And so the first summer wore away and the first harvest was at hand. Any disappointment which had been occasioned by backward conditions earlier in the season was effaced by the wonderful crop which now crowned the efforts of the pioneers. On their finest Eastern farms they had seen nothing to equal the great stand of wheat and oats which now enveloped them, neck-high, whenever they invaded it. The great problem before the settlers was the harvesting of this crop. It was a mighty task to attempt with their scythes, but there was no self-binder, or even reaper, within many miles.

Finally Morrison solved the problem for the whole community by placing an order, at a fabulous figure, for a self-binder from the United States. It was a cumbrous, wooden-frame contrivance, guiltless of the roller bearings, floating aprons, open elevators, amid sheaf carriers of a later day, but it served the purpose, and with its aid the harvest of the little settlement was safely placed in sheaf. The farmers then stacked their grain in the fields, taking care to plough double fire-guards, with a burnt space between, as a precaution, against the terrifying fires which broke over the prairie as soon as the September frosts had dried the grass. A community some twenty miles to the eastward boasted a threshing mill, and arrangements were made for its use after it had discharged the duties of its own locality. The machine was driven by horse-power, and in the dawn of the crisp November mornings the crescendo of its metallic groan could be heard for miles across the brown prairie. It, too, with its hand feed, its open straw-carriers, its low-down delivery, which necessitated digging a hole in the frozen earth to accommodate the bags, and its possible capacity of six hundred bushels a day, bears mean comparison with its modern successor; but it threshed grain at a lower cost per bushel, and threw less into the straw than has ever been accomplished by the mighty steam and gasoline inventions which have displaced it.

When Harris's threshing was done he found he had six hundred bushels of wheat and seven hundred bushels of oats in cone-shaped piles on his fields. The roads were fine and hard, and no snow had yet fallen, so he determined to begin at once with the marketing of his wheat. His last cent had been spent months before; indeed, it had been only through the courtesy of the storekeeper at Plainville, who was also postmaster, and who had stretched the law to the point of accepting hen eggs as legal tender in exchange for postage stamps, that Mary Harris had been able to keep up the brave, optimistic series of letters written "home." So Harris decided that he would at once market some of his wheat. Most of the oats would be needed for his horses and for seed, and what remained would command good prices from new settlers the following spring, but some of the wheat must be turned into money at once. During the latter part of the summer they had lived exclusively on the produce of their farm; on vegetables from the garden, fish and ducks from the stream, prairie chickens, and an occasional rabbit from the fields. The wild geese had deserted them early in the spring, and returned only after harvest. But now they should have a change on their table. Mary had accepted the pioneer fare of the summer without complaint, but of late Harris had discovered a strange longing in her ryes, and more than once she had arrested herself in the words "I wish we had—" Then two penitent little tears would steal softly clown her cheeks, and she would bury her head in his arms as he soothed her with loving words and promised that "after threshing things would be different."

So now he set out for Emerson with the best load his horses could draw. The first few miles he drove in silence, for there was a heavy weight at his heart as he thought of the little wife alone with the responsibilities of the farm...That she would be faithful to every responsibility he knew beyond question...But he was not quite satisfied. A strange moodiness had come over her, and even with him at home she had at times given way to fits of downheartedness which seemed altogether alien to her nature.

But this morning as he drove the well-worn trail, a burnished sun mounted higher and higher ahead of him, and with it his own spirits rose until he found himself whistling and boyishly building castles in the air. But his castles, as he told himself, had solid foundations; indeed, they were not even speculations, but already might be accepted as assured accomplishments. Some things he certainly must do for Mary. First of these was the purchase of a glass window for the house, and next to that he promised enough boards for a door, and perhaps enough to floor part of their little room. Then there should be sugar, and tea, and flour, and warm boots, and some much-needed kitchen utensils. True, he needed some things himself, but his needs could wait. And then there were other things. Oh, he knew what to get. He hadn't been having little conferences with Mrs. Morrison for nothing...A tender smile gently suffused his face, and his cheery whistle soared above the rumble of the wagon-wheels on the hard lumps of the trail.

Ten days later he retraced his course in the teeth of a blinding blizzard. A dozen times he had been lost in the last forty-eight hours, but he had developed the prairie-dweller's sense of direction, and had always been able again to locate the trail. The Arthurs would have detained him, almost by force, but the thought of a pale, patient face, wrung with an agony of anxiety not for itself, made him adamant in his resolve to go home at whatever cost. The roads were almost impassable; he left his lumber at Arthurs', but carried with him his window, a few boards for a door, and a little bundle of drygoods. Everything else had gone by the way, surrendered in exchange for food and shelter for himself and horses.

It was not dreadfully cold, but the sky seemed only a vast turmoil of snow. The north-west wind pelted the flakes in his face, where they melted with the warmth of his skin and again drooped in tenacious icicles from his eyebrows and moustache. The horses, too, were half blinded with the storm, and the empty wagon dragged laboriously through the deep drifts. Darkness came down very early, but at last Harris began to recognize familiar landmarks close by the trail, and just as night was settling in he drew into the partial shelter of the bench on the bank of the coulee. The horses pulled on their reins persistently for the stable, but Harris forced them up to the house. His loud shout was whipped away by the wind and strangled in a moment, so he climbed stiffly from the wagon and pulled with numbed hands at the double thickness of carpet that did service for a door. He fancied he heard a sound, but could be sure of nothing; he called her name again and again, but could distinguish no answer. But at last the fastenings which held the carpet gave way, and he half walked, half fell, into the house.

The lantern burned dimly, but it was not at the lantern he looked. In the farthest corner, scarcely visible in the feeble light, stood his wife, and at her shoulder was the gun, trained steadily upon him.

"Mary, Mary, don't you know me?" he cried.

She dropped her weapon to the floor, where it went off, harmlessly burying its charge in the sod wall.

"Thank God, oh, thank God!" she exclaimed.

He threw off his wet overcoat and rushed to her side. But she sat silent on the bed, staring absently at the light flickering uncertainly in the wind from the open door.

He hastily rearranged the carpet, then, returning to her, he took her hands in his and rubbed them briskly. But she still stared vaguely at the light.

Suddenly a thought came to him. He rushed outside, to find that the horses, of their own accord, had taken shelter beside the stable. Here from the wagon he drew a little bundle and hurried back to the house.

She was sitting where he left her, shivering slightly and watching the play of the light as it flickered up and down the wall. He tore the package open and spread its contents before her.

At first she took no notice, but gradually her eyes found the outline of soft cloth and dainty feminine devices. With a great joy he watched the colour returning as her set face relaxed in a smile of ineffable tenderness. She raised her face to his and slipped her arms about his neck, and he knew that for the moment he had snatched her out of the valley of the shadow.

Harris made no more attempts to market his wheat that winter. His wife's health now became his first consideration, but, even had there been no such problem, experience had shown that nothing was to be gained by making the long and expensive trip to Emerson. The cost of subsistence of man and team on the way devoured all the proceeds of the wheat; indeed, there were instances on record in the settlement where men who attempted such trips during the winter actually came back poorer than they left, while those who could show a gain of a bag of sugar, a sack of flour, or a box of groceries were considered fortunate indeed.

"What shall we eat?" said Harris to his wife, when, after a full discussion, it was decided that no more grain could be marketed until spring.

"Oh, we shall not suffer," was her calm reply. "We have over five hundred bushels of wheat."

"But we can't eat wheat!"

"I'm not so sure of that. I heard Mr. McCrae say that lots of families had wintered on wheat. Indeed, boiled wheat is something of a delicacy. Even the best city families rarely have it, although it is more nutritious than flour and much easier to prepare."

Harris thrilled with joy over his wife's vivacity. The strange gloom that oppressed her so much of late had cost him many anxious hours.

"Besides," she continued, "we are well off to what some of them are. We have a good supply of vegetables, and one of the cows will milk most of the winter, and we have half a dozen laying hens. Then you will be able to shoot a rabbit now and again."

"Yes, we'll be all right," he agreed. "Perhaps I will get a day or two out at the lake. They say there is fine fishing all winter where some of the springs keep the ice open. And then, there's always a chance to pick off a deer."

So, in high spirits, they planned for their winter. There were long hours, and little diversion, and the desolation of bleak, snowbound prairies on every side, but through it all they kept up their courage and their hopefulness. Mary spent much time with her needle, from which John, when he felt she was applying herself too closely, beguiled her to a game of checkers or an hour with one of their few but valued books. To supplement their reading matter Mrs. Morrison sent over her little library, which consisted of "The Life of David Livingstone" and a bound number of "The Gospel Tribune." And there were frequent visits and long evenings spent about a cosy fire, when the Morrisons, or the Grants, or the Rileses, dropped in to while away the time. The little sod house was warm and snug, and as the men played checkers while the women sewed, what cared the pioneers for the snow and the cold and the wind whistling across the plains?

***

At last came the crisis. At four in the afternoon Harris kissed his wife an affectionate farewell, hitched his horses to the sleigh, and started out posthaste for Plainville. The sun, hanging low to the western horizon, was banded by a great ring of yellow and gold, bulging into two dull reflected glows at either side. A ground-drift of snow whipped keenly across the hard crust, and the north-west wind had a rip to it, but overhead the sky was clear and the blue amazingly deep. Harris drove by way of the Morrisons, where a few low words sent Tom to the stable at a trot to hitch his own team, while the good wife bustled about in the "room," almost overwhelmed with the importance of her mission.

"I will go for the doctor, Jack, and you go back and take the wife with you," was Morrison's kindly offer, but Harris would not agree. It was dark by this time, and he felt that he could trust no one else to make the journey to Plainville. Besides, there was more than a chance that Dr. Blain might be incapable, and in that case it meant a drive of thirty miles farther.

"It's good of you, Morrison," he said, "but you are more used to your wife's'bidding than I am, and you can be of good service there, if you will." And without waiting to argue he sprang into his sleigh again and was whipping his team into the darkness.

Dr. Blain, when at home, was to be found at the stopping-place. Harris tied his team at the door and went in, shaking the snow and frost from his great-coat. The air inside was close and stifling with tobacco, not unmixed with stronger fumes. A much-smoked oil lamp, hung by a wall-bracket, shed a certain sickly light through the thick air, and was supplemented in its illumination by rays from the door of a capacious wood stove which stood in the centre of the room, and about which half a dozen men were sitting.

"Night, Harris," said the landlord, who had a speaking acquaintance with every settler within twenty miles. "Ye're drivin' late. Ye'll have a bite supper, an' stable the team?"

"No, Hank, not to-night, thanking you the same. But I'm after Dr. Blain, and I'm in a hurry. Is he here, and—is he fit?" There was an anxiety in the last words that did not escape the host.

"Nothin' ser'ous, I hope? Frost, or somethin'?" Then, without waiting for reply, he continued: "Yes, doctor's here. Upstairs, bed to the right as ye go up. Just got in a little back. As for fit—dig 'im out an' judge for yourself."

Harris lost no time in scaling the ladder which led to the upper half-storey of the building. It was a garret—nothing better—where the cold stars looked through knot-holes in the poplar shingles, and the ends of the shingle-nails were tipped with frost. Another wall-lamp burned uncertainly here, flickering in the wind that whistled through the cracks in the gables, and by its light Harris found "the bed to the right." The form of a man lay diagonally across it, face downward, with arms extended above the head, and so still that Harris paused for a moment in a strange alarm. Then he slipped his hand on the doctor's neck and found it warm.

"Come, Doctor," he said, "I want you with me." But the sleeping man answered with not so much as a groan.

"Come, Dr. Blain," Harris repeated, shaking him soundly. "I want you to go home with me." He might have been speaking to the dead.

In sudden exasperation he seized the doctor by the shoulders, and with one heave of his mighty arms set him upright on the floor and shook him vigorously.

Dr. Blain opened his eyes and blinked uncertainly at the light. "Whatche doing, Harris?" he said at length, and the recognition brought a thrill of hope. "'S no use...Gotta sleep it off. 'S no use, Harris. 'S no use." And he crumpled up in the bed.

But Harris was desperate. "Now I'm not going to fool with you," he said. "You get up and come with me or I'll take you. Which is it?"

But the doctor only mumbled "'S no use," and fell heavily to sleep.

Throwing open his coat to get free motion for his arms, Harris in a moment wrapped the sleeping man in a couple of blankets from the bed, threw him over his shoulder, carried him down the rickety ladder, and deposited him, none too gently, in the sleigh. There was a mild cheer from the men about the stove over these heroic measures, and one of them thoughtfully threw the doctor's satchel into the sleigh. The next moment all were lost in the darkness.

Harris drove for an hour, watching the trail keenly in the whitish mist of the winter's night, and urging the horses to the limit of their exertions. He had almost forgotten his passenger when he felt a stir in the bottom of the sleigh. Looking down closely he found the doctor trying to extricate a flask from one of his pockets. With a quick wrench he took it from him, and would have thrown it into the snow, but the thought struck him that it might be needed, and he put it into his own pocket.

The doctor struggled to his feet. "Say, Harris, you're friend o' mine, but don't take too many liberties, see? 'S no use tryin' without it. Jush give me that bottle now, or I'll get out an' go home."

Harris was so pleased at the signs of returning coherence that he could have hugged the doctor, but he only said, "You've had enough for to-night. And you won't get out, because if you try to I'll knock you senseless in the bottom of the sleigh."

Then the doctor changed his tactics. He threw his arms about Harris's neck, and genuine tears coursed down his cheeks.

"Say, Harris, you don' know anything about it. You don' know what I'm up agains'. Jush got in from Wakopa to-day, and I haven't had my closh off for week. 'S right! I tell you, Harris, you don' know...Oh, I know I'm a fool—yes, don' tell me. But th' engineer knows it too when he ties down th' shafety valve t' make th' grade. Dosh it jush th' same. Thash jus' like me. Come on, Harris, hand it over. I got t' have it, or I can't make the grade."

"Well, you'll make the grade first to-night," said Harris.

After that the doctor remained silent for some time. Then suddenly he demanded: "Shay, Harris, where you takin' me to, anyway?"

"I'm taking you home."

"Home? What home? I got no home, jus'a—"

"I'm taking you to my home."

"Wha' for? You're all right, I guess..." Suddenly the doctor stood erect. "Harris, is your wife sick?"

"That's why I came for you."

"Well, why the devil didn't you say so? Here, give me that whip. Harris, Harris, what did you waste time arguing for?"

"I didn't waste much. The argument was mostly on your side."

"Harris," said the doctor, after a long silence, "you think I'm a fool. You're right. It isn't as though I didn't know. I know the road I'm going, and the end thereof... And yet, in a pinch, I can pull myself together. I'm all right now. But it'll get me again as soon as this is over... Any good I am, any good I do, is just a bit of salvage out of the wreck. The wreck—yes, it's a good word that—wreck."

***

Just as the dawn was breaking he knelt beside her. Her eyes were very large and quiet, and her face was white and still. But she raised one pale hand, and the thin fingers fondled in his hair. She drew his face very gently down, and big silent tears stood in his eyes.

"We will call him Allan," he said.



CHAPTER VI

IN THE SPELL OF THE MIRAGE

A quarter of a century is a short time as world history goes, but it is a considerable era in the life of the Canadian West. More things—momentous things—than can be hinted at in this narrative occurred in the twenty-five years following the great inrush of 1882. The boundless prairie reaches of Manitoba were now comparatively well settled, and the tide of immigration, which, after a dozen years' stagnation, had set in again in greater flood than ever, was now sweeping over the newer lands still farther west. Railways had supplanted ox-cart and bob-sleigh as the freighters of the plains; the farmer read his daily paper on the porch after supper, while his sons and daughters drove to town in "top" buggies, tailor-made suits, and patent-leather shoes. The howl of the coyote had given way to the whistle of the locomotive; beside the sod hut of earlier days rose the frame or brick house proclaiming prosperity or social ambition. The vast sweep of the horizon, once undefiled by any work of man, was pierced and broken with elevators, villages, and farm buildings, and the whiff of coal smoke was blown down the air which had so lately known only the breath of the prairies. The wild goose no longer loitered in the brown fields in spring and autumn, and the wild duck had sought the safety of the little lakes. The pioneer days had passed away, and civilization and prosperity were rampant in the land. There were those, too, who thought that perhaps the country had lost something in all its gaining; that perhaps there was less idealism and less unreckoning hospitality in the brick house on the hill than there once had been in the sod shack In the hollow.

Mary Harris hurried about her capacious kitchen, deep in the preparation of the evening meal. The years had taken toll of the freshness of her young beauty; the shoulders, in mute testimony to much hard labour of the hands, had drooped forward over the deepening chest; the hair was thinner, and farther back above the forehead, and streaked with grey at the temples; the mouth lacked the rosy sensuousness of youth, and sat now in a mould, half of resolution, half submission. Yet her foot had lost little of its sprightliness, and the sympathy in her fine eyes seemed to have deepened with the years.

A moist but appetizing steam rose from the vegetable pots on the range, and when she threw back the iron door to feed more coal the hot glow from within danced a reflection along the bright row of utensils hanging from the wall, and even sought out the brass plate on the cream separator at the far end of the big room. Through the screen door came the monotonously redundant clic...a...clank of the windmill, and a keen ear might have caught the light splash of water as it fell in the wooden horse-troughs from the iron nozzle of the pump.

Mary stuck a fork in a potato to ascertain if the "bone" was all gone, meanwhile shielding her face from the steam with the pot lid, held aloft in an aproned hand. Having satisfied herself that the meal was making satisfactory progress, she stepped to the door and sent a quick look across the fields, to where a streak of black smoke was scrawled along the sky.

"Beulah," she called, turning toward the interior part of the house. "Come, Beulah, set the table. They're coming from the field."

In a moment a girl of twenty, plainly attired in a neat calico dress, entered the kitchen. She was fresh and beautiful as her mother had been that first summer in the sod house on the bench, and something in her appearance suggested that with her mother's beauty and fine sensibility she had inherited the indomitable spirit which had made John Harris one of the must prosperous farmers in the district. She moved in an easy, unconscious grace of self-reliance—a reliance that must be just a little irritating to men of old-fashioned notions concerning woman's dependence on the sterner sex—drew the long wooden table, with its covering of white oilcloth, into the centre of the kitchen, and began placing the dishes in position.

"I don't see why we can't have supper in the dining-room," she protested at length. "Before we built the new house we were always talking about how fine it would be to have a separate room, for our meals, and now we don't eat in it once a week."

"I know," said the mother, in a quiet, tired voice. "But you know what your father thinks about it. You know how down he is on style."

"It's no great style to eat in a dining-room," continued the girl. "What did he build it for? To take off his boots in? That's about all he does there, nights before he goes to bed."

"Now, Beulah, don't be unreasonable. You know we always have meals there Sundays. But your father likes the kitchen best when it ain't too hot. And besides, I can hardly take them into the dining-room while the ploughing's on. You know how greasy they are with the engine."

"They're ploughing over at Grant's, too, and when I dropped in there yesterday the dinner was set in the dining-room, and a clean white linen cloth on the table, and napkins set for the men, and I guess they use the same kind of grease as we do," persisted the girl. "And I noticed when they came in to dinner Mr. Grant and the boys, and the hired man too, all put their coats on—not their working coats, but coats they had hanging in a closet handy. It didn't take a minute, but it looked different."

"Now, Beulah, you know your father would never stand for putting on airs like that. He—"

"'Tisn't putting on airs. It's putting on clothes—clean clothes to eat in. Susy Grant never has to feel—I hate to say it, Mother—ashamed if any of her friends drop in at mealtime. And I couldn't help thinking how fine Harry looked—"

"'Pon my word, Beulah, I'm beginning to think you must be a bit soft on Harry Grant. I had thought perhaps your weakness was toward Jim, but perhaps I'm mistaken."

"Can't a girl say a fellow's fine-looking without being soft about it?" she continued. "As for Jim—"

But at this moment the conversation was cut short by the scraping of heavy boots on the ploughshare nailed to the block at the door, and John Harris, followed by Allan and the hired man, Jim, walked into the kitchen. The farmer's frame was heavier than in his younger days, and his hair, too, was streaked with grey, but every muscle in his great body seemed to bulge with strength. His face was brown with the prairie sun and wind of twenty-five summers, and lines of worry and care had cut their tracings about the mouth and eyes. Beside him stood Allan, his only son, straighter and lither of figure, but almost equally powerful. The younger man was, indeed, a replica of the older, and although they had their disagreements, constant association had developed a fine comradeship, and, on the part of the son, a loyalty equal to any strain. The hired man, Jim, was lighter and finer of feature, and his white teeth gleamed against the nut-brown of his face in a quiet smile that refused to be displaced in any emergency, and at times left the beholder in considerable doubt as to the real emotions working behind.

The men all wore blue overalls, dark blue or grey shirts, and heavy boots. They were guiltless of coat or vest, and tossed their light straw hats on the water-bench as they passed. There was a quick splashing of greasy hands at the wash-basin, followed by a more effectual rubbing on a towel made from a worn-out grain sack. The hired man paused to change the water and wash his face, but the others proceeded at once to the table, where no time was lost in ceremony. Meat, potatoes, and boiled cabbage were supplied in generous quantities on large platters. A fine stack of white bread tiered high on a plate, and a mountainous pile of Mary Harris's famous fresh buns towered on another. All hands ate at the table together, although the hired man was usually last to sit down, owing to his perverse insistence upon washing his face and combing his hair before each meal. Although his loss of time sometimes irritated Harris, he bore it in silence. There was no better farm hand in the country-side than Jim Travers, and, as Harris often remarked, employers nowadays couldn't afford to be too particular about trifles.

Harris helped himself generously to meat and vegetables and, having done so, passed the platters to his son, and in this way they were circulated about the table. Mary poured the tea from a big granite pot at her elbow, and whenever a shortage of food threatened Beulah rose from her place and refilled plate or platter. There was no talk for the first few minutes, only the sound of knife and fork plied vigorously and interchangeably by father and son, and with some regard for convention by the other members of the family. John Harris had long ago recognized the truth that the destiny of food was the mouth, and whether conveyed on knife or fork made little difference. Mary, too, had found a carelessness of little details both of manner and speech coming over her, as her occasional "ain't" betrayed, but since Jim had joined their table she had been on her guard. Jim seldom said anything, but always that quiet smile lay like a mask over his real emotions.

When the first insistent demands of appetite had been appeased, Harris, resting both elbows on the table, with knife and fork trained on opposite corners of the ceiling, straightened himself somewhat and remarked:

"Allan an' me's goin' to town to-night; anything you want from Sempter's store, Mary?"

"That lets me in for the cows," said Beulah. "You were in town night before last, too, and it was half-past nine before I got through milking."

"Oh, well, Jim was away that night," said Allan.

"Jim has enough to do, without milking cows after hours," returned the girl. "What do you want to go to town for again to-night, anyway?"

"Got to get more coal," said Harris. "We'll take two teams, an' it'll be late when we get back."

"Try and not be too late," said the mother, quietly. "You have to be at work so early in the morning, you know."

"I think it's all nonsense, this day-an'-night work," persisted Beulah. "Is there never going to be any let-up to it?"

"Beulah, you forget yourself," said her father, "If you'd more to do you'd have less lime to fret about it. Your mother did more work in one summer than you have in all your life, an' she's doin' more yet."

"Oh, Beulah's a good help," interposed Mary. "I hope she never has to work like I did."

"I guess the work never hurt us," said Harris, helping himself to preserved strawberries. "Just the same, I'm glad to see you gettin' it a bit easier. But this younger generation—it beats me what we're comin' to. Thinkin' about nothin' but fun and gaddin' to town every night or two. And clo'es—Beulah here's got more clo'es than there were in the whole Plainville settlement the first two or three years."

"I got more neighbours, too," interjected the girl. Then springing up, she stood behind her father's chair and put her arm around his neck.

"Don't be cross, Dad," she whispered. "Your heart's in the right place—but a long way in."

He disengaged her, gently enough. As Beulah said, his heart was all right, but a long way in. Twenty-five years of pitched battle with circumstances—sometimes in victory, sometimes in defeat, but never in despair; always with a load of expense about him, always with the problem of income and outlay to be solved—had made of Harris a man very different from the young idealist of '82. During the first years of struggle for a bare existence in some way the flame of idealism still burned, but with the dawn of the "better times" there came a gradual shifting of standards and a new conception of essentials. At first the settlers attached little value to their land; it was free for the taking, and excited no envy among them. The crops of the early years were unprofitable on account of the great distance to market; later, when the railway came to their doors, the crops were still unprofitable, owing to falling prices and diminishing yields due to poor cultivation. Then came a decade during which those who stayed in the country stayed because they could not get out, and it became a current saying that the more land a man farmed the deeper he got in debt. Homesteads were abandoned; settlers flew by night "across the line" or to more distant districts to begin their fight over again. And yet, in some way, Harris kept his idealism amid all the adversity in which the community was steeped; reverses could neither crush his spirit nor deflect it from its ambitions.

Then came the swing of the pendulum. No one knows just what started it prosperity-wards. Some said it was that the farmers, disheartened with wheat-growing, were applying themselves to stock, and certain it is that in "mixed farming" the community eventually found its salvation; others attributed the change to improved agricultural implements, to improved methods of farming, to greater knowledge of prairie conditions, to reductions in the cost of transportation and enlarged facilities for marketing, or to increasing world demand and higher world prices for the product of the farm. But whatever the causes—and no doubt all of the above contributed—the fact gradually dawned upon the settlers that land—their land—was worth money.

It was the farmers from the United States, scouting for cheaper lands than were available in their own communities, who first drove the conviction home. They came with money in their wallets; they were actually prepared to exchange real money for land. Such a thing had never before been heard of in Plainville district. At first the settlers were sceptical. Here were two facts almost beyond the grasp of their imagination: that farmers should buy land with money, and the farmers should have money with which to buy land. True, a few of them had already bought railway lands at three or four dollars an acre, but they bought oil long terms, with a trifling investment, and they aimed to pay for the lands out of the crops or not at all.

But a few transactions took place; lands were sold at five dollars, six dollars, eight dollars an acre. The farmers began to realize that land represented wealth—that it was an asset, not a liability—and there was a rush for the cheap railway lands that had so long gone a-begging. Harris was among the first to sense the change in the times, and a beautiful section of railway land that lay next to his homestead he bought at four dollars an acre. The first crop more than paid for the land, and Harris suddenly found himself on the way to riches.

The joy that came with the realization that fortune had knocked at his door and he had heard was the controlling emotion of his heart for a year or more. But gradually, like a fog blown across a moonlit night, came a sense of chill and disappointment. If only he had bought two sections! If at least he had proved up on his pre-emption, which he might have had for nothing! He saw neighbours about him adding quarter to quarter. None of them had done better than himself, but some had done as well. And in some way the old sense of oneness, the old community interest which had held the little band of pioneers together amid their privations and their poverty, began to weaken and dissolve, and in its place came an individualism and a materialism that measured progress only in dollars and cents. Harris did not know that his gods had fallen, that his ideals had been swept away; even as he sat at supper this summer evening, with his daughter's arms about his neck, he felt that he was still bravely, persistently, pressing on toward the goal, all unaware that years ago he had left that goal like a lighthouse on a rocky shore, and was now sweeping along with the turbulent tide of Mammonism. He still saw the light ahead, but it was now a phantom of the imagination. He said, "When I am worth ten thousand I will have reached it"; when he was worth ten thousand he found the faithless light had moved on to twenty-five thousand. He said, "When I am worth twenty-five thousand I will have reached it"; when he was worth twenty-five thousand he saw the glow still ahead, beckoning him on to fifty thousand. It never occurred to him to slacken his pace—to allow his mind a rest from its concentration; if he had paused and looked about he might, even yet, have recognized the distant lighthouse on the reef about the wreck of his ideals. But to stop now might mean losing sight of his goal, and John Harris held nothing in heaven or earth so great as its attainment.

So, gently enough, he disengaged his daughter's arms and finished his supper in silence. As soon as it was ended the men started for the barn, and in a few minutes two wagons rattled noisily down the trail.

Beulah helped with the supper dishes, and then came out with the milk-pails to the corral where the cows, puffing and chewing, complacently awaited her arrival. But she had not reached the gate when the hired man was at her side and had slipped one of the pails from her arm.

"Now, Jim, I don't think that's fair at all," she said; and there was a tremor in her voice that vexed her. "Here you're slaving all day with coal and water, and I think that's enough, without milking cows at night."

But Jim only smiled and stirred a cow into position.

"Yes, that's like you," she continued. "Pick Daisie first, just because you know she's tough as rubber. Say, Jim, honest goods," she demanded, pausing and facing him, milk stool in hand, "why do you let father put this kind of stuff over on you?"

"Your father doesn't put anything over on me," he answered. "I'm very fond of milking."

"Yes, you are—not," she said. "You do it on my account, because you're too big-hearted to quit before I'm through..." There was a tuneful song of the tin pails as the white streams rattled on their bottoms.

"Jim," she said, after a while, when the noise of the milking was drowned in the creamy froth, "I'm getting near the end of this kind of thing. Father's getting more and more set on money all the time. He thinks I should slave along too to pile up more beside what he's got already, but I'm not going to do it much longer. Mother stands it—I guess she's got used to him, and she won't say anything, but if there's anything I'm not strong on it's silence. I'm not afraid of work, or hardship either. I'd live in a sack if I had to. I'd—"

"Would you live in a shack?" said Jim.

She shot a quick look at him. But he was quietly smiling into his milk-pail, and she decided to treat his question impersonally.

"Yes, I'd live in a shack, too, if I had to. I put in my first years in a sod-house, and there was more real happiness romping up and down the land then than there is now. In those days everybody was so poor that money didn't count...It's different now."

Jim did not pursue the subject, and the milking was completed in silence. Jim finished first, and presently the rising hum of the cream separator was heard from the kitchen.

"There he goes, winding his arm off—for me," said the girl, as she rose from the last cow. "Poor Jim—I wish I knew whether it's just human kindness makes him do it, or whether—" She stopped, colouring a little over the thought that had almost escaped into words.

When the heavy grind of the separating was finished Jim went quietly to his own room, but the girl put on a clean dress and walked out through the garden. Rows of mignonette and lobelia bordered the footpath, and sweet, earthy garden smells filled the calm evening air. The rows of currant and gooseberry bushes were heavy with green fruit; the leaves of the Manitoba maples trembled ever so little in the still air. The sun was setting, and fleecy fragments of cloud were painted ruddy gold against the silver background of the sky. From the barnyard came the contented sighing of the cows and the anxious clucking of a hen gathering in her belated brood. The whole country seemed bathed in peace—a peace deep and unpurchasable, having no part in any of the affairs of man.

At the lower gate she stooped to pick a flower, which she held for a moment to her face; then, toying lightly with it in her fingers, she slipped the latch and continued along the path leading down into the ravine. It was dark and cool down there, with a touch of dampness in the grass, and the balm-of-Gileads across the stream sent a fine moist fragrance through the air. To the right lay the bench where the sod-house had stood, not so much as a mound now marking the spot; but the thoughts of the girl turned yearningly to it, and to the days of the lonely but not unhappy childhood which it had sheltered.

Presently she reached the water, and her quick ear caught the sound of a musk-rat slipping gently into the stream from the reeds on the opposite bank; she could see the widening wake where he ploughed his swift way across the pond. Then her own figure stood up before her, graceful and lithe as the willows on the bank. She surveyed it a minute, then flicked the flower at her face in the water, and turned slowly homeward. She was not unhappy, but a dull sense of loss oppressed her—a sense that the world was very rich and very beautiful, and that she was feasting neither on its richness nor its beauty. There was a stirring of music and poetry in her soul, but neither music nor poetry found expression. What she felt was a consciousness that great things were just beyond the horizon of her experience, things undefined and undefinable which, could she but grasp them, would deepen life and sweeten life and give a purpose to all her being. And as she walked up the path and the fragrant night air filled her nostrils, something of that wilder life seemed borne in upon her and sent a fresh spring to her ankle. And presently she discovered she was thinking about Jim Travers.

Her mother sat in the dining-room, knitting by the light of the hanging lamp. Her face seemed very pale and lovely in the soft glow.

"Don't you think you have done enough?" said the girl, slipping into a sitting posture on the floor by her mother's knee. "You work, work, work, all the time. I suppose they'll have to let you work in heaven."

"We value our work more as we grow older," said the mother..."It helps to keep us from thinking."

"There you go!" exclaimed the girl; but there was a tenderness in her voice. "Worrying again. I wish they'd stay home for a change."

The mother plied her needles in silence. "Slip away to bed, Beulah," she said at length. "I will wait up for a while."

Late in the night the girl heard heavy footsteps in the kitchen and bursts of loud but indistinct talking.



CHAPTER VII

THE CALL OF THE FARTHER WEST

Notwithstanding Harris's late hours the household was early astir the following morning. At five o'clock Jim was at work in the stables, feeding, rubbing down, and harnessing his horses, while Allan and his father walked to the engine, where they built a fresh fire and made some minor repairs. Even at this early hour the sun shone brightly, its rays mellowing in a sheen of ground-mist that enveloped the prairie, but there is a tang in the Manitoba morning air even in midsummer, and the men walked briskly through the crisp stubble. A little later Beulah came down to the corral with her milk-pails, and the cows, comfortably chewing where they rested on their warm spots of earth, rose slowly and with evident great reluctance at her approach. A spar of light blue smoke ascended in a perpendicular column from the kitchen chimney; motherly hens led their broods forth to forage; pigs grunted with rising enthusiasm from near-by pens, and calves voiced insistent demands from their quarters. The Harris farm, like fifty thousand others, rose from its brief hush of rest and quiet to the sounds and energies of another day.

Breakfast, like the meal of the night before, was eaten hurriedly, and at first without conversation, but at length Harris paused long enough to remark, "Riles is talkin' o' goin' West."

"The news might be worse," said Beulah. Riles, although a successful farmer, had the reputation of being grasping and hard to a degree, even in a community where such qualities, in moderation, were by no means considered vices.

Harris paid no attention to his daughter's interruption. It was evident, however, that his mention of Riles had a purpose behind it, and presently he continued:

"Riles has been writin' to the Department of the Interior, and it seems they're openin' a lot of land for homesteadin' away West, not far from the Rocky Mountains. Seems they have a good climate there, and good soil, too."

"I should think Mr. Riles would be content with what he has," said Mary Harris. "He has a fine farm here, and I'm sure both him and his wife have worked hard enough to take it easier now."

"Hard work never killed nobody," pursued the farmer. "Riles is good for many a year yet, and free land ain't what it once was. Those homesteads'll be worth twenty dollars an acre by the time they're proved up."

"I wish I was sure of it—I wouldn't think long," said Allan. "But they say it's awful dry; all right for ranchin', but no good for farmin'."

"Who says that?" demanded his father. "The ranchers. They know which side their bread's buttered on. As long's they can get grazin' land for two cents an acre, or maybe nothin', of course they don't want the homesteader. They tell me the Englishmen and Frenchmen that went out into that country when us Canadians settled in Manitoba have more cattle now than they can count—they measure 'em by acres, Riles says."

Breakfast and Harris's speech came to an end simultaneously, and the subject was dropped for the time. In a few minutes Jim had his team hitched to the tank wagon in the yard. The men jumped aboard, and the wagon rattled down the road to where the engine and ploughs sat in the stubble-field.

"What notion's this father's got about Riles, do you suppose, mother?" asked Beulah, as the two women busied themselves with the morning work in the kitchen.

"Dear knows," said her mother wearily. "I hope he doesn't take it in his head to go out there too."

"Who, Dad? Oh, he wouldn't do that. He's hardly got finished with the building of this house, and you know for years he talked and looked forward to the building of the new house. His heart's quite wrapped up in the farm here. I wish he'd unwrap it a bit and let it peek out at times."

"I'm not so sure. I'm beginning to think it's the money that's in the farm your father's heart is set on. If the money was to be made somewhere else his heart would soon shift."

"Mother!" exclaimed the girl. In twenty years it was the first word approaching disloyalty she had heard from her mother's lips, and she could hardly trust her ears. It was nothing for Beulah to criticize her father; that was her daily custom, and she pursued it with the whole frankness of her nature. But her mother had always defended, sometimes mildly chiding, but never admitting either weakness or injustice on the part of John Harris.

"Well, I just can't stand it much longer," said the mother, the emotions which she had so long held in check overcoming her. "Here I've slaved and saved until I'm an—an old woman, and what better are we for it? We've better things to eat and more things to wear and a bigger house to keep clean, and your father thinks we ought to be satisfied. But he isn't satisfied himself. He's slaving harder than ever, and now he's got this notion about going West. Oh, you'll see it will come to that. He knows our life isn't complete, and he thinks more money will complete it. All the experience of twenty years hasn't taught him any better."

Beulah stood aghast at this outburst, and when her mother paused and looked at her, and she saw the unbidden wells of water gathering in the tender eyes, the girl could no longer restrain herself. With a cry she flung her arms about her mother's neck, and for a few moments the two forgot their habitual restraint and were but naked souls mingling together.

"It's a shame," exclaimed Beulah at length. "We're not living; we're just existing. When I get among people that are really living—like the Grants, over there—you don't know how mortified and mean I feel. And it's not that alone—it's the sense of loss, the sense that life is going by and I'm not making the best of it. You know we are missing the real thing; we are just living on the husks, and father is so blind he thinks the husks are the grain itself."

"Your father is hungry, too," said the mother. "Hungry—hungry, and he thinks that more land, more money, more success, will fill him. And in the meantime he's forgetting the things that would satisfy—the love that was ours, the little devo—Oh, child, what am I saying? What an unfaithful creature I am! You must forget, Beulah, you must forget these words—words of shame they are!"

"The shame is his," declared the girl, defiantly, "and I won't stand this nonsense about homesteading again—I just won't stand it. If he says anything more about it I'll—I'll fly off, that's what I'll do. And I've a few remarks for him about Riles that won't keep much longer. The old badger—he's at the bottom of all this."

"You mustn't quarrel with your father, dearie, you mustn't do that."

"I'm not going to quarrel with him, but I'm going to say some things that need saying. And if it comes to a show-down, and he must go—well, he must, but you and I will stay with the old farm, won't we, mother?"

But the mother's thought now was for quelling the storm in the turbulent heart of her daughter. Beulah's nature was not one to lend itself to passive submission, nor yet passive resistance. She was the soul of loyalty, but with that loyalty she combined a furious intolerance of things as they should not be. She had not yet reached the philosophic age, but she was old enough to value life, and to know that what she called the real things were escaping here. At night, as she looked up at the myriad stars spangling the heavens, the girl's heart was filled with an unutterable yearning; a sense of restriction, of limitation, of loss—a sense that somewhere lay a Purpose and a Plan, and that only by becoming part of that Plan could life be lived to the fullest. Her mother was of a different nature, not less brave, but more resigned; content to fill, without question, the niche to which fate assigned her; accepting conditions as a matter of course. Yet at times she had inklings of those deeper questions which arose in persistent interrogations before her child, and she guessed that if Beulah once became convinced that she saw the Plan, not all her loyalty could dissuade her from following it. So she strove to control the sudden outburst in her own heart lest the fire lighted in Beulah's should break forth in conflagration.

"There, there now," she said, gently stroking her daughter's hair. "Let us forget this, and remember how much we have to be thankful for. We have our health, and our home, and the bright sunshine, and—I declare," she interrupted, catching a glimpse of something through the window, "if the cows haven't broken from the lower pasture and are all through the oat-field! You'll have to take Collie and get them back, somehow, or bring them up to the corral."

Perhaps it was part of the Plan that the diversion should come at that moment, but the rebellion in Beulah's heart was by no means suppressed. Pulling a sun-bonnet upon her head she called the dog, which came leaping upon her with boisterous affection, and hurried down the path to the field where the cows stood almost lost in a jungle of green oats. She soon located the breach in the fence, and, with the help of the dog, quickly turned the cows toward it. But alack! just as victory seemed assured a rabbit was frightened from its hiding-place in the green oats, and sailed forth in graceful bounds across the pasture. The dog, of course, concluded that the capture of the rabbit was of much more vital importance to the Harris homestead than driving any number of stupid cattle, and darted across the field in pursuit, wasting his breath in sharp, eager yelps as he went. Whereupon the cows turned outward again, not boisterously nor insolently, but with a calm persistence that steadily wore out the girl's strength and patience. They would not move a foot toward the pasture unless she drove them; they would move only one at a time; as she drove one the others pushed farther into the oat-field, and when she turned to pursue them the one she had already driven followed at her heels. The sun was hot, the oats were rank, the wild buckwheat tripped her as she ran; her appeals to the dog, now seated on a knoll looking somewhat foolishly for the rabbit which had given him the slip, and her commands to the cattle alike fell on unheeding ears. She was in no joyous mood at best, and the perverseness of things aggravated her beyond endurance. Her callings to the cattle became more and more tearful, and presently ended in a sob.

"There now, Beulah, don't worry; we will have them in a minute," said a quiet voice, and looking about she found Jim almost at her elbow, his omnipresent smile playing gently about his white teeth. "I was down at the creek filling the tank, when I saw you had a little rebellion on your hands, and I thought reinforcements might be in order."

"You might have hollered farther back," she said, half reproachfully, but there was a light of appreciation in her eye when she dared raise it toward him. "I'm afraid I was beginning to be very—foolish."

She tripped again on the treacherous buckwheat, but he held her arm in a strong grasp against which the weight of her slim figure seemed but as a feather blown against a wall. The life of the plains had bred in Beulah admiration for physical strength, and she acknowledged his firm grip with an admiring glance. Then they set about their task, but the sober-eyed cows had no thought of being easily deprived of their feast, and it was some time before they were all turned back into the pasture and the fence temporarily repaired behind them.

"I can't thank you enough," Beulah was saying. "You just keep piling one kindness on top of another. Say, Jim, honest, what makes you do it?"

But at that moment the keen blast of an engine whistle came cutting through the air—a long clear note, followed by a series of toots in rapid succession.

"I guess they're running short of water," said Jim. "I must hustle." So saying he ran to the ford of the creek where the tank-wagon was still standing, and in a minute his strong frame was swaying back and forth to the rhythmic clanking of the pump. But it was some minutes before the tank was full, and again the clarion call of the whistle came insistently through the air. Hastily dragging up the hose, he uttered a sharp command to the horses; their great shoulders socketed into the collars; the tugs tightened, quivering with the strain; the wheels grated in the gravel, and the heavily-loaded wagon swung its way up the bank of the coulee.

Meanwhile other things were transpiring. Harris had returned from town the night before with the fixed intention of paying an early visit to the Farther West. He and Riles had spent more time than they should breasting the village bar, while the latter drew a picture of rising colour of the possibilities which the new lands afforded. Harris was not a man who abused himself with liquor, and Riles, too, rarely forgot that indulgence was expensive, and had to be paid for in cash. Moreover, Allan occasioned his father some uneasiness. He was young, and had not yet learned the self-control to be expected in later life. More than once of late Allan had crossed the boundary of moderation, and John Harris was by no means indifferent to the welfare of his only son. Indeed, the bond between the two was so real and so intense that Harris had never been able to bring himself to contemplate their separation, and the boy had not even so much as thought of establishing a home of his own. Harris sometimes wondered at this, for Allan was popular in the neighbourhood, where his good appearance, strength, and sincere honesty made him something of a favourite. The idea of homesteading together assured further years of close relationship between father and son, and the younger man fell in whole-heartedly with it.

"We'll hurry up the ploughing, Dad, and run West before the harvest is on us," Allan said as they rode home through the darkness. "We can file on our land and get back for the fall work. Then we will go out for the winter and commence our duties. The only question is, Can they grow anything on that land out there?"

"That's what they used to ask when we came to Manitoba," said his father. "And there were years when I doubted the answer myself. Some parts were froze out year after year, and they're among the best in the country now, and never think of frost. The same thing'll happen out there, and we might as well be in the game."

To do him justice, it was not altogether the desire for more wealth that prompted Harris, It was the call of new land; the call he had heard and answered in the early eighties; the old appetite that had lain dormant for a quarter of a century, but was still in his blood, waiting only a suggestion of the open spaces, a whiff from dry grass on the wind-swept plains, the zigzag of a wagon-trail streaking afar into the horizon, to set it tingling again. The thought of homesteading revived rich old memories—memories from which the kindly years had balmed the soreness and the privation and the hardship, and left only the joy and the courage and the comradeship and the conquering. It was the call of the new land, which has led the race into every clime and flung its flag beneath every sky, and Harris's soul again leaped to the summons.

So this morning father and son were especially anxious that not a moment of their ploughing weather should be lost, and it was particularly aggravating when the hired man's long delay resulted in a bubbling sputter followed by a dry hiss from the injector, warning the engineer that the water-tank was empty. Allan shot an anxious glance down the road to the coulee, but the water team was not in sight. Seizing the whistle cord, he sent its peremptory summons into the air. Harris looked up from the ploughs, and the two exchanged frowns of annoyance. But the water stood high in the glass, and Allan did not reduce the speed, although he cut the link action another notch to get every ounce of advantage from the expansion. Down the field they went, the big iron horse shouldering itself irresistibly along, while the ploughs left their dozen furrows of moist, fresh soil, and the blackbirds hopped gingerly behind. But the water went down, down in the glass, and still there was no sign of a further supply. Allan again cut the air with his whistle, and at length, with a muttered imprecation, he slammed the throttle shut and jumped from the engine.

His father ran up from the ploughs. "What do you think of that?" the younger man exclaimed. "Jim must have had trouble. Bogged, or broke a tongue, or something. Never fell down like that before."

"Keep a keen eye on your fire," said Harris, "and I'll go down and see what's wrong with him." So the farmer strode off across the ploughed field. The delay annoyed him, and he felt unreasonably cross with Travers. As he plodded on through the heavy soil his temper did not improve, and he was talking to himself by the time he came upon Travers, giving his team their wind at the top of the hill leading up from the creek.

"What kept you?" he demanded when he came within a rod of the wagon. "Here's the outfit shut down waiting for water, and you—"

"I'm sorry, Mr. Harris—"

"That ain't what I asked you. You can't make steam with sorrow. What have you been foolin' about?"

"I haven't been fooling. As to what delayed me—well, you're delaying me now. Better jump on and ride up with me."

"So you won't tell me, eh? You think you can do what you like with my team and my time, and it's none of my business. We'll see whose business it is."

Harris came threateningly toward the wagon, but was met only by the imperturbable smile of his hired man. He thrust his foot on a spoke of the wheel and prepared to spring on to the tank, but at that moment the horses stirred and his foot slipped. Seeing that the farmer was about to fall Travers seized him by the collar of his shirt, but in so doing he leaned and lost his own balance, when the weight of the falling man came upon him, and the two tumbled on to the grass in each other's arms.

Allan, having satisfied himself that the engine would take no harm, had followed his father, and came over the crest of the ridge above the coulee just in time to see Jim apparently strike his employer and the two struggling on the grass together. In an instant the young man's hot blood was in his head; he rushed forward, and just as Jim had risen to his knees he struck him a stinging blow in the face that measured him again in the grass.

It was only for an instant. Travers sprang to his feet, a red line slowly stretching down his cheek as he did so. Allan came upon him swinging a tremendous blow at the jaw; but Jim guarded skilfully, and answered with a smash from the shoulder straight on the chin, which laid his adversary's six feet prostrate before him.

Allan rose slowly, sober but determined, and for a moment it looked as though a battle royal were to be fought on the spot, both men strong, lean, rigid, hard as iron, and quick as steel; Allan angry, careful, furious; Jim calm, confident, and still smiling. But Harris rushed between them and seized his son by the arms.

"Stop it, Allan; stop, I say. You mustn't fight. Jim didn't hit me—I'll say that for him. Now quit it. As for you" (turning to Jim), "I'm sorry for this, but you have yourself to blame. I'll give you one more chance to answer me—what kept you?"

"I don't choose to answer," was Jim's reply, spoken in the most casual tone. His eye was rapidly closing where Allan's blow had fallen on it, but his white teeth still glistened behind a smile.

"All right," said Harris. "You can go to the house and tell Mrs. Harris to pay you what is coming." And the farmer climbed on to the wagon and took the reins himself.

When Jim entered the kitchen he was received with astonishment by Mrs. Harris and Beulah. "Why, whatever has happened?" they exclaimed. "Has there been an accident? You're hurt!"

But Jim smiled, and said: "No accident at all. I have merely decided to go homesteading." And he went up the stairs to pack his belongings.



CHAPTER VIII

INTO THE NIGHT

Harris and Allan drove straight to the engine, never looking back to see what became of the hired man. On the way the farmer explained to his son what had taken place; that words had passed between them, but no blows had been struck, until Allan appeared on the scene.

"Well, if that's the way of it, I'm sorry I hit him," said the young man, frankly, "and when I see him I'll tell him so. I plugged him a good one, didn't I?—though, to be honest, he was hardly on his feet. But he sure landed me a stem-winder on the chin," he continued, ruefully rubbing that member, "so I guess we're about even."

"He might 've broke your neck," said Harris. "You're too hot-headed, both of you...I can't make out what got into Jim, that he wouldn't answer a civil question. Jim was a good man, too." Perhaps the disturbing suggestion entered Harris's mind that the question had been none too civil, and he was really beginning to feel that after all Jim might be the aggrieved party. But he crushed down such mental sedition promptly. "It don't matter how good a man he was," he declared, "as long as I pay the piper I'm goin' to call the tune."

"It puts us up against it for a water-man, though," said Allan, thoughtfully.

"So it does," admitted Harris, who up to that moment had not reflected that his hasty action in dismissing Travers would result in much more delay than anything else that had occurred. "Well, we'll have to get somebody else. We'll manage till noon, and then you better ride over to Grant's or Mormon's. They'll be able to lend a man or one of the boys for a day or two." It was significant that although Harris was planning a considerable venture with Riles, when he wanted a favour his thought instinctively turned to his other neighbours, Grant and Morrison.

At noon Jim's chair was vacant, and the family sat down to dinner amid a depressing silence. No mention was made of the morning's incident until the meal was well advanced, when Harris, feeling that he ought in some way to introduce the subject, said: "Is Jim gone?"

"Yes, he's gone," blazed Beulah. "You didn't expect he'd wait to kiss you good-bye, did you?"

"One in the family is enough for that treatment," put in Allan, whose swollen chin and stiff neck still biassed him against Travers.

"He didn't, either. And if he did it's none of your business, you big—"; she looked her brother straight in the face, her swollen eyes telling their own story, and repeated deliberately, "you big coward."

Allan bit his lip. "You're about the only person, Beulah, that could say that and get off with whole skin. I suppose he told you I hit him before he was on his feet."

"Well, he didn't. He didn't say you hit him at all, but he couldn't deny it, so we knew the truth. And we knew you must have taken some mean advantage, or you'd never have got near enough to leave a mark on him."

"Jim's quite a hero, all right. It's too bad he's gone."

"It's a good job he's gone," said Harris. "By the way Beulah talks things have gone far enough. I don't want my daughter marrying a farmer."

"Her grandmother's daughter did," said Mary Harris.

"Yes, I know, but things are different now. I look for something better for Beulah."

It was characteristic of Harris, as of thousands of others, that, although a farmer himself, he looked for "something better" for his daughter. He was resigned to Allan being a farmer; his intimate, daily relationship with his son shrank from, any possibility of separation. But for his daughter—no. He had mapped out no career for her; she might marry a doctor, lawyer, merchant, tradesman, even a minister, but not a farmer. It is a peculiarity of the agriculturist that, among all professions, he holds his own in the worst repute. As a class he has educated himself to believe that everybody else makes an easy living off the farmer, and, much as he may revile the present generation for doing so, he is anxious that his children should join in the good picking. In later years has come a gradually broadening conception that farming, after all, calls for brain as well as muscle, and that the man who can wrestle a successful living from Nature has as much right to hold up his head in the world as the experimenter in medicine or the lawyer playing hide-and-seek with Justice through the cracks in the Criminal Code. Herein is a germ of the cityward migration: the farmer himself is looking for "something better" for his children.

"Jim was a good man," persisted his wife. "Don't you think you were—well, perhaps, a little hasty with him?"

Harris sat back. It was his wife's business to agree. For twenty years and more she had been faithful in the discharge of that duty. That she should suggest an opinion out of harmony with his indicated a lack of discipline, not very serious, perhaps, but a seed which, if permitted to flourish, might develop to dangerous proportions.

"So you're goin' to take his part, too? It's a strange thing if I can't handle my hired help without advice from the house."

Mary flushed at the remark. Any open quarrel with her husband, especially before the children—for she still thought of the man and woman to her left and right as "the children"—was more painful to her than, any submission could have been. It would be so much easier to change the subject, to follow the line of least resistance, and forget the incident as quickly as possible. That had been her constant policy after the first few years of their married life. At first there had been troubles and difficulties, but she had gradually adjusted herself to her niche, and their lives had run smoothly together because she never interrupted the current of his. But of late the conviction had been coming home to her that some time, somewhere, she must make a stand. It was all very well meekly to fall in line as long as only her own happiness was concerned, but if the future of her children should be at stake, or if the justice of their dealings with others should be the issue, then she would have to fight, and fight it out to a finish. And, quite unbidden, a strange surge of defiance welled in her when her husband so frankly told her to mind her own business.

"I was under the impression we were managing this farm together, you and I, John," she said, very calmly, but with a strange ring in her voice. "When we came West I understood it was to build our home. I didn't know it was just to be your home."

The look of surprise with which Harris greeter her words was absolutely genuine. A hot, stinging retort sprang to his lips, but by a sudden effort he suppressed it. His wife's challenge, quiet, unruffled, but with evidence of unbending character behind it, in some way conjured something out of the past, and he saw her again, the greying locks restored to their youthful glory and the careworn cheek abloom with the colour of young maidenhood as they had been in the gathering shadows that night when they swore to build their own home, and live their own lives, and love each other, always, only, for ever and ever...And yet, to let her defiance go unchecked, to have his authority challenged before his own children—it would be the beginning of dissolution, the first crumblings of collapse.

"We will talk about that some other time, Mary," he said. "If Jim had answered my question fairly, as he had a right to, instead of beatin' around the bush, I might 've let him off. But when I wanted to know what kept him he simply parried me, makin' a fool of me and rubbin' it in with that infernal smile of his."

"So that's what started it!" exclaimed Beulah. "Well, I'll tell you what kept him, if he wouldn't. The cattle got into the oats through a break in the fence, and I couldn't get them out, and the dog went ki-yi-ing over the prairie after a rabbit, and just as I was beginning to—to—condense over it Jim came up and saved the situation. What if he did keep your old engine waiting? There are more important things than ploughing."

"Aha!" said Harris, knowingly. "Well, I guess it's just as well it happened as it did. Jim was gettin' altogether too good at runnin' at your heels."

"That's all the thanks he gets for working late and early, like no other hired man in the district. All right. You and Allan can milk the cows to-night, for I won't—see?"

Harris was accustomed to his daughter's frankness, and as a rule paid little regard to it. He was willing enough to be flayed, in moderation, by her keen tongue; in fact, he look a secret delight in her unrestrained sallies, but that was different from defiance. He could, and did, submit to any amount of cutting repartee, and felt a sort of pride in her vigour and recklessness, but he had no notion of countenancing open mutiny, even from Beulah.

"We'll talk about that some other time, too," he said. "And you'll milk the cows tonight as usual."

Beulah opened her lips as though to answer, but closed them again, arose, and walked out of the kitchen. For her the controversy was over; the die was cast. Her nature admitted of any amount of disputation up to a certain point, but when the irresistible force crashed into the immovable object she wasted no wind on words. With her war was war.

Harris finished his meal with little relish. His daughter was very, very much to him, and an open rupture with her was among the last things to be imagined...Still, she must learn that the liberty of speech he allowed her did not imply equal liberty of action...His wife, too, had behaved most incredibly. After all, perhaps he had been hasty with Jim. No doubt he would meet the boy in Plainville or somewhere in the district before long, and he would then have a frank little talk with him. And he would say nothing more of the incident to his wife. He was beginning to feel almost amiable again when recollection of Beulah, and the regard which she was evidently cultivating toward Travers, engulfed his returning spirits like a cold douche. It must not come to that, whatever happened.

"You better get over to Grant's, Allan, if you're goin'," he said as he left the table. "I've some shears to change that'll keep me busy until you get back."

An hour later Allan returned, accompanied by George Grant, and operations in the field were resumed. Father and son were both anxious to make up for lost time, and they worked that night long after their usual hour for quitting. Just as the sun was setting George Grant left a last tank of water at the end of the field and started for home. As he passed the buildings he saw Beulah in the garden, and leaned over the fence for a short talk with her. The girl was thankful the gathering dusk hid the colour of her cheeks. George continued on his way, but still the steady panting of the engine, louder now, it seemed, than during the day, came pulsing down on the calm night air. The long twilight dragged on; the light faded out of the east and south, and at last shone like the spread of a crimson fan only in the north-west. It was quite dark when the two men, tired and dusty, came in at the close of their long day's labour.

The table was set for two. "We have had our supper," Mary explained. "We thought we wouldn't wait any longer."

"That's all right," said Harris, trying to be genial. But he found it harder than he had supposed. He was very tired, and somewhat embarrassed following the unpleasantness at noon. He had no thought of apologizing, either to wife or daughter; on the contrary, he intended to make it quite clear to them that they had been at fault in the matter, but he would take his time about reopening the subject. By waiting a day or two before reproving them he would show that he was acting in a judicial spirit, and without any influence of temper. Still...it was provoking that there should be nothing to talk about.

When supper was finished Allan went to the stables to give final attention to the horses—a duty that had always fallen to Jim—and Harris, after a few minutes' quiet rest in his chair, began to remove his boots.

"The cows are not milked, John," said his wife. She tried to speak in a matter-of-fact way, but the tremor in her voice betrayed the import of the simple statement.

Harris paused with a boot half unlaced. While his recollection of Beulah's defiance was clear enough, it had not occurred to him that the girl actually would stand by her guns. He had told her that she would milk the cows tonight as usual, and he had assumed, as a matter of course, that she would do so. He was not accustomed to being disobeyed.

"Where's Beulah?" he demanded.

"I guess she's in her room."

Harris laced up his boot. Then he started upstairs.

"Don't be too hard on her, John," urged his wife, with a little catch in her voice.

"I won't be too hard on anybody," he replied curtly. "It's a strange thing you wouldn't see that she did as she was told. I suppose I have to plug away in the field until dark and then come in and do another half-day's work because my women folk are too lazy or stubborn to do it themselves."

If this outburst was intended to crush Mary Harris it had a very different effect. She seemed to straighten up under the attack; the colour came back to her cheeks, and her eyes were bright and defiant.

"John Harris," she said. "You know better than to say that your women folk are either lazy or stubborn, but there's a point where imposition, even the imposition of a husband, has to stop, and you've reached that point. You didn't have to stay in the field until dark. There's another day coming, and the ploughing'll keep. It isn't like the harvest. It was just your own contrariness that kept you there. You fired the best man you ever had to-day, in a fit of temper, and now you're trying to take it out on us."

Harris looked at her for a moment; then, without speaking, he continued up the stairs. The difficulties of his position were increasing; it was something new to be assailed from the bosom of his own family. He felt that he was being very unfairly used, but he had no intention of shrinking from his duty as a husband and father, even if its discharge should bring pain to all of them.

He found Beulah in her room, ostensibly reading.

"Why are the cows not milked?" he demanded.

"I thought I made it clear to you at noon that they wouldn't be milked by me," she answered, "and there didn't seem to be anybody else hankering for the job."

"Beulah," he said, trying to speak calmly, "don't you think this nonsense has gone far enough?"

"Too far," she agreed. "But you started it—let's see you stop it."

"Beulah," he said, with rising anger, "I won't allow you to talk to me like that. Remember I'm your father, and you've a right to do as you're told. Haven't I given you everything—given you a home, and all that, and are you goin' to defy me in my own house?"

"I don't want to defy you," she answered, "but if you're going to let your temper run away with you, you can put on the brakes yourself. And as for all you've done for me—maybe I'm ungrateful, but it doesn't look half so big from my side of the fence."

"Well, what more do you want?" he demanded.

"For one thing, I wouldn't mind having a father."

"What do you mean? Ain't I your father?"

"No!" she cried. "No! No! There's no father here. You're just the boss—the foreman on the farm. You board with mother and me. We see you at meal-times. We wouldn't see you then if you didn't have to make use of us in that way. If you have a spare hour you go to town. You're always so busy, busy, with your little things, that you have no time for big things."

"I didn't know it was an offence to be busy," he answered. "It's work that makes money, and I notice you can spend your share. You're never so haughty about me workin' when you want a ten-dollar bill for somethin'. Work may be a disgrace all right from your point of view, but money isn't, and in this country you don't get much of one without the other."

"Now, Dad," she protested. "You're taking me up wrong. I don't think work is a disgrace, and I'm willing to work as hard as anyone, but I do think it's a shame that you should be thinking only of work, work, work, when you don't need to. I'd like to see you think about living instead of working. And we're not living—not really living, you know—we're just existing. Just making little twenty-four hour cycles that don't get us anywhere, except older. Don't you see what I mean? We're living all in the flesh, like an animal. When you feed the horses and put them under shelter you can't do anything more for them. But when you feed and shelter your daughter you have only half provided for her, and it's the other half, the starving half, that refuses to starve any longer."

"I'm not kickin' on religion, if that's what you mean, Beulah," he said. "You get goin' to church as often as you like, and—"

"Oh, it's not religion," she protested. "At least, it's not just going to church, and things like that, although I guess it is a more real religion, if we just understood. What are we here for, anyway? Come now, you're a man of sense and experience, and you must have settled that question in your own mind long ago. What's the answer?"

"Well, I'm here just now to tell you those cows are to be milked before—"

"Yes, dodge it! You've dodged that question so long you daren't face it. But there must be an answer somewhere, or there wouldn't be the question. There's Riles, now; he doesn't know there is such a question. He takes it for granted we're here to grab money. And then, there's Grants. They know there is such a question, and I'm sure that to some extent they've answered it. You know, I like them, but I never go into their house that I don't feel out of place. I feel like they have something that I haven't—something that makes them very rich and shows me how very poor I am. And it's embarrassing to feel poor among rich folks. Why, to-night George Grant stopped on his way home to say a word to me, and what do you suppose he said? Nothing about the weather, or the neighbours, or the crops. He asked me what I thought of the Venezuelan treaty. Of course I'd never heard of such a thing, but I said I hoped it would be for the best, or something like that, but I was ashamed—so ashamed he might have seen it in the dusk. You see, they're living—and we're existing."

If Beulah hoped by such argument to persuade her father, or even to influence him, she was doomed to disappointment. Harris listened to her patiently enough at first, but the conviction dawned upon him that she had been reading some silly nonsense that had temporarily distorted her young mind. Such foolishness, if allowed to take root, might have disastrous results. His daughter must learn to centre her mind on her work, and not be led away by whimsical notions that had no place in a busy life.

"You're talking a good deal of nonsense, Beulah," he said. "When you get older these questions won't worry you. In the meantime, your duty is to do as you're told. Right now that means milk the cows. I'll give you five minutes to get started."

Harris went to his room. A little later Beulah, with a light cloak about her shoulders and a suitcase in her hand, slipped quietly down the front stairs and out into the night.



CHAPTER IX

CRUMBLING CASTLES

At the foot of the garden Beulah paused irresolute, the suit-case swinging gently in her hand. She had made no plans for the decisive step events of the day had forced upon her, but the step itself she felt to be inevitable. She was not in love with Jim Travers; she had turned the whole question over in her mind that afternoon, weighing it with judicial impartiality, supposing all manner of situations to try out her own emotions, and she had come to the conclusion that Travers was merely an incident in her life, a somewhat inspiring incident, perhaps, but an incident none the less. The real thing—the vital matter which demanded some exceptional protest—was the narrow and ever narrowing horizon of her father, a horizon bounded only by material gain. Against this narrowing band of outlook her vigorous spirit, with its dumb, insistent stretchings forth to the infinite, rebelled. It was not a matter of filial duty; it was not a matter of love; to her it was a matter of existence. She saw her ideals dimly enough at best, and she would burst every cord of affection and convention rather than allow them to be submerged in the grey, surrounding murk of materialism.

Perhaps it was custom and the subtle pullings of association that drew her feet down the path across the bench to the edge of the stream that gurgled gently in the still night. She stood on the gravel by the water's edge, packed firm by the wagon-wheels of twenty-five years, and watched her image as it swayed gently in the smoothly running current. There was no moon, but the stars shone down in their midnight brilliance, and the water lay white and glistening against the black vagueness of the bushy banks. She stooped and let it fondle her fingers. It was warm and smooth...But it was shallow at the ford...Farther up it was quite deep... The stars blinked a strange challenge from the sky, as though to say, "Here is the tree of knowledge, if you dare to drink thereof."

At length she turned her back on the stream and retraced her steps up the path. The house loomed very sombre and still in the quiet night. A light shone dimly from her father's window. At intervals a deep, contented sighing came from the cows in the barnyard. She took the path past the house and down to the corral, where she paused, her ear arrested by the steady drone of milking. A lantern sitting on the black earth, cast a little circle of light, and threw a docile cow in dreadful silhouette against the barn. And by that dim light Beulah discerned the bent form of her mother, milking.

"Mother, this is too much!" the girl exclaimed.

Her mother started and looked up. "You're leaving us, Beulah?" she asked. There was no reproach in her voice, nor even surprise, but a kind of quiet sorrow. "I couldn't let the poor brutes suffer," she explained.

"Yes, I'm leaving," said Beulah. "I can't stand it any longer."

The mother sighed. "I've seen it coming for some time," she said, at length. "I suppose it can't be helped."

"You're so passive," returned the girl, with a touch of impatience. "You make me want to fight. Of course it can be helped, but it can't be helped by always giving in."

"Your father has met one of his own mettle at last," said the mother, and the girl fancied she detected a note of pride, but whether of father, or daughter, or both, she could only guess. "Well, it's all very sad. Your father is a good man, Beulah...I should send you back to your bed, but somehow I can't. I—I don't blame you, Beulah."

She had finished the last cow. Beulah helped with the pails of milk, and the two women went back to the house together. When Mary had washed her hands she took her daughter's face between her palms and kissed her on the cheeks. Slowly Beulah's arms stole about her neck, and it took all the steel in her nature to prevent surrender.

"It's not you I'm going from," she managed to say. "You understand that, don't you? I'll write to you often, and we'll surely meet before long...But I've just got to. There's no other way out."

"Stay till morning, Beulah. Your father may be disposed to give and take a little then, and you'll do the same, won't you?...Oh, my girl, don't break up our home like this!"

"You can't break up what you haven't got. Aside from you, why should I call this place home? I work here, and get my board and clothes. Well, I can work other places, and get my board and clothes. If I've got to be a cog in a money-making machine, I will at least choose the machine."

"What plans have you made? Where are you going?"

"Haven't made any plans, and don't know where I'm going. But I'm going. At present that's enough. The plans will come along as they're needed."

"Have you any money?" asked the mother, with a brisk effort at cheerfulness. She was already planning for her daughter in the new world she was about to enter.

"Enough to start me. That's all I need. I can earn more. It's not work I'm afraid of, although I suppose father won't be able to see it that way. He'll put all this down to laziness and obstinacy. It's neither. It's just a plain human craving to live."

"I sometimes wonder whether I'll be able to stand it through to the end," her mother whispered, somewhat fearfully, as though frightened by the admission. "I've—I've seen it coming with you, and I can't help feeling that perhaps this is only the beginning."

"Oh, mother, if you should!" cried the girl. "That would do it—that would open his eyes. He'd see then that there is something in the world besides wheat and cows, after all. You know, I think he's in a kind of trance. He's mesmerized by wheat. It was so necessary in those first years, when he was fighting against actual starvation, that it has become a kind of mania. Nothing short of some great shock will bring him out of it. If you would come—if you would only come too, things would be different."

"But I couldn't do that," said the mother, after a silence, and as though speaking with herself. "He's my husband, Beulah. You don't understand."

They talked then, in secret, sorrowful confidence, of many things, things for their ears only, and the grey was returning in the northern sky when the girl again left the house, and this time swung resolutely down the road that led to Plainville. Her heart was now at rest, even at peace. In the sacred communion of that last hour she had come to see something of her mother's problem and sacrifice; and although she was going out into the world alone, she felt that somewhere, some time, was a solution that would reunite the broken family and tune their varying chords in harmony. The North star shone very brightly amid the myriad finer points of light that filled the heavens. She raised her face to the cold rays. The stars had always a strange fascination for her. Their illimitable distances, their infinite number, their ordered procession—all spelled to her a Purpose—a Purpose that was bigger than wheat and land and money, a Purpose that was life, the life for which she groped vaguely but bravely in the darkness.