The Impostor. Harold Bindloss
to the somewhat solid chin. The mouth was hidden by the bronze-tinted moustache, and the eyes alone, were noticeable. They were grey, and there was a steadiness in them which was almost unusual even in that country, where men look into long distances. For the rest, he was of average stature, and stood impassively straight, looking down upon the girl without either grace or awkwardness, while his hard brown hands, suggested, as his attire did, strenuous labour for a very small reward.
“Well,” said the girl with Western frankness, “there’s a kind of stamp on Lance that you haven’t got. I figure he brought it with him from the old country. Still, one might take you for him if you stood with the light behind you, and you’re not quite a bad-looking man. It’s a kind of pity you’re so solemn.”
Witham smiled. “I don’t fancy that’s astonishing after losing two harvests in succession,” he said. “You see, there’s nobody back there in the old country to send remittances to me.”
The girl nodded with quick sympathy. “Oh, yes. The times are bad,” she said. “Well, you read your letters; I’m not going to worry you.”
Witham sat down and opened the first envelope under the big lamp. It was from a land agent and mortgage-broker, and his face grew a trifle grimmer as he read, “In the present condition of the money market your request that we should carry you over is unreasonable, and we regret that unless you can extinguish at least half the loan we will be compelled to foreclose upon your holding.”
There was a little more of it, but that was sufficient for Witham, who knew it meant disaster, and it was with the feeling of one clinging desperately to the last shred of hope he tore open the second envelope. The letter it held was from a friend he had made in a Western city, and once entertained for a month at his ranch, but the man had evidently sufficient difficulties of his own to contend with.
“Very sorry, but it can’t be done,” he wrote. “I’m loaded up with wheat nobody will buy, and couldn’t raise five hundred dollars to lend any one just now,”
Witham sighed a little, but when he rose and slowly straightened himself nobody would have suspected he was looking ruin in the face. He had fought a slow, losing battle for six weary years, holding on doggedly though defeat appeared inevitable, and now when it had come he bore it impassively, for the struggle which, though he was scarcely twenty-six, had crushed all mirth and brightness out of his life, had given him endurance in place of them. Just then a man came bustling towards him, with the girl who bore a tray close behind.
“What are you doing with that coat on?” he said. “Get it off and sit down right there. The boys are about through with the mail and supper’s ready,”
Witham glanced at the steaming dishes hungrily, for he had passed most of the day in the bitter frost, eating very little, and there was still a drive of twenty miles before him.
“It is time I was taking the trail,” he said.
He was sensible of a pain in his left side, which, as other men have discovered, not infrequently follows enforced abstinence from food, but he remembered what he wanted the half-dollar in his pocket for. The hotel-keeper had possibly some notion of the state of affairs, for he laughed a little.
“You’ve got to sit down,” he said. “Now, after the way you fixed me up when I stopped at your ranch, you don’t figure I’d let you go before you had some supper with me.”
Witham may have been unduly sensitive, but he shook his head. “You’re very good, but it’s a long ride, and I’m going now,” he said. “Good-night, Nettie.”
He turned as he spoke, with the swift decision that was habitual with him, and when he went out the girl glanced at her father reproachfully.
“You always get spoiling things when you put your hand in,” she said. “Now that man’s hungry, and I’d have fixed it so he’d have got his supper if you had left it to me.”
The hotel-keeper laughed a little. “I’m kind of sorry for Witham because there’s grit in him, and he’s never had a show,” he said. “Still, I figure he’s not worth your going out gunning after, Nettie.”
The girl said nothing, but there was a little flush in her face which had not been there before, when she busied herself with the dishes.
In the meanwhile Witham was harnessing two bronco horses to a very dilapidated wagon. They were vicious beasts, but he had bought them cheap from a man who had some difficulty in driving them, while the wagon had been given him, when it was apparently useless, by a neighbour. The team had, however, already covered thirty miles that day, and started homewards at a steady trot without the playful kicking they usually indulged in. Here and there a man sprang clear of the rutted road, but Witham did not notice him or return his greeting. He was abstractedly watching the rude frame houses flit by, and wondering, while the pain in his side grew keener, when he would get his supper, for it happens not infrequently that the susceptibilities are dulled by a heavy blow, and the victim finds a distraction that is almost welcome in the endurance of a petty trouble.
Witham was very hungry, and weary alike in body and mind. The sun had not risen when he left his homestead, and he had passed the day under a nervous strain, hoping, although it seemed improbable, that the mail would bring him relief from his anxieties. Now he knew the worst he could bear it as he had borne the loss of two harvests, and the disaster which followed in the wake of the blizzard that killed off his stock; but it seemed unfair that he should endure cold and hunger too, and when one wheel sank in a rut and the jolt shook him in every stiffened limb, he broke out with a hoarse expletive. It was his first protest against the fate that was too strong for him, and almost as he made it he laughed.
“Pshaw! There’s no use kicking against what has to be, and I’ve got to keep my head just now,” he said.
There was no great comfort in the reflection, but it had sustained him before, and Witham’s head was a somewhat exceptional one, though there was as a rule nothing in any way remarkable about his conversation, and he was apparently merely one of the many quietly-spoken, bronze-faced men who are even by their blunders building up a great future for the Canadian dominion. He accordingly drew his old rug tighter round him, and instinctively pulled his fur cap lower down when the lights of the settlement faded behind him and the creaking wagon swung out into the blackness of the prairie. It ran back league beyond league across three broad provinces, and the wind that came up out of the great emptiness emphasized its solitude. A man from the cities would have heard nothing but the creaking of the wagon and the drumming fall of hoofs, but Witham heard the grasses patter as they swayed beneath the bitter blasts stiff with frost, and the moan of swinging boughs in a far-off willow bluff. It was these things that guided him, for he had left the rutted trail, and here and there the swishen beneath the wheels told of taller grass, while the bluff ran black athwart the horizon when that had gone. Then twigs crackled beneath them as the horses picked their way amidst the shadowy trees stunted by a ceaseless struggle with the wind, and Witham shook the creeping drowsiness from him when they came out into the open again, for he knew it is not advisable for any man with work still to do to fall asleep under the frost of that country.
Still, he grew a trifle dazed as the miles went by, and because of it indulged in memories he had shaken off at other times. They were blurred recollections of the land he had left eight years ago, pictures of sheltered England, half-forgotten music, the voices of friends who no longer remembered him, and the smiles in a girl’s bright eyes. Then he settled himself more firmly in the driving-seat, and with numbed fingers sought a tighter grip of the reins as the memory of the girl’s soft answer to a question he had asked brought his callow ambitions back.
He was to hew his way to fortune in the West, and then come back for her, but the girl who had clung to him with wet cheeks when he left her had apparently grown tired of waiting, and Witham sent back her letters in return for a silver-printed card. That was six years ago, and now none of the dollars he had brought into the country remained to him. He realized, dispassionately and without egotism, that this was through no fault of his, for he knew that better men had been crushed and beaten.
It