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Title:      Our Daily Bread (1928)
Author:     Frederick Philip Grove
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
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Language:   English
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Date first posted:          February 2003
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      Our Daily Bread (1928)
Author:     Frederick Philip Grove





Hic tua res agitur



And his sons walked not in his ways.

I Samuel, 8, 3.





Contents


BOOK ONE: THE PASSING OF MRS. ELLIOT

I.  First Fruits Are Harvested

II.  The Leaven of Sex Is at Work

III.  Henrietta Drives a Bargain

IV.  Gladys Comes Home

V.  John Elliot Buys Land

VI.  Death


BOOK TWO: CHAOS

VII.  John Elliot Sells Land

VIII.  John Elliot Goes A-Travelling

IX.  Pete Saws Wood

X.  Fred Pulls Up His Stakes

XI.  John Elliot Ponders and Writes a Letter


BOOK THREE: IN EXILE

XII.  John Elliot Visits Faulknor

XIII.  John Elliot Compares Two of His Sons

XIV.  John Elliot Sits at a Death-Bed

XV.  John Elliot Passes from Hand to Hand

XVI.  A Last Emotion and a Pilgrimage



OUR DAILY BREAD



BOOK ONE

THE PASSING OF MRS. ELLIOT



CHAPTER I

FIRST FRUITS ARE HARVESTED


John Elliot senior, fifty-five years old, small, slender, grey of
hair and beard, but carrying himself erectly, clad in a grey suit--
he despised overalls--was crossing his sloping yard to the barn
which stood north-east of the house, higher up on the bare hill-
side, separated from the plantations about the dwelling by a dry
gully.  He was going to hitch a horse to the buggy; for his wife
was getting ready to call on Mary, her third-oldest daughter who
lived in town.

Halfway up the slope John Elliot stopped and looked back, allowing
his troubled eyes to survey the yard and the fields to south and
west.

The yard occupied the north-west corner of the homestead.  The part
surrounding the dwelling was sheltered by young poplar trees
planted by Mrs. Elliot some fifteen years ago.

Opposite, across the road--it was still a mere trail--a second yard
faced it, enclosed by the straggling, low buildings--stable,
granary, shack--of his oldest son's homestead.  The farms comprised
three hundred and twenty acres each; for east and west of the
homesteads, properly speaking, stretched two "preemptions."  This
was the short-grass country of the new province of Saskatchewan; a
half section of land was considered the least on which a farmer
could make a living.

In fact, John junior, still only twenty-four years old, had not
found even that enough.  The spirit of this new west possessed him,
craving vast and ever vaster spaces.  He had done shallow breaking
over large fields; and, garnering, by sheer luck, according to his
father, two or three crops in succession, he had first rented, then
bought a third quarter.  He had hardly done any plowing since.  He
seeded on stubble land, scratching it, with the disk, into the
semblance of a seed-bed.  This year, according to his father, he
was reaping what he had sown.  It was a dry summer; his grain,
though it was the end of July, stood no more than three or four
inches high, ripe or dried out.  Everywhere the brown, drab earth
showed, over the bare clay hills, between the thin rows of scraggy,
yellow wheat.

In this moment of survey John Elliot senior's eye swept south.  In
a long "draw" or hollow his own field stretched from west to east.
Even there the grain stood none too thickly; but it was two and a
half feet high and, though headed, in spite of the unbroken drought
of five weeks still green: eighty acres, on a fallowed field.

"You can't fool the land!" John Elliot muttered as he turned and
proceeded to the barn.

The mere fact that his son was farming his own land was contrary to
his wishes.  Six years ago, when John junior had become entitled to
file on a homestead, he had done so against his father's protest
who wanted him to remain on his own farm, seeing that it would be
his one day.  Ever since, his father had been critical and still
more morose than was his habit.  That his sons-in-law went their
own way was in the nature of things; but that his flesh and blood
left him was a source of sorrow.



For the last thirty-two years, ever since, on the death of his
father whose name had also been John Elliot, he had left the
original homestead of the Elliots in the Red River valley in
Southern Manitoba, John Elliot senior, a thinker, had lived a life
of introspection, dreams, and ideas.  He and his young wife had
gone to what was then the Territory of Assiniboia, to settle in a
country which was like the land of sun-set, bare, naked prairie
hills, sun-baked, rain-washed, devoid of all the comforts of even
slightly older civilisations, devoid, at the time, even of the
consolation of human neighbourhood.  Together they had seen the
settlement grow: very slowly, almost hesitatingly.  Their first
task had been, not so much to raise crops as to produce what would
ensure them against starvation.  They had had some means, though; a
few thousand dollars accumulated by careful, painstaking economy.
They had built a small, shack-like house to which, through the
decades, they had added room after room and a second storey till
now, painted grey with green trimmings, it stood the largest and
most commodious dwelling of the whole district outside of the
towns, holding eight rooms.  The barn was a model building of its
kind.  Not even an agricultural college would have needed to be
ashamed of it.  The shed sheltered the best implements which money
could buy, kept in a state of repair which ensured them a term of
life and usefulness considerably beyond that of the equipment of an
average farm.  The hen-houses, south-east of the dwelling, were of
the open type, their south walls consisting of canvas.  The stock
kept was pure-bred, home-raised; no beef was ever sold for meat,
always for breeding purposes.

John Elliot was a dreamer; but his dreams had a way of coming true.
Far more important to him than his dreams of economic prosperity
had been his one great dream of family life.

When, thirty years ago, before going west, he had wooed and won
that woman of women, his wife, he had done so with one single
object in view: that of securing to himself the mother of his
children.  In the course of these many years twelve of them had
arrived.  Two had died; ten were living.  Four great afflictions
had visited him, aging him before his time: a long illness of Mrs.
Elliot's, the deaths of those two little beings in infancy, and the
fact that Henry, the second oldest of his sons, as he grew up, had
mentally remained a child.  He had been extraordinarily sober by
temperament; and few people except his wife had therefore been able
to see how much he had been affected by these disasters.  Yet, on
the whole, he had not been disappointed in his particular dream; he
had succeeded in raising a large family honourably.  His living
children, in the order of their birth, comprised, first of all, the
three oldest daughters, Gladys, Henrietta, Mary; next John, the
oldest son, separated from Mary by an interval of four years--it
was at that time that his wife had been ill, after the two
unsuccessful births; three more girls, Cathleen, Isabel, Margaret;
and finally three boys, Henry, the weak-minded one, Norman, and
Arthur, the latter being at present thirteen years old.

As these had grown up--Gladys, the first born, was thirty now--his
old dream, that of raising a large family honourably, had been
replaced, slowly and imperceptibly, by a new one: that of seeing
his children settled about him as the children of the patriarchs of
Israel were settled about their fathers.  A beginning had been made
ten years ago: Mary, the third-oldest girl had been married to Fred
Sately, a Manitoba teacher who, however, had shortly after
abandoned his profession in order to move west and to go into
trade; he was now living in Sedgeby, the small town which, with the
coming of the railroad, had sprung up four miles north of the
farms.  Gladys, the oldest, had, a year later, moved to a homestead
sixteen miles north of Sedgeby: there, a young druggist, also from
Manitoba, had settled down, admittedly drawn by the desire to take
Gladys home into his shack as his wife.  John Elliot never knew how
this latter connection had been brought about; the demand of Frank
Bramley had, to him, come as a complete surprise.  It had been
different with Fred Sately to whom he had deliberately opened his
house, for above all classes of men, even above the farmer, he
respected teachers and preachers.  Yet, curiously, that admission
of Fred Sately into the family circle had, at the time, led to one
of the very few differences of opinion which had, in more than
thirty years, arisen between John Elliot and his wife.  Mrs. Elliot
had objected to him on two grounds: Fred Sately was sixteen years
older than Mary; and, according to her, he had been lacking in
worldly ambition.

Now, at the present time, in the year 1906, when the second
group of girls--Cathleen, Isabel, Margaret--were growing into
marriageable age, Cathleen being twenty-two, Margaret nineteen,
with Henrietta, the second-oldest of the first group, twenty-nine
years of age, still unmarried, a fifth great sorrow was preparing
itself: Mrs. Elliot was failing and plainly preparing to leave
earthly scenes.  Many times, during the last few years, John Elliot
had urged her--in few words, for he was a silent man--to let him
call in what human knowledge and skill was available; but she, in
an unconquerable aversion to physical examinations, had invariably
declined.  Her illness, little defined, mysterious, hovered over
the house like a threat, felt by her children no less than by her
husband.



As he went about his work, harnessing and hitching up the old
horse, Dolly, which his wife was going to drive, thoughts flitted
to and fro in John Elliot's brain: thoughts which, through many
repetitions in many years, had become so familiar that they were
linked by a sort of automatic association and did not need any
longer to be elaborated: a mere adumbration sufficed to add link to
link.

As ever, these thoughts concerned his children.

He remembered how, ten years ago, when, one Sunday, at dinner, Fred
Sately had been received into the family, he, John Elliot, though
he had encouraged the connection, yet had resented it.  That broad,
quiet man with the hanging, black moustache and the almost bald
head, by entering the family circle had seemed to break it.  Into
all future relations he had seemed to introduce a new, unknown
element.  John Elliot had felt as if he were asked to assume a
responsibility without being fully acquainted with a new factor on
which the issues depended.  How right he had been!  The issues were
only now defining themselves.  He had, then, defended himself
against the foreboding that, by his child, he was being stampeded
into a new phase of his life.  Now, he was being rushed along an
unknown path, by that very man whom he had half encouraged in his
suit.

Gladys, the oldest daughter, ten years ago a plump, pretty girl of
twenty, and yet even then in many ways the image of her father, had
been the next to leave the parental house.  She, too, had gone a
path not chosen by him, her father, and hardly by herself.

The image of her father!  That thought released another train of
associations.

Thirty years ago, when Gladys' birth had been imminent, he and his
wife had one day spoken of the great mystery involved in the coming
of children.  To him, John Elliot, his children, still unborn, had
seemed to be a re-birth, a re-creation of himself.  In them, his
ideas and ideals would be multiplied; they would convert that of
his dreams into reality which he himself might fall short of
realising to the full.  They would be a means of multiplying his
own personality.

Yet, as he had felt the slight antagonism in the thought of Martha,
his wife, then herself a young girl of only nineteen years, he had
come to see that his very thoughts were hers also: she expected her
children, still unborn, to be replicas of herself, to accomplish
what she had merely aimed at.  Her aims had been softer, less
stern, more humane than her husband's.  Nobody could doubt, nobody
who knew her did doubt that she was an incarnation of the
peculiarly Christian virtues.  As later, one by one, her children
had arrived, she had learned to rule her household serenely without
seeming herself to count for anything in her scheme of life.  She
had never quarrelled; she had always observed all the forms
prescribed by the church; she had given alms, prayed, kept the
sabbath, communed.  Yet, till quite lately, she had always remained
pleasant; pleasant to look at, in spite of her growing obesity;
pleasant to touch; given to the simple joys of the table and the
flesh.  She had allowed her children to play all sorts of indoor
and outdoor games; she had taught them to dance; she had given them
freedom beyond her husband's wishes.  She had been as worldly as
she had been religious.

Thus, when he had realised that her nature was very different from
his own--so different that only his great love for her could induce
him even to tolerate it--the thought had grown in him that his
children must necessarily be a compound of the two parent natures;
and slowly, though reluctantly he had accustomed himself to that
idea till he had accepted it.  Had he not deliberately chosen his
wife because she seemed to be his complement?  Because to his
dogmatic forthrightness she had added that touch of human blood-
heat which he had seemed to lack?  Not that, at the time, he would
have acknowledged that lack as a defect.  He had been, he still
was, proud of the preponderance, in him, of brain over impulse.
But, in a subtle self-deception, he had told himself that, what he
arrived at as the conclusion of a slow process of thought and
reasoning, was embedded in her as a natural inclination.  She
seemed to do instinctively, action coming from the heart, what he
chose to do after mature deliberation, his action being dictated by
the brain.  In the past, it would never have occurred to him to
weigh the two things and to assign a superior value to one or the
other.

As time had gone by, however, and his children had grown, till they
now ranged in age from thirty to thirteen, he did so weigh the two
natures; and, though, in articulate thought, he still defended his
own, appraising reason above all else, he was at heart very
doubtful about the justice of such a verdict.  Many trifles flitted
up before his mind, examples of how she had been able to exact
obedience from the children, by a word, a look, a smile, when all
he could extract from them, by commands which were the result of
careful thinking, was an evasion of his orders or a concealment of
their wishes and of the actions which conformed to their desires.

A strange, new knowledge had come to him.  As they grew up, these
children were less and less a continuation of himself; less and
less even of a blending of the parent natures.  In each of them a
third thing had appeared, their individual being, with inclinations
and desires which seemed to be without a derivation from himself or
his wife; and the strangest thing about it was that these new
individual natures differed in each single one of his children.
Whence were they?  This was the most puzzling thing of all: a thing
to which he always reverted.  Already, at times, he began to see
failure ahead in what his own pensive and contemplative soul had
conceived to be the peculiar life work and task of his very
existence.

As more and more of the girls grew into womanhood and John, the
oldest boy, became a man, John Elliot had often pondered his own
youth.  Up to the time of his father's death he had known no will
of his own.  He had had dreams, it is true.  But he had subordinated
them to the wishes of his parents and the welfare of the parental
homestead in Manitoba.  And even his own dream--of a farm of his
own, a wife, and many children--had been no more than a continuation
of the practice of his parents.  With them, it had been an instinct
followed blindly; with him it had become a conscious vision.  He had
always felt himself to be continuous with his ancestors.

With anxiety and sinister forebodings he began to see a break in
that continuity.  Each one of his children urged forward in a
separate, distinct direction with a decided angle between it and
the direction in which he, the father, wished to guide them.

As, under the roof of the shed, east of the barn, he hooked the
traces of the horse's harness to the irons of the single-tree, he
suddenly straightened, a frown on his narrow forehead.  One of his
hands was worrying his grey beard.  The present had taken
possession of him again.  His wife was going to town, to see Mary
who was in trouble.

And once more a memory arose, this time concrete.  Whenever man and
wife had been worried in the past, they had talked their worries
over at night, after they had gone to bed, lying side by side in
the dark and speaking in whispers; and whenever Mrs. Elliot wished
to make it clear that she considered the point at issue settled,
she had turned to him and placed her arm about his shoulders; and,
till she withdrew it, that touch had kept him awake in the night,
awake but unable to think, and silent.  She had done so last night
after having declared her intention not to wait for her daughter
but go to see her, uncalled.

Was it possible that he might have to live on one day without ever
being able to look forward to that touch and the currents flowing
from it, through him and her?  That touch which held power to free
him of all uncertainties?



In the house there was much stir.  Mrs. Elliot was getting ready
for her drive to town; her preparations were manifold.  She would
as easily have tried to walk as gone in her working-day clothes.

She had always been plump; but during the last ten years she had
grown very stout, excessively so; and she was short of breath.  Not
often did she leave the farm any longer.  Even on the place itself
she confined her activities to the front yard and the hen-houses.
In the yard, groups of lilac bushes, sheltered by rows of young
poplars, protected small shrubs, gooseberries and currants; in the
hen-houses, to the south, hundreds of White Leghorns were
scratching and feeding themselves to maturity.  In both places she
sat down on a low stool when she had any work to do; one of her
daughters lent her an arm whenever she moved about, in her coming
or going.

Of the girls, three were at home.  Henrietta, twenty-nine years
old, still unmarried, had grown into a family tyrant, good at
heart, no doubt, but harsh and bitter, troubled by a goitre which
disfigured her throat.  Cathleen, round-cheeked, pretty with her
twenty-two years full of laughter, was self-contained and
confident, for she had been teaching for five years and had made a
success of it: she held a first-class teacher's certificate in
Manitoba.  Isabel, the least good-looking of the younger girls,
mannish, with uneven teeth in her large mouth, was without
ambition, somewhat dowdy, but always gay, carolling away in
unexpected bursts of song no matter how serious the situation might
happen to be.

Margaret, the youngest of the second group of girls, had, a few
days ago, gone to her first school.  The boys had been permitted to
take up their sleeping quarters at John's shack, across the road;
that way it was less noisy in the big house.  Henry, the half-wit,
did most of John's field-work; Norman and Arthur, the two youngest
ones, attended classes in town where, as in Margaret's school,
holidays came in winter.

The three girls were busy helping their mother to dress.  They were
in one of the two large front rooms upstairs, the parents' bed-
room.  In its centre Mrs. Elliot sat enthroned while Cathleen
combed her hair, Isabel buttoned her shoes, and Henrietta laid out
her dark-grey silks.

Now and then, as she handled the greying tresses of her mother's
hair, Cathleen looked out through the window at the straggling yard
of her brother's homestead.  Her smile showed a shade of
preoccupation.

The fact was that Mr. Ormond who, three years ago, had been
principal of Arkwright High School where Cathleen taught had
written to her, saying that he was going to spend a few days in
Saskatchewan and asking whether he would be welcome if he dropped
in at her parents' place.  He was teaching in the university now.
During her one year's acquaintance with him Mr. Ormond had appeared
to her like a being from a different world.  This very summer, just
before holidays began, he had visited Arkwright "to renew
acquaintances" as the Arkwright Argus had put it.  He had stayed
only one day; but in the evening he had come to the tennis court
where Cathleen was playing with some girls.  Without taking thought
of what might be implied in her words, she had issued half an
invitation to him.  No doubt he had arranged his holidays in such a
way as to take advantage of the hint.

Cathleen had shown his letter to her mother.  Her mother had looked
at her with a curiously questioning expression; and, seeing her
daughter's slow, persistent blush, she had said lightly, "Well,
child, why not?  We can put him in Margaret's room."

But, once the implication in Mrs. Elliot's look had sunk in,
Margaret's room had seemed hardly good enough for this visitor from
a different sphere, that of great cities and universities.
Cathleen, asking her heart many questions, had insisted on
Henrietta's giving up the second large front room which, in the
past, she had shared only with Gladys or Mary when they had come
home for a visit.  In fact, Cathleen had made herself quite
unpopular by intimating on various occasions that nothing was good
enough for Mr. Ormond.  Special preparations had to be made; the
house had to be scrubbed--as if it were not scrubbed every week;
the curtains must be washed--as if they had not been washed during
house-cleaning in spring and hung up on the line every Saturday
since; a rug had to be provided for the floor of his room--that rug
which Henrietta had wished for during the last ten years; her
sisters must watch themselves in their speech so as not to make
their everyday mistakes in grammar and pronunciation; her younger
brothers must be on their best behaviour; John must cease using
words like "jake" for good or fine.

The consequence was that the whole family had, in irritation,
jumped to conclusions which, ungrounded though they were, had made
Cathleen's heart beat faster.

Two days ago, John had brought a telegram from town, announcing Mr.
Ormond's arrival for the evening of this very day; and Cathleen had
coaxed her brother into promising to fetch the visitor in his new
democrat.

Then, yesterday, a bomb-shell had fallen into these preoccupations
with things which concerned the future.

Rumour, coming through John, asserted that Fred Sately was in
financial difficulties.  Between Fred and the Elliots there had
been a break for some time.  His career in Sedgeby had been
meteoric.  As, with mushroom speed, the little town had sprung from
the prairie, Fred had become identified with its expansion, as a
merchant and a promoter.  People prophesied that Fred "would be a
millionaire before he was done."  His enterprises were widely
ramified and bold enough to dazzle the imagination.

As he rose, Mary had become "distant" to her sisters.  When they
dressed in cottons, she had dressed in silks; when they worked with
their hands and on their knees, she had sat in the parlour, giving
orders to hired servants.  She had a large house in town and a
second house on the farm; for Fred had done what everybody did: he
had filed on a homestead and bought a preemption; his place lay
halfway between the Elliot farms and town.  When John Elliot shook
his head and advised caution, Mary spoke loftily; Fred shrugged his
shoulders with a contemptuous grunt.  "This is a game which one
must understand, the greatest game on earth, making money!  This
country has a future.  I discount it."

Fred had begun with a small furniture store.  The business of a
general merchant had been added; alongside, an implement shop had
sprung up.  He had even built a ware-house and bought wheat; but at
the right moment he had sold that to an elevator company.  Other
merchants had moved into town; the place had been incorporated as a
village; the rural municipality which was formed had opened its
offices there.  Meanwhile this man with the black, hanging
moustache went about doing nothing, very careful not "to talk big"
except to members of his wife's family.

At last the most ambitious of his enterprises had been planned: a
huge, cooperative undertaking owned by the farmers, having for its
aim the marketing of their produce and the purchase of all their
needs, from a bag of salt to a motor car.  A local paper was
founded, the Sedgeby Searchlight, to launch the company under the
name of "Farmers Limited."  This company absorbed all Fred Sately's
previous enterprises; and he drove about the country, selling stock
at sixty dollars for a one-hundred-dollar share.  He sold them for
cash or notes, for horses or cows, for machinery or junk.  The
company's assets at last were written on its books with six
figures.  Fred was the president; Mr. Maclean, secretary of the
municipality of Prairie Hills, was vice-president; and Mr. Murray,
clerk of the county court and of the school district, was
secretary-treasurer.  The company threatened ruin to all other
merchants some of whom were glad enough to sell out.  A boosting
spirit took hold of the countryside; the farmers, feeling they
"were coming into their own," enlarged their acreage and worked day
and night.  Seven elevators sprang up in town.  Fred Sately was the
great man of the district.  Everybody believed in him; everybody
trusted him; he had vision; the future was his.

Everybody except the Elliots.  When Fred called to sell shares,
John Elliot senior hedged and evaded; John junior laughed and
flatly refused to buy.  There was no reason except that they had
come to dislike Fred; for they were themselves impressed by the
brilliancy of his career, by his plate-glass and mahogany office in
town, by his ever more expensive clothes and his fine linen which
hung incongruously on his broad peasant shoulders.  John was not
reticent about his aversion.  "There isn't a man in the world," he
said, "whom I can stand less than this Fred fellow."  And he was
abetted in his attitude by his sister Henrietta.  Henrietta was
rapidly becoming an old maid and apt to disparage any one who did
not do as she directed.  As a matter of fact, she influenced
everybody except Cathleen who, being away from home for the greater
part of the year, remained independent.

When, the day before, the first rumour had reached the Elliot
household that all was not well with Farmers Limited, Henrietta had
triumphed, of course.  "I told you so!"  And they agreed that she
had always predicted Fred would come to a disastrous end.

The thunderbolt had fallen.  Nobody knew exactly what had happened.
Mr. Murray, the secretary-treasurer, had been arrested.  The
bonding company which protected the school funds had entered suit.
Rumour had it that Mr. Murray had been released on bail furnished
by Mr. Sately; additional rumours said that Mr. Sately himself
might be arrested at any time.



"I wish," Henrietta said irritably to Cathleen, "you'd quit eying
that yard of John's.  It isn't time yet."

Cathleen smiled as she finished her mother's coiffure.

Isabel, who had been squatting on the floor, jumped up, heavily,
clumsily, laughed, and pinched Cathleen's arm.

Mrs. Elliot also rose, leaning on Cathleen.  Even that small effort
deprived her of her breath.

"Children!" she admonished, standing ready to have the voluminous
dress slipped over her head.

Henrietta frowned impatiently, "I don't see, mother, why you should
go!"

Mrs. Elliot raised troubled eyes.  "Mary is as much my child as you
are."

"Certainly, mother," Cathleen agreed.

A moment later Mrs. Elliot, supported by Cathleen and Isabel,
slowly descended the stairs.  Henrietta remained behind,
methodically putting the room to order.

In the small hall on the ground floor they halted.

Mrs. Elliot pointed into the dining room which opened to the left.
"Isabel, the robe."

Outside, John Elliot was holding the horse.

Cathleen and her mother were alone.  Isabel had picked the robe up
and was spreading it over the buggy seat.

"Cathleen," Mrs. Elliot asked, "why does that man come?"

Cathleen flushed.  She had thought all that was understood.  "I
don't know, mother," she said lightly.  "To see the country, I
suppose."

"Nonsense, child.  Do you like him?"  Her voice sounded worried.
It seemed almost inconsiderate of this stranger to come at such a
time.

Cathleen smoothed her white flannel skirt.  "I respect him more
than any man I know," she said demurely.

Mrs. Elliot sighed.  She felt sorry for her daughter who stood
there, trembling in every fibre with life and probably expecting
her lover.  She was on the point of saying something to soften the
worried harshness of her words.  But Isabel reentered.  The moment
was gone.

"Ready, mother," Isabel said.

Mrs. Elliot, guided by Cathleen, stepped through the door.

All of them helped her to gain the seat.  John Elliot muttered,
"Hadn't I better drive?"

"I'd rather go alone, John," she said, panting from the exertion as
she spread herself on the cushions.

Isabel covered her knees with a second robe; and the vehicle rolled
down to the road and away to the north, the horse trotting till it
reached the steep ascent of the hill where it fell into a walk.



As the road wound along over bare hill after hill, Mrs. Elliot
thought of all she knew of the married life of her third-oldest
daughter who had been the first to be married.

"My child," she had asked her one day, nearly a year after the
wedding, when the Satelys had still been living in the flat above
the store, "are you happy?"

Mary had shrugged her shoulders, wearily disengaging herself from
her mother's arms.  "I don't know."

"Fred is good to you?  All that could be expected?"

"I suppose so, mother."

Mrs. Elliot had looked at her, searchingly.  She would be a
grandmother soon.  How could that be?  She had still felt so young.
Grandmother!  How tired that young woman looked who, only a few
years ago, had been her own little girl!  What had happened?

"Perhaps you had set your expectations too high?"

"No, mother," Mary had said with the same weary voice.  "Don't let
us talk about it.  I'll tell you all in a very few words.  We get
up in the morning.  I make breakfast.  He goes out.  He comes home
for his meals and goes out again.  I live in a flat of my own.  My
husband is my boarder.  I might be the housekeeper of a bachelor in
town.  The only difference is that he comes to my bed at night as
if he had a right to be there.  I wish I had known!"

Tears had run down Mrs. Elliot's cheeks.  "Do you blame me, Mary?"

"Blame you?  What for?  I have what I wanted."

"Married life is a compromise."

"A compromise means agreement.  I live my life, such as it is.  He
lives his."

"It will be better when the child is born."

"I hope so.  Let us talk of other things."

The child had been born, a boy: Mary's child, hardly Fred's.  A
year later, a second boy; two girls, two more boys; the years had
sped.

Mary had lived a quiet life with her children, indifferent to the
world.  The town had grown.

One day she awoke.  She began to use powder and rouge; she ordered
expensive dresses; she insisted on a house of her own; then on a
larger one.  Fred encouraged her.  Expense enhanced his credit.

Mrs. Elliot had looked on aghast.

"Fred must be doing well?" she had asked one day.

"I suppose he is," Mary had answered.

Mrs. Elliot had said pointedly, "Many admire him."

"Do they?"

There had been no more children.  Between the parental household
and Mary the gulf had opened.  When one set of furniture had
succeeded another in the Sately establishment, each more expensive
than the other, Mary had mocked at the unvarying simplicity in her
father's house.  All this had worried Mrs. Elliot, especially the
change in her daughter since she had ceased to bear children.  One
day she had sounded her.

"Mary, I sometimes wonder whether all is well between your husband
and you?"

"What should be wrong?"

"How old is Dusha?"  Dusha--Andrew--was the youngest born.

"Three years and two months."  Mary had been flippant about it.  "I
know, mother.  No.  There won't be any more children."

Mrs. Elliot had looked noncomprehension.  "Does Fred . . ."

Mary had laughed.  "Fred?  It has nothing to do with Fred.  I don't
want any more.  We have settled that once for all.  I wish I had
been wiser ten years ago.  I should not have six.  There are ways
and means."

"Child!"

Again Mary laughed: a good-natured, superior laugh.  "You are
innocent, mother.  Old-fashioned.  The world moves on.  You can eat
your cake and have it, too."



Of all this Mrs. Elliot thought as she drove to town; and of many
other things.  She shook her head.

She had not often seen Mary of late.  Mary had grown away from her.
All children seemed to do so.  She resented it but felt unable to
remedy matters.  Secretly she cried over it; and she blamed the
girl.  But since she was in trouble, she must go to her; she was
her mother.



The town consisted of two streets crossing each other at right
angles.  Besides, there was the row of elevators along the track.
The intersection of the streets was the business centre; their ends
formed the residential quarters.  Not a tree or shrub had grown as
yet to relieve the monotony of the sky-line.

The third house to the right of Main Street, coming from the south,
was the Sately residence: large, pretentious, glaringly new: a huge
block on a square foundation, with a roofed-over porch along the
west front.  The building was painted dark-brown, with corner-
boards, doors, window-frames the colour of cream.

The yard, large, roomy, pretentious like the house, holding the
neighbourhood at a respectful distance, was enclosed by a picket-
fence.  But it was not cultivated; it consisted of the same short-
grass prairie which formed the road-side.

Behind the house stood a large stable, constructed like a small
barn.  To the back yard a gate gave access from the lane along the
south side of the property.

As Mrs. Elliot turned into this lane, she noticed her son-in-law in
the drive-way of the stable, hitching a team of drivers to a buggy.

She thought she saw a smile flitting over his usually impassive
face: furtive and cynical.  But when he came to open the gate, the
attitude of his square-shouldered, deep-chested body and the
expression of his sallow, massive features were those of a dutiful
deference.

She felt uncomfortable in the presence of this man who was only
slightly younger than she.  There was even an admixture of
repulsion when she returned his greeting by a nod.

He helped her to alight and reached for the lines.

Mary stood in the inner backdoor, looking undisturbed; the slight
flush on her pretty face gave her a girlish look.  It seemed
impossible that she should be the mother of six children.

"My child!"

Breathlessly Mrs. Elliot entered the kitchen which glittered with
white enamel and a range of polished grey steel.  A hired girl,
bashful and apologetic in the older woman's ponderous presence, was
busy washing the dinner dishes and cast a furtive glance at her as,
leaning on her daughter's arm, she passed into the large dining
room which, like the rest of the house, shone with newness.

The door closed.  For a second the two women stood fronting each
other.  They seemed to make sure that all was still in the house,
that they were secure from the intrusion of the children.

Then, with a curious sound from her throat, Mary flung her arms
about her mother's neck.

"My child!  My little girl!"

Mary disengaged herself and led her into the darkened parlor where
she sank into a huge, upholstered arm-chair matching the opaque
curtains.  She herself sat down on a floor-cushion at her mother's
feet.

For a moment there was silence.

Then, "It is true, child?"

Mary nodded: a peculiar nod.

"My poor, poor girl!"

Mary lowered her head.  "Mother," she whispered, "something has
happened at last!"

Mrs. Elliot caught her breath.

Mary stretched her arms in a languid gesture.  She looked
seductively fresh and animated in her loose, flowing dress of dark-
flowered silk.  She had just had a bath; her skin was cool and
fragrant.

"I've been waiting for years!" she said, rose, and took a turn
through the room.

"Child!" Mrs. Elliot exclaimed.  "If rumour speaks true, this may
mean disgrace and prosecution."

Mary shrugged her shoulders.  "Disgrace!"

Her daughter's smile shocked Mrs. Elliot.  Her wide eyes followed
the younger woman's movements through the room.  A poignant
realisation came to her of the distance which separated her from
this child whom she had nursed at her breast how long, how short a
time ago!  Suddenly she seemed to see herself in this girl as she
had been at her age: when Isabel had been born, twenty-one years
ago: young, slender, active.  And now?  What was left but self-
pity?  Mary had turned and was looking at her.  Yes, of all her
children she was most like her in appearance.

"Mother," Mary said, "I have been a married woman for over ten
years.  You said once that married life is a compromise.  I didn't
acknowledge it then.  I don't acknowledge it now.  Not in the sense
in which you meant it.  You meant that each has to realise the
other; each has to modify his own wishes and actions, his nature
even.  Did you not?"

Mrs. Elliot nodded.

Mary laughed lightly.  "I've thought about it these last few years.
I've thought about your own married life.  When father spoke to
you, even when he was angry, there was still a reserve.  You were
you; he was he.  Even when we girls were grown up, there was in
father's manner to you something left of the lover.  How would it
have been with you had father been like a steam-roller crushing all
over which it passes?  Many admire him, you said one day of Fred.
What did they admire?  The selfish, iron composure with which he
pursued his purpose, ignoring the feelings of others.  Something
has checked him; and you want me not to be glad!  A woman cannot be
married to any one for ten years and remain unchanged.  Least of
all I!  And less still, I married to Fred Sately.  You are
astonished to see what has come of it.  I don't know whether to
laugh or to cry.  I am changed.  You asked me once whether I blamed
you.  If you asked me again, I should not say no.  I should say, I
can't tell."

"Mary!  You wanted him!  Nobody forced you!"

"No.  But who was I?  A silly girl.  You let me!  My own people let
me walk into a snare!"

Mrs. Elliot sat and stared.  Tears trickled over her almost
uncannily smooth cheeks.  Her heart ached with a sharp, physical
pain.  She fell back in her chair, fainting.

When she awoke, she was lying down; her clothes had been loosened,
her feet raised to a chair.  Mary was applying compresses to her
temples.

She lay without stirring as if she were basking in a sense of
physical comfort.  Then memory returned.  She reached for her
daughter's hand and drew her down till her head rested on her
shoulder.

"Mary," she whispered, "there is room in your parents' house for
you and your children."

Mary straightened.  "Don't talk, mother.  You are ill."

"I am well enough to attend to my children's welfare."  And Mrs.
Elliot lifted herself to a sitting posture.

"You mean you want me to leave him?"

"After what has happened . . ."

"I took him for better or worse.  I am no coward, I hope."

"When poverty comes in through the door, love flies out through the
window."

"Love!  Mother, I have been alone all through these years.  I am
not an Elliot for nothing.  Would you have left father under
similar circumstances?"

"The circumstances could not have arisen."

"Father is human."

"He is upright."

"He may have been merely less tempted, mother."

For several minutes Mrs. Elliot remained silent.  There was a
gulf . . .  But what of it?  This girl was her child.  With a
sudden movement of tenderness she reached once more for Mary's
head, drew it down, kissed it, and whispered, "God bless you!
We'll hope for his mercy in our afflictions!"



Half an hour after Mrs. Elliot had arrived in town, Fred Sately
stopped his horses in front of John Elliot senior's barn.

He was being watched from the grey house at the foot of the hill
where Cathleen was getting ready to meet the train.  None of the
girls went out to welcome the brother-in-law.  All three stood at
the window of the small north-east room which Cathleen shared with
Isabel.

"So he's found his way here at last, now he's in trouble!"
Henrietta said.

Isabel, rarely serious, sighed.  "Well, I am sorry for Mary."

"I wonder," Cathleen asked, "is father in the house?"

"No," Henrietta replied.  "He's gone over to John's."

Fred Sately was tying his horses to one of the wheels of the wagon
which stood in front of the barn.  He looked about, entered the
stable, and disappeared from view.  When he returned, he stood in
the broad, unmitigated sunlight of the afternoon, scanning the
valley between the bare, untreed hills.

Then, as if he had found what he was looking for, he strode across
the back yard, past the house, and to the gate which led to the
road.

The girls ran into the front room to watch.

At the door of the low, shed-like stable on their brother's yard,
across the road, they discovered their father in conversation with
his son.  John junior was, as usual, wildly gesticulating while he
spoke to his father.  The latter stood quiet, self-contained, grey
as ever.

Fred Sately reached the gate before it became apparent that he had
been observed by the two men on the other farm.  Then John Elliot
senior turned and descended to the road while John junior violently
shrugged his shoulders as if declining to accompany him.

Fred Sately had seen the gesture of the short, stocky, round-
shouldered figure at the stable and interpreted it correctly; he
waited on the trail.

There, after an interval, the two men met, the younger one nodding,
the older one merely shooting a glance at him.  A few words were
interchanged.  John Elliot turned to a stone pile along the fence
of his yard and sat down on a boulder.  Fred followed him and,
raising a foot to one of the stones, leaned an elbow on his knee
and spoke, bent over.

Every movement was watched from the window.

"Well," Henrietta broke the silence at last, "thank the Lord!  The
Elliots do not cater to any Sately!"

Isabel hummed a tune; Cathleen turned back into her own room and
went on with her task of dressing.



At the stone pile, a brief and guarded conversation took place.

"How much is needed to straighten your affairs out?" John Elliot
asked.

"Three to four thousand dollars."

John Elliot received the information in silence.

"The business is a going concern," Fred went on, with hardly the
suggestion of a plea in his voice.  "The difficulty is momentary.
If I gain a month's time, things will arrange themselves."

"It is hardly an ordinary stringency," John Elliot said.  "Lack of
funds does not bring arrests in its wake."

"Well," Fred remarked drily.  "If you hold me responsible for what
Murray does . . ."

"I don't.  But you are aware that crooked dealings on the part of
an officer throw suspicion on the whole concern."

"Murray may have lived beyond his means.  No uncommon thing these
days."

"What do you expect me to do?"

"To whom should I go if not to you?"

"Granting that you may have some claim, there are others to
consider."

"I ask for nothing but a loan, without prejudice to any one's
prospects."

"Why not go to the bank or mortgage your land?"

"The land is mortgaged.  The bank has carried me so far but will
not go farther."

John Elliot shot a glance from under his eyebrows.  "The bank knows
more of your circumstances than I do.  If it were a case of helping
my daughter and her husband personally, it would be a different
matter.  But I am to keep a business on its feet of which I know
nothing."

"That," Fred said pointedly, "is hardly my fault.  I have often
asked you and your son to come in with me."

"On that point my son and I are agreed.  We are farmers.  We wish
to stay out of what we consider doubtful enterprises."

"Do you impugn my integrity?"

"Rumour does."

"Listen to rumour!"

"Experience says, where there is smoke, there is fire."

This silenced Fred.  He could not pursue the line he had followed
without exposing himself to defeat.  As if such a course had been
suggested, he said, "I am willing to let you examine my books."

John Elliot mused.  "All right.  I shall come to a meeting in town.
I want the manager of the bank in Kicking Horse and a representative
of the mortgage company to be present.  Then I shall decide whether
I can do anything or not."

Fred Sately did not at once reply.  He had reason to dread an
investigation.  Yet, the mere presence of a man of John Elliot's
standing would be a help.  The banker would have the interest of
his own institution in view; he would be careful not to allow the
case to look hopeless.  Once committed, John Elliot would be drawn
in more and more deeply.  With Elliot behind him, he, Fred, could
restore public confidence; and public confidence was all that was
needed.  The Murray affair?  He would wire Mr. Heap, the lawyer in
the provincial capital who was handling the case.  Even he, having
by this time received information about all the ramifications of
the situation, would be impressed by the fact that John Elliot had
agreed to a meeting.

"Very well.  I shall send invitations.  What date?"

John Elliot rose.  "A week from to-morrow.  At ten in the morning.
Your office in town."

He accompanied his son-in-law to the gate and stood there, waiting
to let him out.

On his way to the buggy, Fred scanned the windows of the house.
Henrietta was hostile.  Was she watching him?  Isabel was under her
influence; she had always lived at home.  To his surprise he saw
Cathleen stepping back from the window upstairs.  Cathleen had no
reason to be unfriendly.  She had seen more of the world and of
life than the rest of the girls; she had set her aims higher.  She
spent, on her wardrobe, sums which seemed fabulous to Isabel and
Henrietta.  She should be an ally.  Just now he wished to
conciliate any Elliot.  But the atmosphere of the place seemed to
freeze him.  He walked through a hostile void.

He untied his horses, climbed into the buggy, and turned.  At the
gate, he nodded.  "So long, then."

John Elliot nodded gravely back.



On his way to town Fred met Norman and Arthur who were coming from
school.  His impulse to be friendly with any Elliot still
persisted; and he drew his horses to a stop.

"Hello!" he said.

Arthur looked at Norman and laughed.

"Hello, Fred," Norman returned the greeting with ingratiating
affability, speaking as to one immensely his junior.  He stepped up
to the team and unhooked the traces of the off horse.  The buggy
stood in the centre of the road.

Arthur, seeing what he was doing and catching a quick glance of
his, went to the other side and did the same thing with the near
horse.  Their actions looked as if they were premeditated and
concerted.

"Well," Norman went on as if what he did were the most natural
thing to do under the circumstances, "How are you today, Fred?
This was one hot day!  I tell you it was hot in school!  We've a
great new game.  The match game we call it.  I must explain that to
you one day."  Meanwhile he tied the traces securely on the horses'
backs, giving directions to his younger brother in a business-like
way.  "Hold on, there, Art!  That won't do.  This way.  Now, that
is better.  The neck-yoke next."  And he went forward and dropped
the tongue of the buggy to the road.

Fred Sately's brow was knitted into a frown.  He pushed his
expensive hat back from his forehead.  At last he spoke angrily.
"You hitch those horses up again, do you hear?"

"Sure," Norman said, working furiously while he buckled the breast-
straps.  Taking his school-bag off his shoulder, he threw it to
Arthur and, in a sibilant whisper, gave orders, "Step back.  Watch
out.  Then run."

Meanwhile, with a genial smile, he returned to the dash-board of
the buggy and, addressing the horses, broke into action.  "Hi,
there!" he yelled and, swinging his arms, he dealt each one a
resounding slap on the rump.  "Get up!"

The next moment he and Arthur were running away as fast as they
could.

The horses, taken by surprise, reared and bounded forward.  Fred
Sately, unwilling to let go of the lines, could save himself from
being dragged down head forward only by clearing the dash-board
with a desperate leap--a most undignified proceeding when you stare
ruin in the face and are in a tragic mood.

The boys admired him from a safe distance.

"I bet you," Norman said, "he is saying a Sunday school lesson."

Arthur was too much convulsed with laughter to make reply.



An hour later John junior drove up to the door of his father's
house; his new democrat was drawn by two lean, rangy bronchos.

Short, stocky, round-shouldered, with goggle eyes and an enormous,
hanging nether lip in his red, spherical face, he cut a strange
figure; for, in spite of his physical handicaps, he had attired
himself like a fashionable dandy.  On his hands--which, small
though they were, formed just now the most conspicuous part of him--
he wore lemon-coloured kid gloves; on his feet, patent-leather
shoes.  His suit was of navy-blue serge; his neck, encased in a
high, starched collar with a flamboyant tie.  A huge sombrero of
soft black felt sat tilted on the bald dome of his head.

Tall and slender, Cathleen came from the house, trim and neat in a
fawn-coloured suit.  John bent down with a leering grin, rolling
his prominent eyes and pushing out his red, hanging nether lip.

"Well, Queenie, am I in style?"

"John!" Cathleen exclaimed half laughing, half indignant, "you are
a veritable caricature!"

"Whatever that may be.  Don't I look jake?  See the gloves?  Seven
dollars cash without discount.  And the sombrero?  Jakaloo,
Queenie!  We'll show the beau from the city that we can dress in
the barren hills, too."

"You are incorrigible!" Cathleen said as she climbed to her
brother's side.

"Exactly!" John said.  "We'll show him!  We can hold our own with
the best."  And, turning to his horses, "Get up, there, you cows,
or I'll knock your hearts out!"

From the door, Isabel waved a good-by; on Henrietta's lips--she
stood at the window in the dining room--played an ironical smile.



CHAPTER II

THE LEAVEN OF SEX IS AT WORK


It was between eight and nine o'clock at night, two days later.

In the inky darkness of the stable Isabel was throwing the saddle
on the old white horse which her brother John had given her.  She
wore a divided skirt of dark homespun, a shirt-waist, and a red
neckerchief.  Her head was covered with a small, battered man's hat
of soft brown felt.

Her movements were quick, decisive, energetic like those of a man.
Her voice as she spoke to the horse, though subdued, sounded
impatient, urgent, almost harsh.  Now and then she stepped into the
open door and listened into the summer night.

At last she swung herself into the saddle of the curveting horse
and grasped its flanks with her knees.  The horse, an ancient
racer, turned prancing and shot into the star-lit dark.  Obeying
the bridle, it circled the barn; and when it neared the line-fence,
it doubled its pace and took the obstacle like a hurdle; Isabel
kept her seat with the skilled ease of the practised horsewoman.

She turned east, climbing the steep, stony hill-side.

On its crest a horseman was waiting, the figure of a centaur: tall,
slender, wiry, sitting an only half tamed, bucking broncho.  As her
eyes became accustomed to the lack of light, she could recognise
every detail of his appearance: the coal-black, flowing hair which,
parted in the centre, issued to both sides from under the rim of
the hat which was negligently pushed back and knocked into many
angles; the red neckerchief, tied over the left shoulder, so that
its corner flowed out over the right sleeve of his white,
collarless shirt; the wiry forearm which held the reins of the
unruly mount with a gesture of studied nonchalance; and even the
melancholy eyes, coal-black like his hair, which gleamed softly to
both sides of a straight nose resembling that of the Praxitelean
Hermes.  As his horse, excited by Isabel's approach, reared and
turned with a throw of its head, the butt of an ancient pistol,
stuck into the belt of his trousers, caught and reflected the light
of the stars overhead.

Isabel rode straight up to him and, shooting past, touched the rump
of his mount with her riding whip.

A hoarse cry sprang from the mouth of the handsome horseman.  His
heels pinched the broncho's flanks.

Isabel's horse launched itself forward in a stretched gallop; and
the two raced down into the hollow between the stark, bare hills,
circling John Elliot's crop on the flat.  Isabel laughed to
herself.

But the horseman was catching up, his broncho being young and
better used to the rough going over the prairie.  Meanwhile he
spoke.

"Doggone it, Is!  You took me by surprise.  Wait'll I catch you!"

Arrived at the very bottom of the draw, Isabel slowed down, humping
her shoulders.

The horseman reached her and, swerving close, jerked her with a
powerful lift of his arms clear of the saddle and swept her to his
breast.

The horse, now without its rider, instantly fell to cropping the
long grass of the slough.

"I've got you, you kitten!" the horseman whispered.  "You've led me
a bloody chase.  You'll make up for it now."

Isabel gasped breathlessly.  "Don't, Ken, don't!  Be careful!"  For
he smothered her with kisses.



Kenneth Harvey was the son of the blacksmith in town; of Ontario-
Scotch descent, a recent settler on a claim two miles south.  He
lived in a sod-shack, a small hut built of squares of soil lifted
from the prairie.  Since, a few years ago, he had arrived from the
east, with his parents, he had aimed at reviving in words and acts
what he considered to be the true life of the old wild west.  His
brain being filled with the picturesque descriptions of cowboy
life, heard around the fire in lumber camps, he tried to imitate
that curious creation of a romantic fancy.  With boastful and
calculated recklessness he rode unbroken horses, challenged to
bucking contests, and declared that he was a "regular son-of-a-
gun."

Endowed with a strange, almost Byronic beauty, he had broken many
hearts; but when, coming west, he had found a number of unmarried
girls in the Elliot household and tried to cast his spells, he had
been received with a cool, mocking toleration.  The Elliots
considered themselves as being of a different class.  But rebuffs
merely sharpened his appetite.  Henrietta, "a fine figure of a
woman," attracted him first; but the cold disdain with which she
treated his advances discouraged him.  Next he had tried to get up
a flirtation with Margaret who, however, parried the bold thrusts
of his speech with the shy, careful modesty of unawakened
maidenhood.  When Cathleen came home, she froze him into a distant,
respectful silence.  Strange to say, he had at first paid least
attention to Isabel who was no homelier than Henrietta and lacked
her bold, domineering ways.  Nor did he know that Isabel was his
champion in the house where everybody else spoke of him with
condescension.  "A blacksmith," she said, "is every bit as good as
a farmer."

John Elliot senior, who happened to hear this remark, turned a cold
look on her.  "A blacksmith," he said, "may be a gentleman; a
farmer is not necessarily one."

Kenneth Harvey's face, with its soft, melancholy, yet fiery eyes,
and with the exaggerated pallour of its smooth skin seemed to speak
of hidden sorrows, of romantic remorse, perhaps of guilt to be
atoned.  The love of a virgin would redeem him.  Her girl's
imagination was at work, building about him a vast structure of
romance, making him the hero of the true west.  Like his, her mind
was tinged by the early literature of the plains.  He had never
been invited into the house; she had never seen him at table, never
heard him in conversation with the men of their kind.  Instead, on
his way to or from town, he had often stopped in the road and
exchanged a few words with whoever happened to be in the yard.  He
had always been on horseback where he showed to advantage.  And at
last he had been struck by the ardent look in Isabel's light-blue
eyes.

She had taken to riding in the direction of his homestead,
displaying her horsemanship; and one night he had watched for her
and joined her as by chance.  Ostensibly he was chasing his cattle;
for he professed to be a "rancher," not a farmer.  They had
dismounted and sat down by the road-side, allowing their mounts to
graze on the prairie.  He had explained that his father held the
homestead next his own; there he was building a neat little cottage
in which he, Kenneth, was going to live.

A silence had fallen.  Then he had spoken boldly.  "Doggone it!
How about being my girl?"

He had reached for her waist; she had sunk into his arms.

Something of the kind was suspected at home.  The girls, and even
John, dropped teasing remarks, protesting.  "You are lowering
yourself!--Ken's a fake!--You went south?  How's the cowboy today?--
Seen anything of Bucking-Horse Farm?"  Isabel had observed a
sullen silence.  A passion had sprung up to defy the world.

One day, two weeks ago, Kenneth Harvey--who was not a "bad boy" at
heart and who, from many little signs, had arrived at the
conclusion that, with this girl, there was "nothing doing" except
in the regular way--had spoken decisive words.

"You know, Is, I am doggone poor.  I've filed on the homestead; and
I've twelve head of cattle.  But I need a woman on the place.  My
old man will help.  We might make it a go if we milked the bloody
cows and shipped cream."

"Well, Kenneth," she had replied, rather thrilled than repelled by
his coarseness of speech: it was so masculine, "all the settlers
are poor.  We are young.  Life is long."

"It's a go, then, Is?  We hook up in the fall?"

"I suppose so," Isabel had whispered, lowering her eyes.



Kenneth and Isabel--she having remounted--rounded her father's
field and turned to the north-south road.  Beyond the wheat, the
hollow between the hills sank away to a slough, dry in rainless
summers.  Yet grass and semi-aquatic plants grew there so high that
even in daytime the riders would have been half concealed.  As,
through this slough, they approached the trail, they saw, outlined
against the starry sky, two figures coming down the hill-side from
the south.  In an impulse to hide Isabel dismounted again; and
Kenneth did likewise.

"It's Cathleen with Mr. Ormond," Isabel whispered, crouching down.

"Who IS that guy?"

"A professor in the university.  Don't talk."



The two figures descended into the draw; the man stopped.  "What is
that?" he asked, pointing his cane.

"Horses."  For the two mounts had at once begun to graze again.
They were raising their heads and cocking their ears.

Cathleen and her escort reached the corner of the field.  A stone
pile, still warm from the sun of the day, offered the usual seats
to strollers of the prairie.  "Shall we sit for a moment?"  Mr.
Ormond's voice, calm, deliberate, well modulated, sounded clear and
distinct through the fragrant dark.

"If you wish."  Cathleen's outline, white, soft, and slender,
looked lovely in the dim light from the stars.

"Miss Elliot . . ."  The man fingered his cane.  "You can imagine
that I did not come to this part of the country without a purpose."

Cathleen sat very still.  Her heart pounded.  Take me, her bowed
head seemed to say.

Mr. Ormond looked up.  "You know I left Arkwright because I was
called to the university.  I have just received word that, in
addition, I am to serve on an important government commission."

"I must congratulate you," Cathleen said with a voice which sounded
artificially indifferent.

"I wrote at once.  Do you remember the evening when I saw you at
Arkwright?  You said I should be welcome if I came and dropped in
at your parents'."

"I remember."  She held her breath.

"I wondered, then, whether you could ever think of me in a
different way than as your friend?"

There was a silence.  "I don't know how I am to understand this."

"Miss Elliot, I ask you to be my wife."

"I don't think," the quick answer came, "I am qualified for that
position."

A low, masterful laugh greeted the reply.  "Might I ask why that
invitation was given?"

Cathleen rose.  It was easy to divine the burning blush in her
cheeks.  Half averted, she spoke, too quickly for concealment of
her emotion.  "Because, since I had known you, a new ideal of
manhood had come to me."

He, too, rose.  "Cathleen . . ."

But Cathleen was flitting along the road; he followed.



"Doggone it!" Kenneth Harvey whispered where he and Isabel were
hidden in the weeds.  "That was slick.  I'll tell the world!"



Summer madness was in the air that night.

In the great hollow between the hills warm shadows had gathered as
the sun went down in a cloudless sky.  The rising dark had
obliterated all signs of the toil of the day; nothing remained of
it except a fine smell of dust which filled the valley.

In the shelter of the rows of lilac bushes, carefully tended during
the past decades, John Elliot and his wife were sitting on two
chairs.  Without words they conveyed to each other their sense of
passing events.  The father felt jealous of his daughters: he
wanted to guide them, not let them choose for themselves.  But
instinct told him that, if he interfered, nothing would come of it
but dissatisfaction and possibly tragedy.

The children were going their own way; they could not be stopped.
He felt as if he had merely encountered them by the way-side whence
they dispersed in all directions.  That third thing which had grown
in them, the mysterious addition to the parent natures of which
they were compounded, their own individuality, proved more potent
every day.  Mary and Gladys had gone; Cathleen and Isabel were
going.  He knew it and felt his impotence to prevent it.  "If we
don't allow them to pick their own company," his wife had said one
day, years ago, "how can they form any attachment?"  Without
probing things, he had since deferred to his wife.

She, too, felt strangely helpless; as if she could only look on and
let matters take their predestined course.  The example of two
daughters, Gladys and Mary, was like a warning.

In addition to what occupied their thoughts, both felt that they
sat in the shadow, not of the hills only, but of coming things, of
a great separation.

Nothing needed to be said; things had their own voice proclaiming
unalterable decisions.  Mrs. Elliot was failing.  A terrible thing
was at work in her; and the consciousness of it, though imperfectly
realised, stood between man and wife like a spectre.

Articulate thoughts were in town, with Mary; or still farther
north, on a cheerless homestead where Gladys and Frank were
drifting apart; or with the couple on horseback who had not been as
unobserved as they imagined; or with the other two who, in the
light of the setting sun, had gone south through the haze of dust;
or with John over there, in his shack where a light was moving from
window to window, for of late he had fallen into the habit of going
to town after dark; or lastly, with Margaret at her first school;
or with Henrietta, the lonely girl in the house.  Whenever Mrs.
Elliot thought of her, she felt overwhelmed with a conviction which
had grown through many years that Henrietta was the tragic one of
the girls, doomed to live through dark things in her life.



And Henrietta, too, was aware of what was going on.  When Isabel
had saddled her horse at the stable, Henrietta had stood at the
pantry window behind the hall and listened.  When Mr. Ormond and
Cathleen had taken the south road, like a pair of casual
acquaintances, she had stood upstairs and spied upon them as upon a
guilty couple.  And when, an hour later, John junior entered, in
his blue suit, with lemon-coloured gloves on his small, shapely
hands, but without the leering smile on his face, she confronted
him angrily, asking, "Where are you going in that monkey outfit?"

"To town," he answered mildly, with mock reproach for the violence
of her speech.  "You know me, sweetheart.  The night's astir with
love.  Where all the world does love, can John alone sit hating?"

"Chase yourself!" Henrietta cried.

"I will, I will, my dear!"  And, having found whatever he had come
for, he left through the kitchen door.

A few minutes later the creaking of wheels betrayed that he was
driving north between the hills.

Henrietta went up into her little room--not hers, but Margaret's!
Selfishness had debarred her from her own.  She did not light a
lamp.  She sat on the edge of her bed, in the dark, and brooded.

She had had a letter from Pete Harrington.  For the dozenth time
Pete had asked her to be his wife.  He was living in Manitoba
again, where he had bought land in the hills of the Dusky
Mountains.  There he was farming, with forty-five acres broken.  A
living, he said, was assured.  In time it would be more than a
living.  He was lonely and longed for a home of his own.  Would she
reconsider her former decision?

Henrietta's heart had beaten faster.  She had hesitated.  But the
memory had come back to her of how she had invariably treated this
man who looked and dressed like a labourer.  Was Cathleen to marry
this Mr. Ormond from the city while she, Henrietta, followed in
Gladys' footsteps?  She had sat down and written her answer,
declining.

Of all this she thought as she sat in the dark.  Bitterness filled
her soul.  She clasped her hands to her breasts and gripped them.
Was not her body that of a woman?  Was not her soul that of a girl?

True, in married life things did not come out as one wished and
hoped for.  Mary's example was a deterrent.  And Gladys, poor
Gladys with her desire for comfort and luxury!  Living in a two-
roomed shack, with a husband who had the soul of a trader and the
body of a clerk and yet was condemned to handle horses which he
feared and implements which he hated.  She had two children and was
committed.  Life was leading her along a path which she had not
chosen except for the fact that she had once on a time chosen a
man, Frank Bramley, the druggist!

No, she, Henrietta, wanted to see what she was going into before
she accepted.

Yet, during this night of summer madness, with the soft, dust-
smelling air breathing into the room, she had only one desire: to
be taken into the arms of some one, to be held tightly, to feel a
caressing hand on her head, about her shoulders, along her spine.
Life?  What else had it to offer?  She was getting old.

In the sudden realisation that she was giving in to things which
might lead her she knew not where, she rose and shuddered.  "The
flesh is weak," she said; felt her way to the curtain which closed
the door-frame--there were no doors upstairs--and into the hall and
down the stairway.  Arrived at the foot, she turned to the left,
into the large dining room, lighted a lamp, searched on a shelf for
a deck of cards, and sat down at the table to play a game of
solitaire.



In town, John junior sat in a stall of the Rex Cafe.  Opposite him
sat a girl.

Small and delicate, she had the fast-fading prettiness of anaemic
youth, a prim mouth, and movements of studied refinement.  When she
raised the spoon, sipping her ice, she bent the little finger of
her manicured hand away from the others.  And John who watched her
with a look of exaggerated infatuation noted critically that that
little finger was not quite straight.

"Sure," he said as if he were acting a comedy.  "I am the gentleman
of the family.  It's a poor family that can't afford one gentleman.
I have them all working for me, brothers and sisters."

"Father and mother, too?" she asked with an artificial laugh.

"Oh, father!"  And with sudden soberness he added, "No, not mother.
You must know, Miss Lillian, that I consider my mother the best
woman that ever lived.  That is one reason why I should like you to
meet her.  How about it?  Will you come on Sunday?  I'll fetch you,
sure.  I'll fetch you in style.  That's what I got my democrat for.
I'll come in gala.  With my team of bronchos."

"I might," she smiled.

"Jakaloo!" he exclaimed, acting the clown.  "You know, there are
farmers and farmers.  My father's one kind, I am the other.  Great
country this.  Tickle the soil with a plow; and it smiles with a
crop.  If ever I marry . . ."  And he laughed at her with a broad
laugh, humping his back, drawing his head between his shoulders,
and looking up at her with his enormous, light-blue goggle eyes,
letting his lower lip hang, thus making capital out of his
ugliness.

She, half overcome with this game of mocking admiration, picked the
paper napkin up and hit him a playful blow over his half bald head
with the yellow wreath of hair.  "You are a monkey," she said,
"Mr. . . ."

"John," he completed.

"Mr. John, then," she said primly, straightening so as to
counteract the effect of her familiarity.

"What I was going to say," he drawled without changing his
ludicrous attitude.  "If ever I marry, Miss Lillian--you can take
that whichever way you please . . .  If ever I marry Miss
Lillian,"--this time he spoke the clause without the comma--"my
wife is not going to work unless she wants to: she can sit in
state.  Look at me!"  He extended his long, strong arms.  "Six
years ago I homesteaded with seventeen cents in my pocket; and they
were borrowed.  I am worth five, six thousand dollars at the lowest
valuation, not counting the land which I would not sell for ten
thousand cash.  There isn't much of a crop this year; we had no
rain.  But there is credit.  I can walk into that there bank in the
city and borrow.  They'll be tickled to loan me whatever I need."

"I believe you, Sir John," the girl said with a smile and a
sidelong glance.



Miss Lillian Flaws was the stenographer in the real-estate office
of Mr. Howden; she was twenty-four years old and beginning to
realise that she would soon be an old maid unless she was willing
to accept what appeared to be the solid comforts of farm-life in
lieu of the dreamt-of luxuries of the city.  She was the daughter
of a poor Ontario parson blessed with six children; and she had,
from an early age, been condemned to make her own living.  Already
she felt that, in order to hold her own by the side of younger
girls, she must have recourse to a discreet use of lip-stick and
powder; and, though she was not, on principle, averse to such "aids
to beauty," she viewed their necessity with alarm.

John Elliot junior had met her at a school picnic.  In the bevy of
rustic belles she had struck him by her air of exotic refinement.
He had singled her out with his attentions; and she, awed by the
name of Elliot, much respected in her employer's office, had mildly
responded and played an adroit and careful game.  People who
watched them had said--the male part, "Lucky if he gets her!"--the
female part, "It seems a disgrace, the way she is setting her cap
for him."

Out of a flirtation begun in wantonness of spirit a situation had
arisen where John's vanity was involved and where, had it been
necessary, she might have claimed that he had compromised her and
owed reparation.

John was half conscious of this mixture of motives; and he
anticipated resistance at home.  But that, unless the resistance
came from his mother, was rather calculated to egg him on in his
course.  The affair carried him away just as, when a boy, he had
been carried away by his devilries.

At moments, while at work in the field, he was suddenly overcome
with a feeling of the seriousness of the matter.  He would stop
whatever work he was engaged in and cast a wistful glance into the
tenebrities of the future.  But he was young.  The blood coursed
hotly through his veins.  He had never known any girl with any
degree of intimacy; and Lillian was pretty.  She had thick tresses
of black hair, neatly arranged on her small and delicate head.  Her
skin had the fine, fragrant smoothness of thin-blooded youth.  And
once, when she had bent forward, he had, with a thrill, caught
sight of budding breasts beneath the filmy edge of her fine waist:
she dressed with skill.

At thought of that, he yielded to incomprehensible stirrings and
gave vent to them in a burst of coarseness.

"To hell with it all!" he yelled as he stood behind his horses,
wiping the sweat from his brow and kicking the dust from a clod.
"I am going to marry the chit!"



It was near midnight when he took leave from her in front of her
boarding place.  Holding the lines of his horses with his left, he
reached out with his right for hers and asked once more, "You
promise?  Sunday?  I'll be here at half past two."

"Yes," she said, smiling encouragingly up at him, her face bathed
by the light of a street lamp.

Her hand rested in his; from the contact a stream of fire seemed to
pass.  He drew her to him and kissed her on mouth and eyes.

When he released her, she breathed, "Oh John!"

"That's settled," he said and sprang to the seat of his vehicle;
and, with a wave of his disengaged hand, he vanished into the
night.

On the face of the girl who gropingly entered the sleeping house
lay a curious smile.



That night, in the distant city of Brandon, in Manitoba, a tall,
broad man boarded a midnight train going west.  He was clad in a
dark suit of nondescript colour, with a cap on his tousled, ash-
blond hair.  Everything about him betrayed that he placed no value
on his appearance.

It was Pete Harrington who, the day before, had received a letter
from Henrietta Elliot who refused to be his wife.  For twelve years
he had courted her.  Now that he had bought land and was making his
way he felt that he could not go on without a woman on the place.
On the farm, a man is only half a man when he has to cook meals and
to wash dishes and sweep floors.  He had tried to envisage a future
with a stranger as his wife.  He could not imagine it.  There was
only one woman.  She had refused him by letter: she should once
more refuse him by word of mouth or accept him.



Thus, as the second group of the Elliot children grew up, the
leaven of sex was at work again, shaping their destinies for a
future veiled in darkness.



CHAPTER III

HENRIETTA DRIVES A BARGAIN


On the afternoon of the following day the three girls were in the
kitchen of the grey house, two of them washing the dishes used in
an early cup of tea.

Henrietta would not allow Cathleen to do any part of the house
work.  She insisted on her being treated as a guest.  During the
last four years Cathleen had repeatedly sent home not inconsiderable
sums of money which must have more than repaid her parents for the
expense of sending her to high school and to normal.  Henrietta
felt, therefore, that it was her and Isabel's privilege to do the
work in the house--in order, as she sometimes expressed it, to
"pay for their keep."

Thus it was only natural that Cathleen, in her long, starched dress
of white batiste, should be sitting on a chair by the window.  On
her round, pretty face lay a smile.  She knew that her secret had
somehow betrayed itself to Isabel; but Henrietta was still ignorant
of it.

Between Henrietta and her younger sisters and brothers a peculiar
relation had defined itself during the last few years.  By right of
her age she claimed an authority little short of maternal; and they
denied and resented it, sometimes laughingly, sometimes in bitter
quarrels.  But only Cathleen, being absent from home for ten months
of the year, had succeeded in withdrawing herself from its
influence.

Isabel was waiting for Cathleen to say something.  Living at home,
she suffered most from Henrietta's domineering temper.  Repeatedly
she threw Cathleen an encouraging look; but Cathleen bided her
time.  Isabel, wild and, in matters of deportment, younger than her
years--her mother called her the "humble-bee"--was singularly free
of envy.  Both she and Henrietta had been impressed with Mr.
Ormond's manners, with his courtesy, yes, with his clothes.
Cathleen had not failed to awe them with mentioning what she
thought was his income; and Henrietta had sneered.  Isabel,
however, knew that Henrietta would feel "left behind" on hearing
the definite news which Cathleen had in store.  Though speculation
had been rife before Mr. Ormond's arrival, his actual appearance
had almost stopped it.  He was from a different social plane.
Cathleen's engagement to him would "take Henrietta down a notch or
two."

The mute play between Cathleen and Isabel became so obvious that
Henrietta could not but take notice of it.  Her mouth set itself in
a straight line.  She tried hard not to betray that she was aware
of what was going on; but her very air of unconcern, a little too
pronounced to be natural, gave her away.

At last Isabel burst into a merry laugh.

Henrietta veered.  "What's the matter with you?"

"With me?" Isabel asked indignantly.

Henrietta turned and went to the pantry.  Her very step--with the
steeply sloping line of her instep--seemed to assert a claim of
defeated authority.  When she returned, she stopped in the middle
of the kitchen, holding her head high and looking down on the
offenders.  Her hard, blue-grey eyes glinted.

"You've something up your sleeve.  Out with it!"

"We?" Isabel asked innocently.

"Yes.  You or your sister."

Cathleen sat smiling.  But, lacking Isabel's provocation, she also
lacked her cruelty.  She rose.

"I don't know," she said, "whether you would call it having
something up my sleeve.  I did come in here to tell you something
which concerns you only as my sister.  Isabel knows; though I might
say I did not tell her."

Comprehension burst upon Henrietta; much as she tried to disguise
it, its effect was obvious.

All her sisters, so it seemed, were finding husbands.  She alone
remained an old maid.  Margaret was still single, it is true; but
Margaret, a mere chit of a girl, had had offers and declined them;
she had professed her intention never to marry.  Margaret,
undoubtedly the best-looking one of the Elliot girls, was strangely
cool, possessed of curious ideas of independence, filled with an
ambition to carve a career for herself: a reader of the most modern
literature of Europe: Ibsen, Maeterlinck, Ellen Key, Lagerloeff,
Tolstoi, Hamsun.  A girl with ideas so perverse had offers, and no
despicable ones.  Hers, Henrietta's, had all come from the same
man, a man who did not measure up to her preconceived ideas of a
husband!

That the impending announcement of Cathleen's engagement hit her so
hard--when she had just arrived at the conclusion that, after all,
nothing of the kind was to be expected--was owing to the very fact
that Mr. Ormond represented the type with whom she herself imagined
that she could have fallen in love.  To him she would have bowed as
a slave; his very mannerisms she would have copied; his views and
ways she would have adopted as her own.  Innately, she was a
climber; and she felt that Cathleen was not; the externals left
Cathleen indifferent.  Seeing, therefore, her sister grasp the
prize, she turned around to disparage it, to find fault with the
man, in order to destroy the younger girl's triumph.  There was
even something like scorn of her sister: never would Cathleen fully
appreciate her good fortune; the man was making a mistake; it was
she, Henrietta, whom he should have asked!

"You don't need to say a word," she said haughtily.  "I know you
have accepted him.  You are a fool."

Cathleen's soft and radiant features hardened.  "A nice way to wish
me joy," she said.

"Joy?" Henrietta repeated steelily.  "You are marrying out of your
sphere.  I have never known any good to come from such a match.
Wait till you have seen more of life.  Besides, he is too old for
you."

"Too old?" Cathleen asked with icy mockery.  "He is no more than
nine years older than I am.  And, you may not know yet, he has just
been appointed to an important position in the provincial
government."

That moment a knock sounded at the kitchen door.

Henrietta, on the point of flinging back a sneering remark, turned
with a shrug of her shoulders and opened the door.

A grimy young fellow from town stood on the flag-stone.

"What is it?"

"There's a gentleman in the car," he said, "who asks Miss Henrietta
Elliot whether she'd step down to the road for a second."  With a
grin on his grease-smeared face he looked from one to the other,
apparently at a loss for whom the message was meant.

"Miss Henrietta?" she repeated.

"Yes, ma'am."

Blank astonishment on three faces.

Henrietta was the first to recover.  With a few quick movements she
divested herself of her apron, touched up her hair, and fronted the
door.

"Where?"

The young man donned his cap and led the way.  The door closed
behind them.



Isabel led in the rush upstairs, to the landing between the rooms.
Cathleen followed somewhat more slowly.

Carefully Isabel raised the curtain which closed the entrance to
the parents' bed-room.  Mrs. Elliot was lying down, asleep.  They
tiptoed to the window.  On the road, trembling with the running
engine, stood a motor car, headed north; its top was folded down,
its wind-shield up.  The front seat was empty; in the back seat, a
stranger sat, too far away to be recognised.

As the young man reached the road, he promptly climbed in and took
his seat behind the wheel.

Henrietta, her head still high with indignation at her sisters,
followed through the open gate.

The stranger raised his cap, leaned over, and spoke.  Then he
opened the door of the tonneau; and Henrietta, hatless, clad in her
slightly faded blue-and-white house dress, climbed in by his side.

The engine roared; the young man threw the clutch in; the car shot
away, up the steep, winding trail between the hills which hid the
town.

Isabel and Cathleen looked at each other, shrugged their shoulders
with an expressive gesture, and tiptoed back into the hall and down
the stairs.



When Henrietta reached the road, she recognised, with a quickening
of her pulse, Pete Harrington, her decade-long suitor.  He looked
aged, matured.  He must be thirty-three years old.  He was not
handsome.  In a peculiarly long, clean-shaven, deep-lined face his
short, thin nose stood awry, giving his features something chaotic,
earthy, as of nature in disarray.  But he was every inch a man.

"Hennie," he said, "I must speak to you.  No, not here nor at the
house.  Somewhere on top of a hill.  I have hired this car for the
afternoon.  Get in and come along.  As soon as I have had my say, I
shall take you back.  Nobody here needs to know who I am unless you
tell them.  Your father and John are in the fields.  Your younger
sisters don't know me."

Henrietta, in a state of trembling agitation, nodded mutely.

She entered the car; and they were climbing the hill.  They had
neither shaken hands nor touched.  Pete sat in his corner;
Henrietta in hers.

Her father's line-fence was left behind.  To the right, a section
of wild land stretched over the hill; to the left, Fred Sately's
preemption.

Henrietta's mind was working fast, thoughts ticking off like heart-
beats.

Two miles from the farms, halfway to town, Pete Harrington touched
the driver on his back.

"Pull out of the road and stop."

The driver obeyed, manipulating pedals and levers.

Pete opened the door of the tonneau; and, with a short, breathless
laugh, Henrietta alighted.

"It may be a few minutes; it may be an hour," Pete said to the
driver.  "I leave my suitcase in the car."

Then he took the lead, crossing the prairie at right angles to the
trail, going east, up the flank of a hill covered with sparse tufts
of short, wiry grass interspersed here and there with snowberry
brush and mats of prickly cactus.  Arrived at the top, where huge
boulders were embedded in the parched clay, he stopped.  They could
see the elevators of the town from here; and to the south, the roof
of John Elliot's barn.

"Might as well sit down, Hennie," Pete said.

She did so, choosing a flat stone for her seat.

"I've come to ask once more," he went on.  "I know it must seem
laughable to you.  It is the last time.  The point is this.  I have
reached a stage, on the farm, where I can't remain single.  I have
made up my mind to marry in any case.  If you won't have me, I must
ask another woman.  I could not bring myself to do so without
making a last attempt."

Henrietta smiled cryptically.  "You have chosen the moment well,"
she said.

He looked down.  "What do you mean?"

"Never mind.  Nothing that concerns you.  Listen, Pete.  On certain
conditions I'll marry you at once."

He was so surprised that he could but stammer, "What has happened?"

"Never mind," she repeated.  "As I said, if you still want me, you
can have me; provided you can pay the price."

"If I still want you?  Should I be here?"

"Pete," she said softly.  "I am no longer the child of ten years
ago.  I am twenty-nine.  I have a goitre.  At home they think I am
a termagant, a sort of dragon.  And yet, Pete, I long to be fondled
and caressed."

Pete laughed and looked about.  "That driver's watching us.  Come
down into the hollow.  I'll show you whether I can kiss."

Henrietta smiled up at him.

He looked sober again.  "You speak of a price."

"Yes," she said bitterly.  "Pete, I am not a silly girl.  I have
seen something of life.  If I marry, I shall consider the
arrangements as a matter of business.  I want to make sure of
certain comforts and luxuries before I take the plunge."

"What are the conditions?"

"I want a car."

"I am buying a threshing outfit.  I like machinery.  Within a few
years . . ."

Henrietta shook her head.  "No.  If you want me, you will have to
take me at once, before harvest.  I do not intend to stay here
through the fall."

"All the better.  I need you in harvest."

"Yes.  But within two weeks of my arrival at your place I want to
drive to town in that car."

Pete was sobered.  "What else?"

"I am not going to be without money.  I am a good housekeeper.  I
have practically run father's house for the last eight or ten
years.  I know how; and at little expense.  But over and above my
household allowance I want twenty-five dollars a month for myself,
to spend on clothes, luxuries, what-not."

"Sounds," Pete said, "as if you were hiring out for wages."

She nodded.  "Exactly what I am doing, Pete.  This is partly a
business deal.  I might say that I had almost made up my mind to
leave home.  I can make a living.  I could conduct a boarding
house.  That is what I was thinking of.  I want to be independent.
If you hired a housekeeper, you would not dream of leaving the
question of wages in suspense.  If you marry me, you do hire a
housekeeper; and you get a wife into the bargain.  You may think it
would have been nicer if I had sunk into your arms.  It seems
mercenary to you."

"No," said Pete.  "Perhaps there is something to be said for your
way of looking at it."

"Well," Henrietta said encouragingly, "at least I am never going to
come to you begging for money.  I shall have my own funds."

Pete laughed.  It sounded a trifle forced.  "Yes.  But, Hennie, you
know, a farmer does not always have the cash."

"He can if he sees to it.  You are buying a threshing outfit.  No
doubt you have promised definite yearly payments.  Well, I ask you
to promise me three hundred dollars a year, the money to be mine,
never to be asked for, never to be enquired about, how it is spent
and what for.  Put it aside in the fall, when you thresh."

Pete brooded.  "Hennie," he said, "all this somehow does not seem
quite right.  Marriage is a partnership."

"Marriage," Henrietta objected, "is mostly slavery."

"I'd promise almost anything--seeing you so near--within my grasp.
The farm is almost bound to be a success."

She leaned back, supporting herself on one hand, and smiled up at
him.  Her face was flushed.  The hard red of her cheeks was lost in
that suffusion.  "Pete, if you want me to, I'll go down with you
into that hollow . . ."

"Come," he cried, his huge body shaken as by an earthquake.  "Have
it your way.  As for the car, I'll pay for it out of the wood I saw
in winter."

Half hidden by the snowberry brush which grew densely in the draw,
she lay in his arms; and kisses rained down on her face, hard,
eager kisses; and great, calloused hands played havoc with her
hair, so that it came undone, falling about her head and shoulders.

"Pete," she whispered, "Pete!"

She looked almost pretty in her disarray; and he, flushed and
victorious, looked almost handsome to her suddenly enamoured eyes;
he was strong and manly.

"Pete," she cried, "am I an old maid?"

"A maid," he said brusquely.  "But old?  Who says so?"

An hour went by; the sun was sinking to the west.

On top of the hill a slim figure appeared, spying curiously down
into the hollow.

"Pete!" Henrietta sprang up in dismay.  "That fellow sees us."

"Let him!" Pete laughed.  "Let the world see us!"

"Listen," she said as they went to the road.  "We'll drive back to
within half a mile of home.  Then I get out and walk.  It's time to
get supper.  You turn west this side of John's.  Go to his shack
across the field.  When I ring the gong, you come over with John.
I won't say a word.  We'll surprise them."

"Sure," he agreed.  "Anything you say."

The driver received them with an open grin.  "The two kids came
by," he said to Henrietta.  "Your brothers, miss.  They crawled all
over and under the car and asked all kinds of questions."

"You did not tell them, I hope?"

"You bet I didn't."



Henrietta entered the kitchen and, ignoring her mother's astonished
and questioning look, at once proceeded with the preparations for
supper.

Cathleen and Mr. Ormond were in the small "music room" which was
accessible only from the dining room and which owed its name to the
fact that it held an organ.

A few minutes after Henrietta's return, Isabel burst into the
kitchen and stood arrested.

"Where have you been all this while?" she asked, less reluctant to
plunge into words than her mother.

"I?" Henrietta replied frigidly.  "Out for a walk."

"Whereto?"

"Over the hills."

"Who was that stranger in the car?"

"None of your concern," Henrietta said; but, catching her mother's
reproachful look, she added tantalisingly, "All things come to him
who waits."

While, in the half-dusk of the kitchen from which the steep slope
of the hill-side excluded much light, the preparations for supper
went on, John Elliot senior was seen to appear in the yard, leading
his six-horse team.  He had been disking his summer-fallow on the
preemption, east of the homestead.

At the barn, Norman joined him shortly to take the horses from him
and to lead them down to the well at the deepest point of the
hollow between the two farms.

Then Mr. Ormond was seen to stride over and to greet him
pleasantly.  The guest was dressed in a pair of light-grey
trousers, well fitting, sharply creased; his upper body was
coatless; his white, blue-striped shirt as always immaculate.  On
his square, heavy head a sailor hat was tilted at an angle.

John Elliot, grey, dusty from the field, sat down on the tongue of
a wagon where his guest joined him.  The two conversed.

When Norman returned with the horses, John Elliot rose and gave him
a few instructions, pointing.  The boy proceeded to undo the lines.
The two men came to the house.

Contrary to his custom, John Elliot went to the front; a moment
later he looked through the door which connected kitchen and dining
room, nodding to his wife who still sat on the chair in the corner.

"Martha," he said and offered his arm.

The door closed behind them.

"I believe," Isabel whispered, "he is going to ask them."

"Very likely."  Henrietta was unconcerned.

Feeling repulsed, Isabel could not deny herself the satisfaction of
what, in the family jargon, was known as a "dig."  "There will be
two weddings from this house in fall," she said.

"No.  There will be three, at least."

Isabel looked up.

"Provided," Henrietta went on, "that, against the wish of your
family, you marry the blacksmith."

That silenced Isabel.

It was her usual task to set the table.  But, when she prepared to
do so, Henrietta, who was lighting a lamp, turned and said, "You
watch the potatoes.  Slice that ham.  When you hear the first gong,
break these eggs into the pan.  I am going to set the table
myself."

"All right," Isabel drawled as if she were not hurt in the least.
"You are the doctor."

Henrietta went into the dining room, taking note of the fact that
the door to the music room was closed.  Her parents were closeted
with Cathleen and Mr. Ormond.

She pulled the extension table out to its full length, spread the
cloth, and laid it for eleven.



The first gong had sounded.

John Elliot went into the kitchen to wash; Cathleen and Mr. Ormond
slipped upstairs.  Henry, Norman, and Arthur filed into the dining
room.  Mrs. Elliot was still sitting in the music room, solemnity
on her pain-drawn face.

Henrietta entered, carrying a platter heaped with date-filled
biscuits.

"Arthur," she said to her youngest brother, "I want you for once to
behave and not to be greedy.  Don't you dare to take any cookies
unless I give you one."

Arthur grinned and looked at Norman who, unable to suppress his
vitality, was humming a tune and dancing a jig.

"John isn't here yet?"

"No," Norman said.  "I'll get him, shall I?"  And with exaggerated
obsequence he jumped toward the door.

"You stay where you are!" Henrietta commanded.

The second gong was sounded.

The dining room filled.  Cathleen came on Mr. Ormond's arm.  John
Elliot took his place behind the chair at the upper end of the
table; his wife, hers at the lower end.  Henrietta assumed command
and assigned a seat to each of the others.  Three seats remained
vacant; she took the central one.

"Who set the table?" Mrs. Elliot asked.

"I," Henrietta replied casually.  "We won't wait for John."

"There is one cover to spare."

"John is bringing a friend."

John Elliot cleared his throat.  All voices ceased while he asked
the blessing.  Then he reached for the Bible and read a passage
from Mark iv.  Chairs scraped over the floor; and all sat down.

During the momentary confusion which followed, John's entrance
escaped observation.  Behind him, Pete's tall figure loomed, half
lost in shadows.

"Hello," John said.  "I don't know whether this gentleman is known
to the company?"

All heads turned.  Pete bowed awkwardly.

Nobody except Henrietta had seen him within ten years.  The younger
generation of the Elliot children had never known him except by
sight.  The light of the lamp hanging over the centre of the table
gave his embarrassed smile and crooked nose something almost
Satanic.

Again Henrietta took command.  One would have thought that she was
angry when she attended to the formalities of introduction.

"Certainly, Pete," John Elliot said.  "I remember you perfectly.
How are the parents?"

"Pete Harrington of the Arkwright Harringtons?" Mrs. Elliot asked,
shaking hands.

The girls and the two youngest boys bowed.  Henry stared.  But Mr.
Ormond, with a quick look from man to girl, extended his hand and
shook that of the new guest with hearty pressure.

"You sit here, Pete."  Henrietta drew out the chair at her left.

Isabel, bending forward, sought Cathleen's eye with a significant
wink.

Then the meat was passed, relieving the tension.  Mrs. Elliot,
further to put Pete and Henrietta at ease--she divined what had
happened--addressed a question to the young man; and small talk
started.

Henrietta, satisfied with the sensation she had caused, ruled the
table, keeping an eye on the boys.

At last Isabel rose to fetch the tea.  The conversation broke up
into smaller groups.  Cake and biscuits were passed around.

Arthur, horror in his eye, followed the platters on their circuit.
He was inordinately fond of date biscuits; but so, it seemed, was
everybody else; they dwindled; he squirmed in his seat.  At last,
when the platter reached Henrietta, he could not contain himself.

"Hennie," he cried, a dead silence falling around the table, "a
cookie, quick!  Before they're all gone."

Henrietta's look was charged to annihilate.  But, fortunately for
the boy, Mr. Ormond grasped the meaning of the situation and burst
out laughing.

That laughter enlightened the rest; and, John Elliot senior joining
in it, it became general.

Arthur laughed more boisterously than any one else, casting a
grateful look on Mr. Ormond who bent over and whispered to him,
"You better clear out after supper, young man; or you'll get it!"

When the company settled down to the dessert, John Elliot senior
cleared his throat once more and tinkled his spoon gently against
the rim of his cup.

Silence fell.

"My dear children," he said, "there will perhaps not be many meals
at which such a number of you will assemble around this board.
Another one of your sisters is going to leave us and to follow her
chosen husband.  I ask you all to welcome Woodrow Ormond as a
brother-in-law.  He and Cathleen are to be married before the end
of the month of August."

Another silence.  Then, with a renewed scraping of chairs over the
floor, everybody rose, glass in hand, to file past the couple and
to congratulate.

Henrietta frowned.  She was thinking fast.  Her mother was failing.
Should Isabel be the next to announce her betrothal, the odium of
leaving that mother of theirs alone would fall on her.  She threw
Pete a quick look and took his arm.

"This," she said, dominating the standing assembly into attention,
"is very irregular.  Father and mother, I must ask your forgiveness.
Pete and I have at last made up our minds.  We, too, ask for your
blessing.  Harvest is coming.  We cannot lose time.  Let that
excuse us."

She had succeeded in centering attention on herself.

Mrs. Elliot sat down, tears in her eyes.  Her heart's desire was
fulfilled.  Henrietta, the tragic one of her children . . .

"Come here, my child," she said.

Her sight filled Henrietta with remorse.  She had been intent only
on breaking what appeared to her as the insolence of her sisters.
With a few quick steps, drawing Pete along, she arrived in front of
the mother whom perhaps she had wounded and who sat there, taking
quick breaths and white as a sheet.

"Mother," she whispered, "I am sorry."

"No," Mrs. Elliot whispered back as she bent over her kneeling
child and stroked her hair, "it is joy!  I had been worried about
you for years.  Pete," she added, "look after her, will you?  She
needs it."

"Well-l-l," John junior trumpeted, "ladies and gentlemen, how would
it be if we resumed the interrupted procession?  I am reliably
informed, by the way, that there will be another such party
shortly."  And he pinched Isabel's arm.

"John!" she whispered, "that is not fair!  There is nobody left to
get married but me!"

"What?" he whispered back.  "Do only girls marry?"

John Elliot found his way to the side of his wife; and while all
others clinked glasses, Norman and Arthur slipped out of the room,
unobserved.



"Let's celebrate, too," Norman whispered.

"How?" Arthur asked.

"The cellar!"

They left the house through the front door.  Arthur took his stand
at the cellar window on the north side.  Norman quickly and
furtively reentered the house through the kitchen, picked up a
small pail which he filled with water and a second one, empty, and
tiptoed down the cellar steps.

There, he unscrewed two sealers filled with strawberry preserves,
poured the syrup into the empty pail, replaced it with water from
the other, and handed both through the window to his accomplice.

Then, listening at the cellar door, he slipped out again, with the
agility of a cat, and joined his brother.  They retired to the
barn.

Arthur was first to have a taste of the stolen goods.

He curled his lips in disgust--a gesture lost on his brother in the
darkness.  But his exclamation was not.  "Ex!"

"What's the matter?"

"Thin!"

"Eh?"

"Thin.  I'll tell what you've done.  You've got hold of a jar that
had been emptied already!"

"Gosh!" Norman groaned.  "That may be.  It was dark."



At the house, Mrs. Elliot retired to her room.

John Elliot senior followed her.  "Anything we can do?"

"No.  I need rest, that is all.  But, John . . ."

"Yes?"

"I want Gladys!"

"I'll go for her in the morning."

"Yes."  She sank back on her bed.  "And, John!  Ask the children to
sing."

"I will.  You are sure there is nothing . . ."

"Nothing.  I want to lie down.  But I should like so much to hear
them sing."

Without a further word John Elliot returned downstairs.  He called
his son John and took him aside.

A few minutes later John junior had reassembled the family in the
dining room and was handing out hymn books.

They arranged themselves into two groups, the three girls in one,
the men and the boys in the other.  Henry sat apathetic in a chair
between the two.  John Elliot senior stood in the recess of the
huge bay window at the south end of the room.

And, clear as crystal, their voices rang through the house as they
sang their mother's favourite hymn, "Nearer, my God, to thee."



In the eye of the man at the threshold of old age who stood,
unobserved, behind the curtains of the window trembled a tear.
Never before had he felt so much of that dependence on a being
outside of himself as now when he viewed in his mind the contrast
of the youth that was singing here and the lonely woman who lay
upstairs, composing herself to leave this earthly scene.  In the
strains of the hymn doubt seemed to dissolve; and certainty seemed
to descend from above.  If only he could hold on to that certainty,
never to let go of it again!  And yet, in town, there lived another
girl, once part of this group, now divided from them by a gulf.
And on a farm, some twenty miles north, there lived another.  Would
these, also, be divided ere long?  Two more were going out on paths
of their own.  What was in store for them?  Perhaps it was good
that the woman upstairs was not going to view the things that were
coming?  But he?



CHAPTER IV

GLADYS COMES HOME


Next morning, Saturday, John Elliot senior went over to his son's
place at an early hour before breakfast.  Mrs. Elliot had announced
a wish to remain in bed.  Nobody else had stirred as yet in the
house.

He found John at the stable feeding his horses.  Norman, whose task
it was to feed those of his father, was washing in front of the
shack, sleepy, yawning, shivering in the dawn of the day.

John, carrying a huge forkful of slough-hay, stopped and greeted.
Then he asked, "Anything you want?"

"Yes.  Are you going to use your democrat?  I promised your mother
to fetch Gladys over."

"Sure.  Anything wrong?"

"Well, your mother, you know."

"Yes.  Want the bronchos?"

"No.  I'll take my own drivers."

"Slow work," John junior said.  "As for the democrat, of course.
I'll go if you want me to."

"No, you need your time.  The summerfallow . . ."

"The summerfallow be hanged!  But, just as you say.  By the way."
And he dropped the hay to the ground and leaned on the handle of
the fork.

His father frowned.  John junior knew the reason well.  The older
man would not have dropped the hay.  Hay was scarce; some of it
would be wasted.  There was friction, unexpressed, between the two
about such trifles.

"Well?"

"Yea," John drawled absent-mindedly, hitching the suspenders of his
overalls up on his shoulders.  "I'll tell you.  I, too, intend to
get married."

"Eh?"  His father drew his eyebrows up.  "To whom?"

"Girl in town," John answered lightly.  "Miss Lillian Flaws,
daughter of a Presbyterian parson, stenographer in Howden's office.
I was going to fetch her up to-morrow.  I wonder, had I better
wait?"

His father mused.  "I don't know.  I don't know."

John felt uncomfortable.  To escape the feeling, he went on,
"You're aware, of course, that Isabel . . ."

"Yes," his father said quickly, "the blacksmith's son."

"What's it matter?" John exclaimed.  "What's it matter?  Ken's a
decent sort, I believe.  Not much education, I know.  But neither
have I.  It don't make me unhappy."

"We shall see," his father said curtly.  He looked through his
son's artifice.  They were all allied.

"There might be four weddings from the house in fall."

"Well, tell Norman about the democrat."

"I'll hitch up myself," John junior said, gathering the hay.
"Dolly and Prince, I suppose?"

"Yes."  John Elliot turned away.

Having taken an early breakfast prepared by Isabel, John Elliot sat
on the driver's seat of the democrat which was drawn by two old
horses.

Four weddings from the house this fall!

As for Isabel, her sisters and brothers had done all that could be
done to dissuade her from the match.  He could only shrug his
shoulders.  His children were growing beyond his control.

His view of the family was patriarchal.  He had a feeling that his
sons and daughters-in-law should be picked by himself.  Out of six
he had picked a single one: by giving him, ten years ago,
unrestricted access to his house: Fred Sately.  He thought of the
fact that his wife had half objected to him on the ground that he
was lacking in worldly ambition.  In that point at least Fred
Sately had surprised them all.  It was not ambition he was lacking
in.  If anything, he had too much of it.  The others had picked for
themselves.  If things went wrong, it was not he who was to blame.

Pete Harrington, yes, he was a man after his heart: a worker, with
one aim: to stand on his land as his own master.  Yet he had found
out last night that even he was in debt, paying off small sums each
year on land and equipment.  He, John Elliot, had never been in
debt.  Assume a debt, and you are a slave.  Your creditor owns, not
only part of your tools and your crops, but part of your labour and
time, part of yourself!

Woodrow Ormond, a sensible man, mature beyond his years!  But
unanchored in the soil.

During the last ten years, more than ever before--perhaps through
his reaction to the career of Fred Sately--John Elliot had come to
view all occupations except that of the farmer with suspicion.  A
granary full of grain; a barn full of stock, with a loft lined with
fodder, sheaves or hay: such was his idea of wealth.  He had never,
of late, sold his crop in the fall.  He sold half of it during the
winter, half of the remainder in summer; and the balance only after
the next crop was garnered.  Ormond might have money; his salary
amounted to three thousand dollars a year; and his salary was only
part of his income.  Yet a mere money income seemed very insecure
to John Elliot; and he respected only one thing on earth: security;
for he had only one ideal; and that ideal was a large family.

He had had many a talk about these things with his son John.  When
John, against his protest, had filed on his homestead, his father
had offered to loan him the horses and implements with which to
work his land.  John had declined and had bought what he needed.
He was for ever driving about the country, in winter and on rainy
days, hunting for opportunities to trade.  Not one of his horses
remained in his barn for a year.  Before it had had time to get
used to him as its master, he traded it off.  His father could not
deny that John showed judgment and skill in trading.  He boasted
that one day, when his father had done no more than disked twenty
acres, he had made four hundred dollars clear profit by skilful
deals.  But in trading luck changes.  John Elliot senior believed
in raising his horses and keeping them on the farm.  Just as,
having once located on a piece of land, he would never sell it.
The trouble was, the young generation would not listen.

Many said that in this district of Saskatchewan nobody could make a
living on the farm.  People moved in and out.  Even John spoke of
the possibility of leaving the neighbourhood.

In anger John Elliot senior had refused to listen to such talk.
"Of course," he had said, "you can't fool the land.  No matter
where you are, you have to study your soil.  Summerfallow gets the
rains of two seasons and holds them.  Whenever you seed a crop,
seed a fallow.  Stubble yields one year and dries out the next.
If you know it, why do you seed it?  It's a gamble, no more."

"Yea," John junior had drawled in reply.  "But I like to gamble.
If I win, the winnings are big.  If I lose, I have credit to carry
me.  What we need, is a boom.  In a boom I'd sell out."

"And buy in the boom as well!  Assume a debt when money is cheap
and pay back when money is dear!  A disastrous business!  Whoever
tries to beat the game in a boom, gives the devil a hold on his
shoulder!"

From these memories--as John Elliot drove through the still
sleeping town of Sedgeby, across the track, west of the seven
elevators, and north again, over now more level land, his mind
turned to other things.  He thought of his household and of the
principles guiding him and his wife in its management.  They bought
nothing but what could not be raised on the farm.  Yet, if at any
time twenty guests had arrived at his place, they would have been
fed without a flurry: no need to have the store around the corner!
In his house there was plenty.  Yet he owned a few good, safe
bonds; and he had a margin of cash in the bank.

John often went to the nearby little city; but never without buying
all sorts of knick-knacks: collars and ties for himself; shawls and
ribbons for the girls; a few tins of lobster or shrimps for the
table.  John had always money in his pocket; but it did not stay
there long.  What did John need three, four suits of clothes for,
at forty, fifty dollars each?  He, John Elliot, had one Sunday
suit, of black broadcloth, for which he had paid forty dollars
fifteen years ago.  Apart from that he had his grey everyday suits
at twenty-five dollars; they lasted him two or three years.
Clothes!  A man like Ormond might need them: his appearance
probably was an element of his success; and he was in a position to
take care of them.  But a farmer?  A farmer could afford to look
down on those who needed to groom themselves.

And Frank, Gladys' husband!  A quiet, unassuming man he had seemed
to be!  But he had a mortgage on his place now, a thousand dollars!
And he owed money besides.  It was well known in the family that
Gladys and he were none too happy together.  Gladys, once a plump,
gay little girl, had become thin and sharp-featured.  Repeatedly
Frank had come to his father-in-law for help and had received it.
Yet John Elliot had scruples about giving such help.  He thought of
the time when he would be no more.  If his children did not learn
to make their daily bread while he lived, what would happen after
his death?  Death came on apace.

John Elliot had told Frank that he was drifting toward tenancy.
But Frank had not heeded the warning.  Hence a coolness had arisen
between the two families.  Gladys had no longer come home as she
had used to do for weeks at a stretch in the past.

John Elliot did not like his present task of asking her to come.
But his wife was ill, mysteriously ill.  Every whim of hers had to
be indulged.

He drove on, quiet, grey, nodding here and there to a farmer in a
field.

What was wrong with the younger generation?  They were "high-
fliers."  They looked to the externals and wanted to outdo each
other in expense.  Distinction?  Was distinction gained by
outspending others?  Distinction consisted in minding one's
business and never spending beyond one's means!

For more than two hours he drove north, between stretches of flat,
treeless, wild prairie and occasional fenced and tilled fields.

Then, in a seemingly greener flat, far ahead, within view of the
bush fringe skirting the South Saskatchewan River, low, scattered
buildings came in sight: the homestead where Frank and Gladys
lived.

As he approached, he scanned the field, looking for Frank whom he
discovered at last, plowing north of the yard.  He drove past the
farmstead and, having caught up with the plowman, drew his horses
in.

Frank Bramley was at the far end of his fallow and turned.  He did
not hurry as he caught sight of his early caller.  John Elliot
watched him as he approached.

Frank was of medium height, slender, though wiry.  His head was
narrow, as if compressed from both sides.  The features of his face
were finely cut, thin, expressive; his eyes, protected by large,
horn-rimmed spectacles of smoked glass.  He was thirty-two years
old; but his hair was as grey as his father-in-law's.

While he watched, John Elliot's thought was busy.  He tried to find
a word which would characterise the peculiar quality of Frank's
appearance.  The movements of the man were slow; even his voice,
when he called to the horses, was slow; the very step of the beasts
seemed to be influenced by that voice.

John Elliot jerked his head.  As always, he was sitting bolt-
upright on his seat without touching its back with his shoulder-
blades.  His lips moved, soundlessly forming the shell of a word.
"Dispirited!" his mind said through that motion of the lips.  "Like
everything else about the place."

Frank recognised him and flashed a smile which showed gold-filled
teeth.  Down to that wan flash of gold John Elliot disliked what he
saw.

Then, morosely, he nodded in answer.

A moment later Frank stopped his horses, dismounted, and came
across the margin of the field.

"Summerfallow?" John Elliot asked.

"Yes," Frank said, feeling the irony.  "A bit late, is it?"

"Hardly worth while.  You turn what little moisture there is to the
air.  That needs to be done before the rains.  Well . . ."

A far-away look came into the other's eyes, obliterating the smile.
For a moment the two men, both grey, but one of them young, the
other past middle age, looked at each other with hardly veiled
antagonism.

"I came for Gladys," John Elliot said.  "Her mother asked for her;
she is not well."

"Nothing serious, I hope?"

"Serious?" John Elliot repeated with a touch of contempt.
"Serious?  No.  It is only the beginning of the end."

The other's jaw dropped.  He straightened himself with a shudder.
"All right.  Better go to the house.  Tell her to send Norah to the
field.  She'll have to take the baby.  It'll be for a few days
only?  All right."

John Elliot nodded.  "Can I go along the fence?"

"Yes.  It's rough.  But it's dry.  Dry as the field."

"How's the crop?"

"There is none.  I'll cut with the mower, for feed."



John Elliot turned into the yard, looking disapprovingly, as he had
so often done, at the single-boarded stable full of knot-holes; at
the doorless out-building leaning at a dangerous angle; and at the
shed-like shack which served for a dwelling.  The buildings were
unpainted, weather-beaten, grey.  What with the dry, parched
prairie all about and no other farmstead in sight, it was the
picture of desolation.  Yet, from a distance, the flat had looked
greener than the desert-like stretch north of town: there had been
rain here when the rest of the district had gone entirely without
it.

He tied his horses to a fence-post.

As he stood on the door-slab, he heard a crooning voice inside.
Then he knocked.

The door opened; and a thin little woman stood on the threshold,
clad in a pink-striped gingham dress.  She, too, looked dispirited,
in spite of her neat tidiness and the remains of beauty in her
face.

"It's you, father, is it?" she said without a smile.  "Come in.
How is mother?"

"Mother's failing.  That's what I come for.  She wants you."

He had entered.  The inside of the shack showed a marked contrast
to its outside.  In the kitchen stood a good cooking range; above
it, shining tin vessels hung on the wall.  A huge dining table was
covered with a centre-piece of crochet and drawn-work.  Snow-white,
starched muslin curtains clothed the windows.  In the adjoining
bed-room, the door standing open, the available space was crowded
with furniture: a wide bed; a second one, narrower; a crib; a
dresser; a wash-stand; a library table; and several shelves running
along the wall.  Whatever offered a level surface, was hidden under
white scarfs of painstakingly executed fancy-work.  It looked quite
cheering.

But, as John Elliot nodded to the dark and serious-eyed girl of
eight or nine, large for her age, his dejected mood returned.  He
looked about for the boy, a little over a year old, and discovered
him sitting on the floor and staring at him.  Ah, these were no
children!

"Well," Gladys said, "I suppose Frank can bach it for a day or so."

"I spoke to him.  He says to send Norah to the field and to take
the baby."

"All right.  You stay for dinner?"

"No," he said brusquely.  "I want to get home."

Gladys did not reply.  Her father was her father.  She had never
yet contradicted him and was not going to do so now.  He knew what
he wanted.  She attended in haste to what had to be attended to
before leaving.

"Norah," she said to the girl, "you tell your daddy the soup is in
the range.  All he needs to do is light the fire and heat it.
There is bread in the big crock in the cellar.  A good thing I
baked yesterday.  There is some ham left.  Be a good girl.  Now
kiss me and go."

All this was said without a smile, with a wistful look of the eyes.

The girl complied in the same, quiet way.  "Good-by, grandfather,"
she curtsied and ran off.



The democrat was rolling south.  Neither father nor daughter spoke.
But the young woman, holding her baby on her knees, sat up whenever
they passed a tilled field--which happened every three or four
miles.

At last she said, "No crop anywhere!"

"I have a crop," her father replied briefly.

When they had crossed the track and rounded the elevators of the
town, passing along Main Street where everybody greeted him, he
scanned the stores and houses to the right till he came to a small
building which bore a large sign, "A. R. Howden, Real Estate,
Insurance, Farm Loans."  He drew his horses in.

"I'll be back in a moment."

A young lady received him, prim, superficially pretty.  Her whole
appearance, with its lack of lasting qualities, "went against his
grain."

"Miss Flaws?" he asked.

"That is my name," she said with an affected smile.

"Ah!" John Elliot said sharply, with a jerk of his head.  "I want
to speak to Mr. Howden."

Mr. Howden, big, suave, ponderous, appeared in the door of his
private office.

"Just what," John Elliot asked, "is standing against Mr. Sately's
farm on section eight?"  That served as a pretext for having a look
at Miss Flaws.

"Two thousand; that is, the principal debt."  Mr. Howden was glad
to see Mr. Elliot taking an interest.

John Elliot nodded.  "I know the rest," he said briefly.  "Charges
unpaid for three years."

"Four," Mr. Howden corrected.

"Thank you.  That's all I wanted.  There will be a meeting on
Tuesday."

"So I hear.  So I hear."  And Mr. Howden bowed his caller out.



Half an hour later the democrat topped the last hill: the view
opened up on the farms in the hollow beyond.  An exclamation
escaped the young woman.

"How do you do it?" she asked.

His look followed hers.  "Summerfallow," he said.  The green field
ahead stood in striking contrast to John junior's parched and
yellow acres.  "Fallowed in June."

The young woman nodded.  "That's what I keep telling Frank."

"I noticed his oats.  When was that seeded?"

"Oh!" Gladys cried despondently.  "Frank is slow, slow!  On the
last of June."

"When he should have finished his fallow."

"But, father!" she felt impelled to defend the man whom she had
chosen before all others.  "So many of them say the late-sown crops
do best."

"Fools!" he replied angrily.  "We get the early and the late rains.
Build conclusions on one year's chance conditions!  Get your seed
in before the last snow flies if you can."

"But the fallow . . .  Did your fallow get rain this year?"

"No."  His voice was stubborn.  "Unless we have a wet summer next
year, I won't have a crop either.  I can stand it.  It will be the
first failure in eleven years."

Gladys sighed.

"Mother has a garden even!" she said as the vehicle rolled down
into the valley.

"We've carried water for weeks," he answered ruthlessly.



At the house, Gladys seemed bewildered by the presence of the two
strangers though Pete was not altogether strange to her.  Cathleen
who had always liked her best of her older sisters noticed with
surprise how awkward and bashful she was during the introductions.

Henrietta came noisily forward.  "Mother's upstairs, Gladys.  I'll
take charge of the baby.  Come, baby, you'll stay with auntie,
won't you?  Sure, you will."

Gladys escaped upstairs, into the room where her mother lay on her
bed, dressed but dishevelled.  To Gladys' wistful eyes she looked
enormous and swollen.

The two women between whom there was only nineteen years'
difference in age lay mutely in each other's arms.  To the mother,
her oldest child was a reminder of the past: when Gladys was born,
Mrs. Elliot had been a young girl herself; though, of all the
children, Gladys resembled her father most, she was, to the mother,
an embodiment of her own carefree youth.

They remained together for no more than a quarter of an hour; few
words were exchanged between them; yet worlds of meaning and
comprehension were conveyed.

"No, mother," Gladys said, "you stay right here.  To-morrow is
Sunday; then you come down in the afternoon; not to-day.  There is
no need."

Mrs. Elliot heaved a sigh of contentment.  "I am so glad to have
you here!"  And, drawing her close, "Gladys, I know it is a sin.  I
can't help it.  The rest . . .  They are all my children.  But I
must tell you.  They are strangers."

"I know, mother.  I know.  And so, at heart, is father."

Mrs. Elliot looked frightened.  "How can you tell?"

"Never mind, mother.  He's a man.  We'll be alone this afternoon.
Don't worry.  I'll go down and look after things.  Just as if you
were there yourself.  Lie still."

For an hour or so Gladys was slipping through the house, like a
ghost, intruding nowhere, yet omnipresent.

In the kitchen, Isabel was depositing two sealers filled with
strawberry preserves.  Gladys picked one of them up and held it
against the light.

"Spoiled," she said as she put it down.

"Spoiled?" Henrietta exclaimed indignantly.  "Spoiled nothing!
I put them up myself!"

Gladys unscrewed the top.  "Taste," she said, having smelt the
contents.  "There is water on it instead of syrup."

"Well," Henrietta shouted.  "I'll be . . ."

"Sh!" Gladys nodded to the ceiling.  "Mother!"  Then, after a
moment's pause.  "Watch the boys, Norman and Arthur.  They've
poured the syrup off.  John used to do that.  Don't let them get
into the cellar."

"What?" Henrietta said intensely.  "Let me catch the scamps!  I'll
show them where they get off!"

Gladys had already turned into the dining room; dense clouds of
smoke issued from the music room where Mr. Ormond and Pete sat in
discussion.  Her father hated smoke.  She slipped to the door and
closed it.

"I'll tell you, Pete," Mr. Ormond's voice was saying.  "Credit is
the forerunner of tenancy every time.  Crop-payment purchase leads
to a state of things resembling feudal tenure."

"It's the devil!" Pete's bass replied.  "But what are we to do?"

"That," Woodrow said, "is beyond my jurisdiction.  I investigate
facts and conditions.  I enunciate laws; and there the domain of
science ends."

"Then," Pete objected, "science is barren."

"Perhaps.  I might say--not as an economist but as a private
citizen--that what has built the east of this country is plain
living and high thinking; we are trying to build the west by high
living and plain thinking."

Gladys turned away.  From a window she saw John going from his well
to the shack.  She slipped through the front door.

In the yard, Cathleen was picking flowers for the table.

Gladys stopped.  "I like him," she said.

Cathleen looked up into her sister's worried face.  "He's a
scholar.  They say he is a coming man.  What do you think of
mother?"

Gladys raised her hands in an expressive gesture.  "Get this
excitement done with as soon as you can!"

"It's Mary.  That's what has upset her so!"

"Perhaps.  I am going to John's."



"Hello!" John greeted her, stopping in front of his shack and
smiling broadly.

"Aren't you disking?"

"Henry is, sure.  You didn't think I worked myself?"

"Well, you try to make out you aren't."

"How's mother?"

Gladys replied by the same gesture with which she had answered
Cathleen's question.

John's face darkened.  "Say, sis," he asked gloomily.  "You don't
know.  I'm going to get married.  I was going to fetch my girl over
to-morrow."

"Who's she?"

"Miss Flaws.  From Howden's office in town."

"Oh!" Gladys said.  "That is why father went in!"

"Did he?" John whistled through his teeth.  "What do you advise?
Better wait?"

Gladys considered the case.  "No.  I don't think so.  Get it over
with while I am here.  It seems they all get married.  How about
Isabel?"

"Sure.  As far as I know, Ken is going to see the old man to-day."

"Four weddings," Gladys said.  "Well, get it over with.  I'll go
back to the house."

"All right, old girl."

As Gladys turned away, she shrugged her shoulders as at so much
tomfoolery and trifling.



CHAPTER V

JOHN ELLIOT BUYS LAND


In the private office of the president of Farmers Limited tension
was in the air.  The atmosphere was not what Fred Sately had hoped
for.

Of the dire