead from the prairie – "are the regulation width, but I was thinking of doubling them. The grass is tinder-dry, and the oats will soon be ripe enough to burn."

"Ah," said Carrie, "you think the rustlers might try again?"

Leland smiled drily. "Well," he said, "grass-fires are in no way unusual at this season."

Carrie guessed what he was thinking as he looked in silence out across the ripening wheat. As she gazed at the vast sweep of grain, she, too, was stirred with the pride of possession and accomplishment. She longed now for the glitter of the assembly, for conversation as one of them with men and women of culture and station, with a fervour which in all probability any one who had lived, as she had, on the lonely prairie levels would quite understand. But, with a little sigh, she crushed the longing down.

"Then," she said quietly, "we will stay here, Charley."

Leland appeared irresolute. "After all, we wouldn't be so very long away."

"No," said Carrie, firmly. "There is a lot against you, and you mustn't leave a single advantage to the enemy."

Leland stooped and kissed her. "Well, I guess you're right – still, I think I know what you're going to do without for me."

Nothing more was said, but it was not needed, for there was perfect understanding between them as they went into the house together.

It was early next morning when Leland harnessed four horses to the big gang-plough, and, as there was moonlight that night, he still sat behind another four until long after the red sun went down. There were other men he could have bidden to do the work for him, but he knew the odds against him, and meant to do it himself thoroughly. It was also careful ploughing, and not done in haste, as is most usual in the West, for throughout most of it the clods ran dead smooth and level, without a break to let the grass tussocks through. Their sides, gleaming from contact with the polished steel, were laid towards the prairie, presenting to it a serried phalanx of good, black loam; but where the sod was unusually friable, Leland got down to toil with the spade.

A grass-fire needs very little to help it. A tuft or two of dry grass projecting from a half-turned clod will suffice, and the flame will sometimes creep in and out between and across the ridges, wherever a few withered stalks may lie. Leland knew he had not done with the rustlers yet, and it was advisable to take due precautions. The standard guard-furrows were considered quite enough by most of his neighbours, who, indeed, now and then neglected to plough them. But he had a good deal at stake, and meant, in so far as it was permitted him, to make quite sure.

He went round the wheat and oats, and then spent several days ripping odd strips here and there across the prairie in the track of the prevalent winds. It was fiercely hot weather, but he was busy every hour from dawn to dusk, and at nights his men grinned as they mentioned it. Charley Leland was getting very afraid of fire, they said. When he was satisfied with the ploughing, he had the axes and grub-hoes ground, and set the men to work cutting out the smaller growth of willows of underbrush in the strip of birches that stretched close up to the homestead from the bluff. When Gallwey, who had other duties, found him busy at it the first morning, he smiled a little.

"I suppose it's really necessary. If not, it would be a considerable waste of time," he said.

"Well," said Leland, drily, "I almost think it is. A good deal of this stuff is tinder-dry, and you can't plough through the bluff. I don't know if you have ever seen a bad fire in the underbrush? You can't beat it out, as you can now and then when it's in the grass."

Gallwey looked thoughtful. "All this points to one thing. You feel tolerably satisfied that the rustlers will make another attempt?"

"It's a sure thing." Leland straightened himself a little, with a lean, brown hand clenched on the haft of the big axe. "Before the snow is on the ground, I or the whisky boys will have had to quit this prairie. I don't want it to be me."

Then he turned away abruptly, and, whirling the great blade high, buried it at a stroke in a dry and partly rotten birch. His comrade smiled. He had seen Leland's face, and there was something vaguely portentous in the flash of whirling steel and the crash of the blow. Charley Leland, he knew, could wait and take precautions, but it was also evident that when the time came, he could strike in a somewhat impressive fashion.

Leland worked on for several more days, and then one night Carrie and he stood outside of the door of the homestead, watching a great pile of underbrush blazing furiously. The man smiled as he turned to his companion. His hands were blackened, and his old blue-jean garments singed.

"Well," he said, "I guess I've done what I can. I had to do it, anyway, since you lent me that two thousand pounds. If the market would only stiffen, you'd get your money back with an interest that would astonish people in England."

He broke off for a moment with a curious little laugh. "My dear," he said, "you and I should have been in Winnipeg to-night."

Carrie said nothing, but the firelight was on her face when she looked up at her husband, and once more he was satisfied.

CHAPTER XXV

A PORTENTOUS LIGHT

It was growing dusk, of a thick, hot evening, when Leland at last pulled up his jaded horses, and, turning in the iron saddle, raised his hand in signal. Behind him, a drawn-out line of machines and plodding teams were moving on at measured distances, binder after binder, half-hidden by the tall oats that went down before them with a harsh crackle. Where they passed, men toiled hard among the flung-out sheaves, and the trampling of weary horses, rasp and tinkle of the knives, and the clash of the binders' wooden arms rang far across the great dusky plain. The sounds of strenuous activity had risen since the sun first crept up above the vast sweep of grass, and continued through the burning heat of the day; but now they ceased suddenly, and men, stripped to coarse blue shirt and trousers of dusty jean, wiped their dripping faces, and straightened their aching backs before they loosed the teams. Their hoarse voices came up to Leland, with the clatter of flung-down poles and the tramp of horses among the stubble, as he got down from his binder.

Men toil hard at harvest the world over, but, perhaps, nowhere is the work so fierce, or demands so much from those engaged in it, as on the wide levels which stretch back from the wheat lands of Western Canada into the Dakotas across the border. There flesh and blood must keep pace with unwearying machines, the latest and most ingenious that man's brain can conceive. The reaper has gone, the binder that is a year or two out of date is broken up, and, while the machine does more and more, the strength of the men who serve and drive it remains the same. For all that, none of them can afford to be left behind. They have no use for the incompetent in that country, and, though at times the pace is apt to kill, man must strain overtaxed muscle and sinew in the tense effort to keep up with wooden arms that never ache, and with clashing steel. The toilers are, for the most part, well paid and generously fed, and they give all that is in them, from pride of manhood, and in some degree from sheer necessity. The ban that is still a privilege has never been lifted yet, and, while wheat may glut the markets and flour be cheap, it is alone by the sweat of somebody's strenuous effort that man has bread to eat.

Leland was aching all over, but that was, of course, nothing new to him, and he turned to Gallwey, who was standing close by, when a man came up to lead his team away.

"If you'll put the saddle on Coureur, Tom, and bring him out, I'd be obliged," he said. "I'll sit here and smoke a pipe before I ride out to meet Carrie and Mrs. Annersly. They should be well on their way from Custer's now."

Gallwey ventured to expostulate with him. "I believe I heard Mrs. Leland tell you not to come; and if you are going to start again at four o'clock to-morrow, one would fancy you had done about enough," he said. "I'm quite sure I have."

"Well," said Leland, "I want a look round, anyway. There has been a good deal of smoke about most of the day, and there's a big grass-fire, or probably more than one, somewhere out on the prairie. The wind's freshening, too."

That, at least, was evident, for a rush of hot breeze came up out of the growing darkness, and during the last few hours the sun had been hidden by driving haze. Gallwey, who felt the wind upon his dusty cheek, turned and glanced down the long row of sheaves which ridged the edge of the prairie, for he guessed what his comrade was thinking. Behind the oats there rolled long, rippling waves of wheat, and, though they were dusky now, the daylight would have shown that they were tinted with bronze and gold. The tall stems were hot still, and the prairie sod was white and thick with fibrous dust.

"Everything is about as safe as you could make it," he said. "We have good guards, and you ploughed check-furrows outside of them."

"I did," said Leland, drily. "I cut them across the track of the usual winds. This one's an exception, and I have seen a fire jump guards that were 'most as wide. There would be trouble if a spark got in among the stubble, and I'm taking no chances just now."

Gallwey made a little gesture of concurrence as he once more glanced down the long rows of sheaves. The stubble stood among them knee-high and above the strip of ploughing that cut it off from the prairie, for straw has no great value in that country.

"Well," he said, "I daresay you are right. It's a little hard to see how a fire could get in, but, after all, one can never make quite sure of anything."

He went away, and when he came back with the horse, Leland, swinging himself stiffly into the saddle, rode out across the rise into the silent prairie. Half an hour had passed before he met the waggon, but he then turned back with it, checking his lively horse as Carrie's team, which had travelled a considerable distance that day, plodded slowly through tussocky grass up a slope. There are places where the prairie runs dead level from horizon to horizon, but here and there it lifts in long, gentle rises, as the ocean does when the swell of a past gale disturbs its oily surface. Often the change is imperceptible until one comes to the dip where the incline softly falls away again. As they crossed the ridge, Carrie pulled the horses up and gazed about her.

"It's a trifle impressive. No sky, and darkness on the unseen earth. There are only the fires moving in a void," she said.

The others did not answer, though they were in sympathy with her. Thick darkness hid the prairie, and they on the crest of the ridge seemed utterly alone in an immeasurable immensity of space. Somewhere in the midst of it were long smears of crimson light that seized the eye with their suggestion of distance as they flung themselves aloft when the waggon crossed a rise. Still, the rise remained invisible, and, as Carrie had said, the fires seemed to be moving through a great emptiness. It was curiously and almost hauntingly impressive.

"I suppose they can't be near Prospect?" she said.

Leland turned his face to the wind, which was filled with the smell of burning. "The nearest should be most of a league away from the homestead," he said. "It's fortunate it is. That fire's an unusually big one."

There was silence again for a minute or two, while they watched the moving radiance, and then Carrie stood up suddenly.

"Prospect should be straight in front of us over the horses' heads," she said.

"Almost. You couldn't see it. The rise hides the house."

"Ah!" said Carrie, with a little gasp. "Then there's another light behind it. Something low and little that twinkles like a star."

Leland shook his bridle and touched the horse with his heel. "Take your own time," he said hoarsely. "I'm going on. I'm afraid you'll have light enough before you're home."

In another moment he had vanished into the darkness, and they heard a drumming of hoofs grow fainter as he rode towards Prospect at a furious gallop. For a while there was nothing he could see, but when he swept across the last rise, and the lights of Prospect twinkled close in front of him, he made out a little patch of radiance beyond them on the prairie. It was evident to him that nobody at the homestead, which stood lower, would see it. Then he struck the horse again, and was riding by the stables at a wild gallop when a voice hailed him.

"That you, Mr. Leland?" it said.

Leland, remembering what instructions he had given the watcher, shouted and pulled up his horse with a struggle.

"Turn out the boys!" he said. "Get them along to the south side of the oats with the wet grain bags and shovels. Tom Gallwey's in the house?"

The unseen man said he was; and in another minute Leland, who rode on, swung himself down at the homestead door. Gallwey, who had apparently heard him coming, ran out.

"Bring me my old Marlin, and get yours," said Leland. "There's a fire-bug getting his work in to windward of us on the prairie."

Gallwey disappeared, but came back with two rifles in less than a minute. Leland, who had let the horse go, turned to him.

"We're going on foot to get that fellow if we can," he said. "I guess the boys will know what to do."

Gallwey considered that this was probable, for grass-fires are common at that season, and Leland had more than once explained exactly what the part of each would be in case one approached the homestead. He and his comrade accordingly set off through the bluff at a steady run, though Gallwey twice fell over an unseen obstacle, while, when they came out, there were two moving lines of fire, small as yet, but growing, on the prairie behind it. It was also evident that the hot wind would bring them down upon the oats. Leland, however, did not head for either blaze, but for a point some distance to the left of the one farthest off.

"That man means to make quite sure," he said. "He'll figure he's as safe as he was when he started the first fire, since we've shown no sign of seeing it."

"I suppose there is a man," gasped Gallwey.

Leland seemed to laugh, though he was running hard. "Well," he said breathlessly, "it's quite a usual thing for one fire to come along in weather like this, but it's rather too much of a coincidence when two of them start in the same place, while, when you see a third one too, it's enough to make one anxious for a good grip of the man who's lighting them."

"I can't see a third."

Leland swung his arm up, and appeared to be pointing in front of him. "You're going to. Go on slow, but be ready to run when you see a twinkle. The one thing to remember is that you have a rifle."

He turned off and vanished, while Gallwey pulled up to a walk. There was a very big fire a league or so away, and two small ones behind him which were extending rapidly, but all the rest of the prairie was wrapped in utter darkness. When he turned, after glancing at the wide blaze of radiance, he could not see a yard in front of him. Where his comrade was he did not know, but he fancied his object was to place the incendiary between the two of them when he betrayed himself by the third blaze. Gallwey was, however, not quite sure there would be a third blaze, while it appeared not improbable that if the man still lingered, he might hear them.

For five minutes he walked straight on, or, at least, he fancied so. It seemed to be getting darker, for the air was thick with drifting smoke, and there was no moon. Then a pale twinkle leapt up in front of him, and that was all he could be certain of, for, since there was no horizon, it might have been, for all that he could tell, either above him or beneath. It was a feeble blink of light that presently went out again. Still, he had his direction now, and his heart beat a good deal faster than usual as he went on at a run, until the pale blaze sprang up a second time. Then he dropped swiftly, and crouched with one foot under him and the rifle in his left hand, watching the radiance increase. He could see the taller tussocks of grass between him and the fire now, and drew in his breath, pitching the rifle forward with his elbow on his knee, when a black figure became faintly visible behind it.