.
often met with gripping 63 the hot double-barrel when the pheasants sweep clattering athwart the wood, or sitting intent and eager with tight hand on the rein outside the fox cover.
Still, no one could say they had suffered by their translation to a new country, which was chiefly due to Colonel Carrington. He had been successful hitherto at wheat-growing on an extensive scale, and though few of the settlers liked him they could not help admiring the bold far-seeing way in which he speculated on the chances of the weather, or hedged against a risky wheat crop by purchasing western horses. Still, not content with building up the finest property thereabout, he aspired to rule over a British settlement, and each time that he visited the old country at regular intervals several young Englishmen of good family and apparently ample means returning with him commenced breaking virgin prairie. They were not all a success as farmers, the settlers said, and there were occasional rumors of revolt; but if they had their differences with the grim autocrat they kept them loyally to themselves, and never spoke in public of their leader save with respect. Now it was evident that his daughter was expected; they had come to escort her home in state, and no princess could have desired a finer bodyguard. They were the pick of the old country’s well-born youth when they came out, and now they had grown to a splendid manhood in the wide spaces of the prairie.
Though they answered our greetings with good fellowship, I am afraid we regarded them a little enviously, for the value of some of their horses would have sown us a crop, and even Harry seemed unkempt beside them. We lived and dressed very plainly at Fairmead that year. Then amid a grinding of brakes, with lights flashing, a long train rolled in, and the group stood, fur cap in hand, about the platform of a car from which a dainty figure looked down at them. 64 It was Grace Carrington, and as I stood a little apart from the rest my heart leaped at the sight of her. Yet, either from bashfulness or foolish pride, I would not move a step nearer.
“What a picture!” said Harry softly. “A princess of the prairie and her subjects doing homage to her! Ralph, I say, you must not stare at the girl like that. But, by Jove, she’s smiling this way—yes, she is really beckoning you!”
It was true, for a stripling who wore his deerskin jacket as though it were the dolman of a cavalry officer strode forward, and inclining his head said:
“If you are Mr. Lorimer, Miss Carrington desires to speak with you.”
For some reason I drew Harry with me. It may have been that I felt the company of a comrade of my own kind would be comforting in that assembly; and then I forgot everything as, fixing her bright eyes on me, Grace held out her hand.
“It was kind of you to meet me, and this is an unexpected pleasure,” she said. “You must come over to Carrington and tell me where you have settled. Oh stay, Raymond, this is Mr. Lorimer—he was kind to me in England, and I want you to invite him to your approaching festivities. You will come, won’t you, and bring your friend—very pleased to see you Mr. Lorraine, too; then I shall have an opportunity for talking with you.”
“Delighted, of course, to please you,” said a tall bronzed man of maturer years, bowing. “Met Mr. Lorimer already; pulled my wagon up most kindly when the team was stalled in a ravine. If I’d known you were from the old country would have ridden over already to ask you.”
Further introductions followed, all effected in a queenly way, and with a last pleasant glance toward us Grace moved toward the carriage, while I fancied that some of the 65 younger among her bodyguard regarded us jealously. Harry and I stood silent until the cavalcade vanished into the dimness, and then, while the last beat of hoofs died away, the blood surged through every artery as he said:
“Wasn’t she splendid! When she held out her hand to me I felt that I ought to go down on one knee and kiss it, and all that kind of thing, you know. Ralph, you stalked up like a bear; must have been dazed by too much brightness, because you never even raised your hat. Well, one can understand it; but I think some of the others would have liked to cut your big solid throat for you.”
Harry was both enthusiastic and impressionable, though I did not think so then, and the whole scene could scarcely have lasted five minutes, but it filled my mind for days afterward, and I can recall it clearly still.
66
CHAPTER VII
HARVEST HOME
It was a bitter night when Harry and I rode into the red glow of light that beat out through the windows of Lone Hollow, the furthest outlying farm of the Carrington group, where, now that the last bushel of his wheat had been sold in Winnipeg, Raymond Lyle was celebrating a bounteous harvest. Round about it, drawn up in ranks, stood vehicles—or rigs, as we call them—of every kind, for it seemed as if the whole country-side had driven in. Most of them were of better make than those we and the majority of the poorer settlers used, and it was hard not to covet when we managed to find a stall for our beasts.
When one has wasted precious time that in the whole season can scarcely be made up again, by riding behind oxen at the exhilarating pace of some two miles an hour, or hauling in grain with half-tamed horses which jib at every hill, it is easy to realize the advantages of an efficient team, and any of those we saw in the Lone Hollow stables would have saved us many dollars each year. Even in the West the poor man is handicapped from the beginning, and must trust to ready invention and lengthened hours of labor to make up for the shortcomings of indifferent tools.
Lyle, who had heard the trampling of hoofs, met us at the door. “It was kind of you to come, and I hope you will enjoy yourselves,” he said. “We have tried to make things homely, but, as you know, this isn’t England.”
We shook off our wrappings and entered the long lamp-lit 67 hall, partly dazed by the sudden glare and warmth after the intense cold. It certainly was different from anything I had seen at home, for here in place of paint and gilding the decoration was in harmony with the country, bizarre and bountiful, with a beauty that was distinctly its own. Few oat-heads grown from English furrows might compare with the pale golden tassels that drooped in graceful festoons from the wall, while among the ruddier wheat-ears and bearded barley, antelope heads peeped out beside the great horns of caribou which the owner of Lone Hollow had shot in the muskegs of the north. Rifles and bright double-bitted axes of much the same pattern as those with which our forbears hewed through Norman mail caught the light of the polished brass lamps and flashed upon the wainscot, while even an odd cross-cut saw had been skillfully impressed into the scheme of ornamentation. But there was nothing pinchbeck or tawdry about them. Whirled high by sinewy hands, or clenched in hard brown fingers while a steady eye stared down the barrel, that a bridge might span a ravine where no bridge had been, or venison help to cut down the grocery bill and leave the more for the breaking of virgin soil, that steel had played its part in the opening up of a wide country. Yet, the suggestion of strict utility even enhanced its effectiveness, and I remembered with a smile the trophies of weapons stamped out by the gross in Birmingham which I had seen adorning our suburban villas at home.
The majority of the guests were English—one could see that at a glance, and the mother country had small reason to be ashamed of her outland sons. The clear skin showed through the snow-blink’s tan, and the eyes were bright with a steadfastness that comes from gazing into wide distance. Sun, wind, and snow, the dust of parched earth and the stinging smoke of the drifts, had played their part in hardening 68 them, but still, a little deeper in color, a little stronger in limb, they were the same men one finds dwelling in many an English home. Standing beside a great open hearth, on which to aid the stove a huge pile of birch logs crackled joyously, the representative of an alien race drew a cunning bow across the strings of a dingy violin. He sprang from Gallic stock, a descendant of the old coureurs who for two centuries wandered in search of furs across the wilderness, even as far as the northern barrens, before the Briton came to farm. It