Hawtrey's Deputy. Bindloss Harold
of conception, and the power of application; but he had somehow failed to accomplish as much as his neighbours did. After all, there must be a good deal to be said for the man who raises four bushels of good wheat where his comrade with equal facilities raises three.
In the meanwhile Hawtrey was talking to Sally, and it was not astonishing that they talked of farming, which is the standard topic on that strip of prairie.
"So you're not going to break that new piece this spring?" she said.
"No," said Hawtrey; "I'd want another team, anyway, and I can't raise the dollars; they're hard to get out here."
"Plenty under the sod," said Sally, who was essentially practical. "That's where we get ours, but you have to put the breaker in and turn it over. You" – and she flashed a swift glance at him – "got most of yours from England. Won't they send you any more?"
Hawtrey's eyes twinkled as he shook his head. "I'm afraid they won't," he said. "You see, I've put the screw on them rather hard the last few years."
"How did you do that?" said Sally. "Told them you were thinking of coming home again?"
There was a certain wryness in her companion's smile, for though Hawtrey had cast no particular slur upon the family's credit he had signally failed to enhance it, and he was quite aware that his English relatives did not greatly desire his presence in the Old Country.
"My dear," he said, "you really shouldn't hit a fellow in the eye that way."
As it happened, he did not see the girl's face just then, or he might have noticed a momentary change in its expression. Gregory Hawtrey was a little casual in speech, but so far most of the young women he bestowed an epithet of that kind upon had attached no significance to it. They had wisely decided that he did not mean anything. In another moment or two the Scottish fiddler's voice broke in.
"Can ye no' watch the music? Noo it's paddybash!" he cried.
His French Canadian comrade waved his fiddle-bow protestingly.
"Paddybashy! V'la la belle chose!" he said with ineffable contempt, and broke in upon the ranting melody with a succession of harsh, crashing chords.
Then it apparently became a contest as to which could drown the other's instrument, and the snapping time grew faster, until the dancers gasped, and men with long boots encouraged them with cries and stamped a staccato accompaniment upon the benches or on the floor. It was savage, rasping music, but one player infused into it the ebullient verve of France, and the other was from the misty land where the fiddler learns the witchery of the clanging reel and the swing of the Strathspey. It is doubtless not high art, but there is probably no music in the world that fires the blood like this and turns the sober dance to rhythmic riot. Perhaps, too, it gains something that gives it a closer compelling grip amidst the prairie snow.
Hawtrey, at least, was breathless when it ceased, and Sally's eyes flashed with the effulgence of the Northern night when her partner found her a resting-place upon an upturned barrel.
"No," she said, "I won't have any cider." She turned and glanced at him imperiously. "You're not going for any more either."
It was, no doubt, not the speech a well-trained English maiden would have made, but, though Hawtrey smiled rather curiously, it fell inoffensively from Sally's lips. Though it is not always set down to their credit, the brown-faced, hard-handed men as a rule live very abstemiously in that country, and, as it happened, Hawtrey, who, however, certainly showed no sign of it, had already consumed rather more cider than anybody else. He made a little sign of submission, and Sally resumed their conversation where it had broken off.
"We could let you have our ox-team to do that breaking with," she said. "You've had Sproatly living with you all winter. Why don't you make him stay and work out his keep?"
Hawtrey laughed. "Sally," he said, "do you think anybody could make Sproatly work?"
"It would be hard," the girl admitted, and then looked up at him with a little glint in her eyes. "Still, I'd put a move on him if you sent him along to me."
She was a rather capable young woman, but Hawtrey was very dubious of her ability to accomplish as much as this. Sproatly was an Englishman of good education, though his appearance seldom suggested it, who drove about the prairie in a waggon vending cheap oleographs and patent medicines most of the summer, and contrived to obtain free quarters from his bachelor acquaintances during the winter. It is a hospitable country, but there were men round Lander's who when they went away to work in far-off lumber camps, as they sometimes did, nailed up their doors and windows to prevent Sproatly getting in.
"Does he never do anything?" Sally added.
"No," said Hawtrey; "at least, never when he can help it. He had, however, started something shortly before I left him. You see, the house has wanted cleaning the last month or two, and we tossed up for who should do it. It fell to Sproatly, who didn't seem quite pleased, but he got as far as firing the chairs and tables out into the snow. Then he sat down for a smoke, and he was looking at them through the window when I drove away."
"Ah," said his companion, "you want somebody to keep the house straight and look after you. Didn't you know any nice girls back there in the Old Country?"
It was spoken naturally, and there was nothing to show that the girl's heart beat a little more rapidly than usual as she watched her companion. His face, however, grew a trifle graver, for she had touched upon a rather momentous question to such men as him. There are a good many of them living in Spartan simplicity upon the prairie, well-trained, well-connected young Englishmen, and others like them from Canadian cities. They naturally look for some grace of culture or refinement in the woman they would marry, and there are few women of the station they once belonged to who could face the loneliness and unassisted drudgery that must be borne by the small wheat-grower's wife. There were also reasons why this question had been troubling Hawtrey in particular of late.
"Oh, yes, one or two," he said. "I'm not quite sure, however, that girls of that kind would find things even moderately comfortable here."
There was a certain reflectiveness in his tone, which, since it seemed to indicate that he had already given the point some consideration, jarred upon his companion. She had also an ample share of the Western farmer's pride, which firmly declines to believe that there is any land to compare with the one the plough is slowly wresting from the wide white levels of the prairie.
"We make out well enough," she said with a snap in her eyes.
Hawtrey made a little whimsical gesture. "Oh, yes," he admitted; "it's in you. All you want to beat the wilderness and turn it into a garden is an axe, a span of oxen, and a breaker plough. You ought to be proud of it. Still, you see, our folks back yonder aren't quite the same as you."
Sally partly understood him. "Ah," she said, "they want more, and, perhaps, they're used to having more than we have; but isn't that in one way their misfortune? Is it what folks want, or what they can do, that makes them of use to anybody else?"
There was a hard truth in her suggestion, but Hawtrey, who seldom occupied himself with matters of that kind, smiled.
"Oh," he said, "I don't know; but, after all, it wouldn't be worth while our raising wheat here unless there were folks back East to eat it, and if some of them only eat it in the shape of dainty cakes that doesn't affect the question. Anyway, there's only another dance or two, and I was wondering whether I could drive you home; I've got Wyllard's Ontario sleigh."
Sally glanced at him rather sharply. She had half-expected this offer, and it is possible would have judiciously led him up to it if he had not made it. Now, as she saw that he really wished to drive her home, she was glad that she had not done so.
"Yes," she said softly, "I think you could."
"Then," said Hawtrey, "if you'll wait ten minutes I'll be back with the team."
CHAPTER II.
SALLY TAKES CHARGE
The night was clear and bitterly cold when Hawtrey and Sally Creighton drove away from Stukely's barn. Winter had lingered unusually long that year, and the prairie gleamed dimly white, with the sledge trail cutting athwart it, a