Masters of the Wheat-Lands Part 19

"I don't know," answered Mrs. Hastings; "perhaps it's Harry's idea of having everything proportionate. The Range is quite a big, and generally a prosperous, farm. Besides, it's likely that he doesn't contemplate remaining a bachelor forever. Indeed, Allen and I sometimes wonder how he has escaped marriage for so long."

"Is 'escaped' the right word?" Agatha asked.

"It is," a.s.serted Mrs. Hastings with a laugh. "You see, he's highly eligible from our point of view, but at the same time he's apparently invulnerable. I believe," she added dryly, "that's the right word, too."

The Swedish housekeeper appeared again and they talked with her until she went to bring in the six o'clock supper. Soon after the table was laid Wyllard and the men came in. Wyllard was attired as when Agatha had last seen him, except that he had put on a coat. He led his guests to the head of the long table, but the men--there were a number of them--sat below, and evidently had no diffidence about addressing question or comment to their employer.

The men ate with a voracious haste, but that appeared to be the custom of the country, and Agatha could find no great fault with their manners or conversation. The talk was, for the most part, quaintly witty, and some of the men used what struck her as remarkably fitting and original similes. Indeed, as the meal proceeded, she became curiously interested.

The windows were open wide, and a sweet, warm air swept into the barely furnished room. The s.p.a.ciousness of the room impressed her, and she was pleased with the evident unity of these brown-faced, strong-armed toilers with their leader. At the head of the table he sat, self-contained, but courteous and responsive to all alike, and though they were in an essentially democratic country, she felt that there was something almost feudal in the relations between him and his men. She could not imagine them to be confined to the mere exaction of so much labor and the expectation of payment of wages due. She was pleased that he had not changed his clothing.

So strong was Agatha's interest that she was surprised when the meal was finished. Afterward, she and Mrs. Hastings talked with the housekeeper for a while, and an hour had slipped away when Wyllard suggested that he should show her the slough beyond the bluff.

"It's the nearest approach to a lake we have until you get to the alkali tract," he said.

Agatha went with him through the shadow of the wood, and when they came out among the trees he found her a seat upon a fallen birch. The house and plowing were hidden now, and they were alone on the slope to a slight hollow, in which half a mile of gleaming water lay. Its surface was broken here and there by tussocks of gra.s.s and reeds, and beyond it the prairie ran back unbroken, a dim gray waste, to the horizon. The sun had dipped behind the bluff, and the sky had become a vast green transparency. There was no wind now, but a wonderful exhilarating freshness crept into the cooling air, and the stillness was broken only by the clamor of startled wildfowl which Agatha could see paddling in cl.u.s.ters about the gleaming slough.

"Those are ducks--wild ones?" she asked.

"Yes," answered Wyllard; "ducks of various kinds. Most of them the same as your English ones."

"Do you shoot them?"

Agatha was not greatly interested, but he seemed disposed to silence, and she felt, for no very clear reason, that it was advisable to talk of something.

"No," he said, "not often, anyway. If Mrs. Nansen wants a couple I crawl down to the long gra.s.s with the rifle and get them for her."

"The rifle? Doesn't the big bullet destroy them?"

"No," returned Wyllard. "You have to shoot their head off or cut their neck in two."

"You can do that--when they're right out in the slough?" asked Agatha, who had learned that it is much more difficult to shoot with a rifle than a shotgun, which spreads its charge.

Wyllard smiled. "Generally; that is, if I haven't been doing much just before. It depends upon one's hands. We have our game laws, but as a rule n.o.body worries about them, and, anyway, those birds won't nest until they reach the tundra by the Polar Sea. Still, as I said, we never shoot them unless Mrs. Nansen wants one or two for the pot."

"Why?"

"I don't quite know. For one thing, they're worn out; they just stop here to rest."

His answer appealed to the girl. It did not seem strange to her that the love of the lower creation should be strong in this man, who had no hesitation in admitting that the game laws were no restraint to him.

When these Lesser Brethren, worn with their journey, sailed down out of the blue heavens, he believed in giving them right of sanctuary.

"They have come a long way?" she asked.

Wyllard pointed towards the south. "From Florida, Cuba, Yucatan; further than that, perhaps. In a day or two they'll push on again toward the Pole, and others will take their places. There's a further detachment arriving now."

Looking up, Agatha saw a straggling wedge of birds dotted in dusky specks against the vault of transcendental blue. The wedge coalesced, drew out again, and dropped swiftly, and the air was filled with the rush of wings; then there was a harsh crying and splashing, and she heard the troubled water lap among the reeds until deep silence closed in upon the slough again.

"The migrating instinct is strangely interesting," she said.

A curious look crept into Wyllard's eyes.

"It gives the poor birds a sad destiny, I think; they're wanderers and strangers without a habitation; there's unrest in them. After a few months on the tundra mosses to gather strength and teach the young to fly, they'll unfold their wings to beat another pa.s.sage before the icy gales. Some of us, I think, are like them!"

Agatha could not avoid the personal application.

"You surely don't apply that to yourself," she said. "You certainly have a habitation--the finest, isn't it, on this part of the prairie?"

"Yes," answered Wyllard slowly; "I suppose it is. I've now had a little rest and quietness too."

His last remark did not appear to call for an answer, and Agatha sat silent.

"Still," he went on reflectively, "I have a feeling that some day the call will come, and I shall have to take the trail again." He paused, and looked at her before he added, "It would be easier if one hadn't to go alone, or, since that would be necessary, if one had at least something to come back to when the journey was done."

"Must you heed the call?" asked Agatha, who was puzzled by his steady gaze.

"Yes," he said with gravity, "the call will come from the icy North if it ever comes at all."

There was another brief silence. Agatha wondered what he was thinking of, but he soon told her.

"I remember how I came back from there last time," he said. "We were rather late that season, and out of our usual beat when the gale broke upon us in the gateway of the Pole, between Alaska and Asia. We ran before it with a strip of the boom-foresail on one vessel and a jib that blew to ribands every now and then. The schooner was small, ninety tons or so, and for a week she scudded with the gray seas tumbling after her, white-topped, out of the snow and spume. The waves ranged high above her taffrail, curling horribly, but one did not want to look at them. The one man on deck had a line about him, and he looked ahead, watching the vessel s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g round with hove-up bows as she climbed the seas. If he'd let her fall off or claw up, the next wave would have made an end of her. He was knee-deep half the time in icy brine, and his hands had split and opened with the frost, but the sweat dripped from him as he clung to the jarring wheel. The helmsmen had another trouble which preyed on them. They were thinking of the three men they had left behind.

"Well," he added, "we ran out of the gale, and I had bitter words to face when we reached Vancouver. As one result of the trouble I walked out of the city with four or five dollars in my pocket--though there was a share due to me. Then in an open car I rode up into the ranges to mend railroad bridges in the frost and snow. It was not the kind of home-coming one would care to look forward to."

"Ah!" Agatha cried with a shudder, "it must have been horribly dreary."

The man met her eyes. "Yes," he said, "you--know. You came here from far away, I think a little weary, too, and something failed you. Then you felt yourself adrift. There were--it seemed--only strangers around you, but you were wrong in one respect; you were by no means a stranger to me."

He had been leaning against a birch trunk, but now he moved a little nearer, and stood gravely looking down on her.

"You have sent Gregory away?" he questioned.

"Yes," answered Agatha, and, startled, as she was, it did not occur to her that the mere admission was misleading.

Wyllard stretched out his hands. "Then won't you come to me?"

The blood swept into the girl's face. For the moment she forgot Gregory, and was conscious only of an unreasoning impulse which prompted her to take the hands held out to her. She rose and faced Wyllard with burning cheeks.

"You know nothing of me," she said. "Can you think that I would let you take me out of charity?"

"Again you're wrong--on both points. As I once told you, I have sat for hours beside the fire beneath the pines or among the boulders with your picture for company. When I was worn out and despondent you encouraged me. You have been with me high up in the snow on the ranges, and through leagues of shadowy bush. That is not all. There were times when, as we drove the branch line up the gorge beneath the big divide, all one's nature shrank from the monotony of brutal labor. The paydays came around, and opportunities were made for us to forget what we had borne, and had still to bear. Then you laid a restraining hand on me. I could not take your picture where you could not go. Is all that to count for nothing?"

He held out his arms to her. "As to the other question, can you get beyond the narrow point of view? We're in a big, new country where the old barriers are down. We're merely flesh and blood--red blood--and we speak as we feel. Admitting that I was sorry for you--I am--how does that tell against me--or you? There's one thing only that counts at all--I want you."

Agatha was stirred with an emotion that made her heart beat wildly. He had spoken with a force and pa.s.sion that had nearly swept her away with it. The vigor of the new land throbbed in his voice, and, flinging aside all cramping restraints and conventions, he had claimed her as primitive man claimed primitive woman. Her whole being responded to his love and Gregory faded out of her mind; but there was, after all, pride in her, and she could not quite bring herself to look at life from his point of view. All her prejudices and her traditions were opposed to it. He had made a mistake when he had admitted that he was sorry for her. She did not want his compa.s.sion, and she shrank from the thought that she would marry him--for shelter. It brought to her a sudden, shameful confusion as she remembered the haste with which marriages were arranged on the prairie. Then, as the first unreasoning impulse which had almost compelled her to yield to him pa.s.sed away, she reflected that it was scarcely two months since she had met him in England. It was intolerable that he should think that she would be willing to fall into his arms merely because he had held them out to her.

"It is a little difficult to get beyond one's sense of what is fit," she said. "You--I must say again--can't know anything about me. You have woven fancies about that photograph, but you must recognize that I'm not the girl you have created out of your reveries. In all probability she is wholly unreal, unnatural, visionary." Agatha contrived to smile, for she was recovering her composure. "Perhaps it is easy when one has imagination to endow a person with qualities and graces that could never belong to them. It must be easy"--though she was unconscious of it, there was a trace of bitterness in her voice--"because I know I could do it myself."

Again the man held out his arms. "Then," he said simply, "won't you try?