Witham glanced at it. "The quant.i.ty is small. Still, money is very scarce, and bank interest almost extortionate just now."
Barrington flushed a trifle, and there was anger in his face. He knew the fact that his loss on this sale should cause him anxiety was significant, and that Witham had surmised the condition of his finances tolerably correctly.
"Have you not gone quite far enough?" he said.
Witham nodded. "I fancy I need ask no more, sir. You can scarcely buy the wheat, and the banks will advance nothing further on what you have to offer at Silverdale. It would be perilous to put yourself in the hands of a mortgage-broker."
Barrington stood up very grim and straight, and there were not many men at Silverdale who would have met his gaze.
"Your content is a little too apparent, but I can still resent an impertinence," he said. "Are my affairs your business?"
"Sit down, sir," said Witham. "I fancy they are, and had it not been necessary, I would not have ventured so far. You have done much for Silverdale, and it had cost you a good deal, while it seems to me that every man here has a duty to the head of the settlement. I am, however, not going to urge that point, but have, as you know, a propensity for taking risks. I can"t help it. It was probably born in me. Now, I will take that contract up for you."
Barrington gazed at him in bewildered astonishment. "But you would lose on it heavily. How could you overcome a difficulty that is too great for me?"
"Well," said Witham with a little smile, "it seems I have some ability in dealing with these affairs."
Barrington did not answer for a while, and when he spoke it was slowly. "You have a wonderful capacity for making any one believe in you."
"That is not the point," said Witham. "If you will let me have the contract, or, and it comes to the same thing, buy the wheat it calls for, and if advisable sell as much again, exactly as I tell you, at my risk and expense, I shall get what I want out of it. My affairs are a trifle complicated, and it would take some little time to make you understand how this would suit me. In the meanwhile you can give me a mere I O U for the difference between what you sold at, and the price to-day, to be paid without interest and whenever it suits you. It isn"t very formal, but you will have to trust me."
Barrington moved twice up and down the room before he turned to the younger man. "Lance," he said, "when you first came here, any deal of this kind between us would have been out of the question. Now, it is only your due to tell you that I have been wrong from the beginning, and you have a good deal to forgive."
"I think we need not go into that," said Witham, with a little smile.
"This is a business deal, and if it hadn"t suited me I would not have made it."
He went out in another few minutes with a little strip of paper, and just before he left the Grange placed it in Maud Barrington"s hand.
"You will not ask any questions, but if ever Colonel Barrington is not kind to you, you can show him that," he said.
He had gone in another moment, but the girl, comprehending dimly what he had done, stood still, staring at the paper with a warmth in her cheeks and a mistiness in her eyes.
CHAPTER XXII
SERGEANT STIMSON CONFIRMS HIS SUSPICIONS
It was late in the afternoon when Colonel Barrington drove up to Witham"s homestead. He had his niece and sister with him, and when he pulled up his team, all three were glad of the little breeze that came down from the blueness of the north and rippled the whitened gra.s.s. It had blown over leagues of sun-bleached prairie, and the great desolation beyond the pines of the Saskatchewan, but had not wholly lost the faint wholesome chill it brought from the Pole.
There was no cloud in the vault of ether, and slanting sunrays beat fiercely down upon the prairie, until the fibrous dust grew fiery, and the eyes ached from the glare of the vast stretch of silvery grey. The latter was, however, relieved by stronger colour in front of the party, for, blazing gold on the dazzling stubble, the oat sheaves rolled away in long rows that diminished and melted into each other, until they cut the blue of the sky in a delicate filigree. Oats had moved up in value in sympathy with wheat, and the good soil had most abundantly redeemed its promise that year. Colonel Barrington, however, sighed a little as he looked at them, and remembered that such a harvest might have been his.
"We will get down and walk towards the wheat," he said. "It is a good crop, and Lance is to be envied."
"Still," said Miss Barrington, "he deserved it, and those sheaves stand for more than the toil that brought them there."
"Of course!" said the Colonel with a curious little smile. "For rashness, I fancied, when they showed the first blade above the clod, but I am less sure of it now. Well, the wheat is even finer."
A man who came up took charge of the horses, and the party walked in silence towards the wheat. It stretched before them in a vast parallelogram, and while the oats were the pale gold of the austral, there was the tint of the ruddier metal of their own North-West in this. It stood tall and stately, murmuring as the sea does, until it rolled before a stronger puff of breeze in waves of ochre, through which the warm bronze gleamed when its rhythmic patter swelled into deeper-toned harmonies. There was that in the elfin music and blaze of colour which appealed to sensual ear and eye, and something which struck deeper still, as it did in the days men poured libations on the fruitful soil, and white-robed priest blessed it, when the world was young.
Maud Barrington felt it vaguely, but she recognized more clearly, as her aunt had done, the faith and daring of the sower. The earth was very bountiful, but that wheat had not come there of itself; and she knew the man who had called it up had done more than bear his share of the primeval curse which, however, was apparently more or less evaded at Silverdale. Even when the issue appeared hopeless, the courage that held him resolute in face of other"s fears, and the greatness of his projects, had appealed to her, and it almost counted for less that he had achieved success. Then, glancing further across the billowing grain she saw him--still, as it seemed it had always been with him, amidst the stress and dust of strenuous endeavour.
Once more, as she had seen them when the furrows were bare at seed time, and there was apparently only ruin in store for those who raised the Eastern people"s bread, lines of dusty teams came plodding down the rise. They advanced in echelon, keeping their time and distance with a military precision; but in place of the harrows the tossing arms of the binders flashed and swung. The wheat went down before them, their wake was strewn with gleaming sheaves, and one man came foremost, swaying in the driving-seat of a rattling machine. His face was the colour of a Blackfoot"s, and she could see the darkness of his neck above the loose-fronted shirt and a bare blackened arm that was raised to hold the tired beasts to their task. Their trampling and the crash and rattle that swelled in slow crescendo drowned the murmur of the wheat, until one of the machines stood still, and the leader, turning a moment in his saddle, held up a hand. Then those that came behind swung into changed formation, pa.s.sed, and fell into indented line again, while Colonel Barrington nodded with grim approval.
"It is very well done," he said. "The best of harvesters! No newcomers yonder. They"re capable Manitoba men. I don"t know where he got them, and, in any other year, one would have wondered where he would find the means of paying them. We have never seen farming of this kind at Silverdale."
He seemed to sigh a little, while his hand closed on the bridle; and Maud Barrington fancied she understood his thoughts just then.
"n.o.body can be always right, and the good years do not come alone,"
she said. "You will plough every acre next one."
Barrington smiled dryly. "I"m afraid that will be a little late, my dear. Any one can follow, but since, when everybody"s crop is good, the price comes down, the man who gets the prize is the one who shows the way."
"He was content to face the risk," said Miss Barrington.
"Of course," said the Colonel quietly. "I should be the last to make light of his foresight and courage. Indeed, I am glad I can acknowledge it, in more ways than one, for I have felt lately that I am getting an old man. Still, there is one with greater capacities ready to step into my shoes; and though it was long before I could overcome my prejudice against him, I think I should now be content to let him have them. Whatever Lance may have been, he was born a gentleman, and blood is bound to tell."
Maud Barrington, who was of a patrician parentage, and would not at one time have questioned this a.s.sertion, wondered why she felt less sure of it just then.
"But if he had not been, would not what he has done be sufficient to vouch for him?" she said.
Barrington smiled a little, and the girl felt that her question was useless as she glanced at him. He sat very straight in his saddle, immaculate in dress, with a gloved hand on his hip and a stamp which he had inherited, with the thinly-covered pride that usually accompanies it, from generations of a similar type, on his clean-cut face. It was evidently needless to look for any sympathy with that view from him.
"My dear," he said, "there are things at which the others can beat us; but, after all, I do not think they are worth the most; and while Lance has occasionally exhibited a few undesirable characteristics, no doubt acquired in this country, and has not been always blameless, the fact that he is a Courthorne at once covers and accounts for a good deal."
Then Witham recognized them, and made a sign to one of the men behind him as he hauled his binder clear of the wheat. He had dismounted in another minute and came towards them, with the jacket he had not wholly succeeded in struggling into loose about his shoulders.
"It is almost time I gave my team a rest," he said. "Will you come with me to the house?"
"No," said Colonel Barrington. "We only stopped in pa.s.sing. The crop will harvest well."
"Yes," said Witham, turning with a little smile to Miss Barrington.
"Better than I expected, and prices are still moving up. You will remember, madam, who it was wished me good fortune. It has undeniably come!"
"Then," said the white-haired lady, "next year I will do as much again, though it will be a little unnecessary, because you have my good wishes all the time. Still, you are too prosaic to fancy they can have anything to do with--this."
She pointed to the wheat, but though Witham smiled again, there was a curious expression in his face as he glanced at her niece.
"I certainly do, and your good-will has made a greater difference than you realize to me," he said.
Miss Barrington looked at him steadily. "Lance," she said, "there is something about you and your speeches that occasionally puzzles me.
Now, of course, that was the only rejoinder you could make, but I fancied you meant it."
"I did," said Witham, with a trace of grimness in his smile. "Still, isn"t it better to tell any one too little rather than too much?"
"Well," said Miss Barrington, "you are going to be franker with me by and by. Now, my brother has been endeavouring to convince us that you owe your success to qualities inherited from bygone Courthornes."