Hawtrey's Deputy. Harold Bindloss
about you."
This again was significant, but Hawtrey did not notice it.
"I've no doubt they said I ought to tackle the new quarter section?" he suggested.
"Yes," assented Sally. "Why don't you do it? Last fall you thrashed out quite a big harvest."
"I certainly did. There, however, didn't seem to be many dollars left over when I'd faced the bills."
The girl made a little gesture of impatience. "Oh," she said, "Bob and Jake and Jasper sowed on less backsetting, and they're buying new teams and ploughs. Can't you do what they do, though I guess they don't go off for weeks to Winnipeg?"
The man was silent. He had an incentive to work hard which she was not acquainted with, and he had certainly done so, but the long, iron winter, when there was nothing that could be done, had proved too much for him. It was very dreary sitting alone evening after evening beside the stove, and the company of the somnolent Sproatly was not much more cheerful. Now and then his pleasure-loving nature had revolted from the barrenness of his lot when he drove home from an odd visit to a neighbour, stiff with cold, through the stinging frost, and, arriving in the dark, found the stove had burned out and water frozen hard inside the house. These were things his neighbours patiently endured, but Hawtrey had fled for life and brightness to Winnipeg.
Sally glanced up at him with a little nod. "You take hold with a good grip. Everybody allows that," she said. "The trouble is you let things go afterwards. You don't stay with it."
"Yes," assented Hawtrey. "I believe you have hit it, Sally. That's very much what's the matter with me."
"Then," said the girl with quiet insistence, "won't you try?"
A faint flush crept into Hawtrey's face. The girl was less than half-taught, and unacquainted with anything beyond the simple, strenuous life of the prairie. Her greatest accomplishments consisted of some skill in bakery and the handling of half-broken teams; but she had once or twice given him what he recognised as excellent advice. There was something incongruous in the situation, but, as usual, he preferred to regard it whimsically.
"I suppose I'll have to, if you insist. If ever I'm the grasping owner of the biggest farm in this district I'll blame you," he said.
Sally said nothing further on that subject, and some time later the sleigh went skimming down among the birches in a shallow ravine. Hawtrey pulled the horses up when they reached the bottom of it, and glanced up at a shapeless cluster of buildings that showed black amidst the trees.
"Lorton won't be back until to-morrow, but I promised to pitch the bags into his granary," he said. "If I hump them up the trail here it will save us driving round through the bluff."
He got down, and though the bags were heavy he managed to hoist the first of them on to his shoulders, with Sally's assistance, and then staggered up the steep foot-trail that climbed the slope with it. He was more or less accustomed to carrying bags of grain between store and waggon, but his mittened hands were numbed, and his joints were stiff with frost just then, and Sally noticed that he floundered rather wildly. In another moment or two, however, he vanished into the gloom among the trees, and she sat listening to the uneven crunch of his footsteps in the snow, until there was a sudden crash of broken branches, and a sound as of something falling heavily down a declivity. Then there was another crash, and stillness again.
Sally gasped, and clenched her mittened hands hard upon the reins as she remembered that Lorton's bye trail skirted the edge of a very steep bank, but she lost neither her collectedness nor her nerve. Presence of mind in the face of an emergency is probably as much a question of experience as of temperament, and, as it happened, she had, like other women in that country, seen men struck down by half-trained horses, crushed by collapsing strawpiles, and once or twice gashed by a mower blade. This was no doubt why she remembered that the impatient team would probably move on if she left the sleigh, and she drove them to the first of the birches before she got down. Then she knotted the reins about a branch, and called out sharply.
No answer came out of the shadows, and her heart beat unpleasantly fast as she plunged in among the trees, keeping below the narrow trail that went slanting up the side of the declivity, until she stopped, with another gasp, when she reached a spot where a ray of moonlight came filtering down. A limp figure in an old skin coat lay almost at her feet, and she dropped on her knees beside it in the snow. Hawtrey's face showed an unpleasant greyish-white in the faint silvery light.
"Gregory!" she cried hoarsely.
The man opened his eyes, and blinked at her in a half-dazed manner. "Fell down," he said. "Think I felt my leg go—and my side's stabbing me. Go for somebody."
Sally glanced round, and noticed that the grain bag lay burst open not far away. She fancied that he had clung to it after he lost his footing, which explained why he had fallen so heavily, but that was not a point of any consequence now. There was nobody who could help her within two leagues of the spot, and it was evident that she could not leave him there to freeze. Then she noticed that the trees grew rather farther apart just there, and rising swiftly she ran back to bring the team. The ascent was steep, and she had to urge them up it with sharp cries and blows with her mittened hand amidst the shadowy trunks and through snapping undergrowth before she reached the spot where Hawtrey lay. He looked up at her when at last they stood snorting close beside him.
"You can't turn them here," he said.
Sally was never sure how she managed it, for the sleigh drove against the slender trunks, and the fiery beasts, terrified by the snapping of the undergrowth, were almost unmanageable; but at last they were facing the descent again, and she stooped and twined her arms about the shoulders of her companion, who now lay almost against the sleigh.
"It's going to hurt, Gregory, but I have got to get you in," she said.
Then she gasped, for Hawtrey was a man of full stature, and it was a heavy lift. She could not raise him wholly, and he cried out once when his injured leg trailed in the snow. Still, with the most strenuous effort she had ever made she moved him a yard or so, and then staggering fell with her side against the sleigh. She felt faint with the pain of it, but with another desperate lift she drew him into the sleigh, and let him sink down gently upon the bag that still lay there. His eyes had shut again, and he said nothing now.
"She could not raise him wholly, and he cried out once when his injured leg trailed in the snow."
It took only another moment or two to wrap the thick driving robe about him, and after that she glanced down, with one hand still beneath his neck. It was clear that he was quite unconscious of her presence, and stooping swiftly she kissed his grey face. Then she settled herself in the driving seat with only a blanket coat to shelter her from the stinging frost, and the horses went cautiously down the slope. She did not urge them until they reached the level, for the trail that wound up out of the ravine was difficult, but when the wide white expanse once more stretched away before them she laid the biting whip across their backs.
That was quite sufficient. They were fiery beasts, and when they broke into a furious gallop the rush of night wind that screamed by struck her tingling cheeks like a lash of wires. Then all power of feeling went out of her hands, her arms grew stiff and heavy, and she was glad that the trail led smooth and straight to the horizon. Hawtrey, who had moved a little, lay, a shapeless figure, across her feet, but he answered nothing when she spoke to him.
The team went far at the gallop, and the beat of hoofs rose up, dulled a little, in a wild staccato drumming. There was an insistent crunching beneath the runners, and a fine mist of snow beat against the sleigh, but the girl leaning forward, a tense figure, with nerveless hands clenched upon the reins, saw nothing but the blue-grey riband of trail that steadily unrolled itself before her. At length, however, a blurred mass, which she knew to be a birch bluff,