"Hold on!" said Perkins, breathing heavily. "Not to-night. I want to say something. She's waiting to see me go upstairs."

Cameron came back.

"What have you got to say, you cur?" he asked in a voice filled with a cold and deliberate contempt.

"Don't you call no names," replied Perkins. "It ain't no use." His voice was low, trembling, but gravely earnest. "Say, I might have killed you to-night." His breath was still coming in quick short gasps.

"You tried your best, you dog!" said Cameron.

"Don't you call no names," panted Perkins again. "I might--a--killed yeh. I'm mighty--glad--I didn't." He spoke like a man who had had a great deliverance. "But don't yeh," here his teeth snapped like a dog's, "don't yeh ever go foolin' with that girl again. Don't yeh--ever--do it. I seen yeh huggin' her in there and I tell yeh--I tell yeh--," his breath began to come in sobs, "I won't stand it--I'll kill yeh, sure as G.o.d's in heaven."

"Are you mad?" said Cameron, scanning narrowly the white distorted face.

"Mad? Yes, I guess so--I dunno--but don't yeh do it, that's all. She's mine! Mine! D'yeh hear?"

He stepped forward and thrust his snarling face into Cameron's.

"No, I ain't goin' to touch yeh," as Cameron stepped back into a posture of defense, "not to-night. Some day, perhaps." Here again his teeth came together with a snap. "But I'm not going to have you or any other man cutting in on me with that girl. D'yeh hear me?" and he lifted a trembling forefinger and thrust it almost into Cameron's face.

Cameron stood regarding him in silent and contemptuous amazement.

Neither of them saw a dark form standing back out of the moonlight, inside the door. At last Cameron spoke.

"Now what the deuce does all this mean?" he said slowly. "Is this girl by any unhappy chance engaged to you?"

"Yes, she is--or was as good as, till you came; but you listen to me. As G.o.d hears me up there"--he raised his shaking hand and pointed up to the moonlit sky, and then went on, chewing on his words like a dog on a bone--"I'll cut the heart out of your body if I catch you monkeying round that girl again. You've got to get out of here! Everything was all right till you came sneaking in. You've got to get out! You've got to get out! D'yeh hear me? You've got to get out!"

His voice was rising, mad rage was seizing him again, his fingers were opening and shutting like a man in a death agony.

Cameron glanced towards the door.

"I'm done," said Perkins, noting the glance. "That's my last word. You'd better quit this job." His voice again took on an imploring tone. "You'd better go or something will sure happen to you. n.o.body will miss you much, except perhaps Mandy." His ghastly face twisted into a snarling smile, his eyes appeared glazed in the moonlight, his voice was husky--the man seemed truly insane.

Cameron stood observing him quietly when he had ceased speaking.

"Are you finished? Then hear me. First, in regard to this girl, she doesn't want me and I don't want her, but make up your mind, I promise you to do all I can to prevent her falling into the hands of a brute like you. Then as to leaving this place, I shall go just when it suits me, no sooner."

"All right," said Perkins, his voice low and trembling. "All right, mind I warned you! Mind I warned you! But if you go foolin' with that girl, I'll kill yeh, so help me G.o.d."

These words he uttered with the solemnity of an oath and turned towards the porch. A dark figure flitted across the kitchen and disappeared into the house. Cameron walked slowly towards the barn.

"He's mad. He's clean daffy, but none the less dangerous," he said to himself. "What a rotten mess all this is!" he added in disgust. "By Jove! The whole thing isn't worth while."

But as he thought of Mandy's frightened face and imploring eyes and the brutal murderous face of the man who claimed her as his own, he said between his teeth:

"No, I won't quit now. I'll see this thing through, whatever it costs,"

and with this resolve he set himself to the business of getting to sleep; in which, after many attempts, he was at length successful.

CHAPTER V

HOW THEY SAVED THE DAY

There never was such a Dominion Day for weather since the first Dominion Day was born. Of this "Fatty" Freeman was fully a.s.sured. Fatty Freeman was a young man for whose opinion older men were accustomed to wait. His person more than justified his praenomen, for Mr. Harper Freeman, Jr., was undeniably fat. "Fat, but fine and frisky," was ever his own comment upon the descriptive adjective by which his friends distinguished him.

And fine and frisky he was; fine in his appreciation of good eating, fine in his judgment of good cattle and fine in his estimate of men; frisky, too, and utterly irrepressible. "Harp's just like a young pup,"

his own father, the Reverend Harper Freeman, the old Methodist minister of the Maplehill circuit, used to say. "If Harp had a tail he would never do anything but play with it." On this, however, it is difficult to hold any well based opinion. Ebullient in his spirits, he radiated cheeriness wherever he went and was at the bottom of most of the practical jokes that kept the village of Maplehill in a state of ferment; yet if any man thought to turn a sharp corner in business with Mr. Harper Freeman, Jr., he invariably found that frisky individual waiting for him round the corner with a cheery smile of welcome, shrewd and disconcerting. It was this cheery shrewdness of his that made him the most successful cattle buyer in the county and at the same time secretary of the Middles.e.x Caledonian Society. As secretary of this society he was made chiefly responsible for the success of the Dominion Day picnic and, as with everything that he took hold of, Fatty toiled at the business of preparation for this picnic with conscientious zeal, giving to it all his spare hours and many of his working hours for the three months preceding.

It was due solely to his efforts that so many distinguished county magnates appeared eager to lend their patronage. It needed but a little persuasion to secure the enthusiastic support of the Honourable J. J.

Patterson, M.P.P., and, incidentally, the handsome challenge cup for hammer-throwing, for the honourable member of Parliament was a full-blooded Highlander himself and an ardent supporter of "the games."

But only Fatty Freeman's finesse could have extracted from Dr. Kane, the Opposition candidate for Provincial Parliamentary honours, the cup for the hundred yards race, and other cups from other individuals more or less deeply interested in Dominion, Provincial, and Munic.i.p.al politics.

The prize list secured, it needed only a skillful manipulation of the local press and a judicious but persistent personal correspondence to swell the ranks of the compet.i.tors in the various events, and thus ensure a monster attendance of the people from the neighbouring townships and from the city near by.

The weather being a.s.sured, Fatty's anxieties were mostly allayed, for he had on the file in his office acceptance letters from the distinguished men who were to cast the spell of their oratory over the a.s.sembled mult.i.tude, as also from the big men in the athletic world who had entered for the various events in the programme of sports. It was a master stroke of diplomacy that resulted in the securing for the hammer-throwing contest the redoubtable and famous Duncan Ross of Zorra, who had at first disdained the bait of the Maplehill Dominion Day picnic, but in some mysterious way had at length been hooked and landed.

For Duncan was a notable man and held the championship of the Zorras; and indeed in all Ontario he was second only to the world-famous Rory Maclennan of Glengarry, who had been to Braemar itself and was beaten there only by a fluke. How he came to agree to be present at the Maplehill picnic "Black Duncan" could not quite understand, but had he compared notes with McGee, the champion of the London police force and of various towns and cities of the western peninsula, he would doubtless have received some enlightenment. To the skill of the same master hand was due the appearance upon the racing list of the Dominion Day picnic of such distinguished names as Cahill of London, Fullerton of Woodstock, and especially of Eugene La Belle of nowhere in particular, who held the provincial championship for skating and was a runner of provincial fame.

In the racing Fatty was particularly interested because his young brother Wilbur, of whom he was uncommonly proud, a handsome lad, swift and graceful as a deer, was to make his first essay for more than local honours.

The lists for the other events were equally well filled and every detail of the arrangements for the day had pa.s.sed under the secretary's personal review. The feeding of the mult.i.tude was in charge of the Methodist Ladies' Aid, an energetic and exceptionally businesslike organization, which fully expected to make sufficient profit from the enterprise to clear off the debt from their church at Maplehill, an achievement greatly desired not only by the ladies themselves but by their minister, the Reverend Harper Freeman, now in the third year of his inc.u.mbency. The music was to be furnished by the Band of the Seventh from London and by no less a distinguished personage than Piper Sutherland himself from Zorra, former Pipe Major of "The old Forty-twa."

The discovery of another piper in Cameron brought joy to the secretary's heart, who only regretted that an earlier discovery had not rendered possible a pipe compet.i.tion.

Early in the afternoon the crowds began to gather to MacBurney's woods, a beautiful maple grove lying midway between the Haleys' farm and Maplehill village, about two miles distant from each. The grove of n.o.ble maple trees overlooking a gra.s.sy meadow provided an ideal spot for picnicking, furnishing as it did both shade from the sun and a fine open s.p.a.ce with firm footing for the contestants in the games. High over a n.o.ble maple in the centre of the gra.s.sy meadow floated the Red Ensign of the Empire, which, with the Canadian coat of arms on the fly, by common usage had become the national flag of Canada. From the great trees the swings were hung, and under their n.o.ble spreading boughs were placed the tables, and the platform for the speech making and the dancing, while at the base of the encircling hills surrounding the gra.s.sy meadow, hard by the grove another platform was placed, from which distinguished visitors might view with ease and comfort the contests upon the campus immediately adjacent.

Through the fence, let down for the purpose, the people drove in from the high road. They came in top buggies and in lumber wagons, in democrats and in "three seated rigs," while from the city came a "four-in-hand" with McGee, Cahill, and their backers, as well as other carriages filled with good citizens of London drawn thither by the promise of a day's sport of more than usual excellence or by the lure of a day in the woods and fields of G.o.d's open country. A specially fine carriage and pair, owned and driven by the honourable member of Parliament himself, conveyed Piper Sutherland, with colours streaming and pipes playing, to the picnic grounds. Warmly was the old piper welcomed, not only by the frisky cheery secretary, but by many old friends, and by none more warmly than by the Reverend Alexander Munro, the douce old bachelor Presbyterian minister of Maplehill, a great lover of the pipes and a special friend of Piper Sutherland. But the welcome was hardly over when once more the sound of the pipes was heard far up the side line.

"Surely that will be Gunn," said Mr. Munro.

Sutherland listened for a minute or two.

"No, it iss not Gunn. Iss Ross coming? No, yon iss not Ross. That will be a stranger," he continued, turning to the secretary, but the secretary remained silent, enjoying the old man's surprise and perplexity.

"Man, that iss not so bad piping! Not so bad at all! Who iss it?" he added with some impatience, turning upon the secretary again.

"Oh, that's Haley's team and I guess that's his hired man, a young fellow just out from Scotland," replied the secretary indifferently. "I am no great judge of the pipes myself, but he strikes me as a crackajack and I shouldn't be surprised if he would make you all sit up."

But the old piper's ear was closed to his words and open only to the strains of music ever drawing nearer.

"Aye, yon's a piper!" he said at length with emphasis. "Yon's a piper!"

"I only wish I had discovered him in time for a compet.i.tion," said Fatty regretfully.

"Aye," said Sutherland. "Yon's a piper worth playing against."

And very brave and gallant young Cameron looked as Tim swung his team through the fence and up to the platform under the trees where the great ones of the people were standing in groups. They were all there, Patterson the M.P.P., and Dr. Kane the Opposition candidate, Reeve Robertson, for ten years the Munic.i.p.al head of his county, Inspector Grant, a little man with a ma.s.sive head and a luminous eye, Patterson's understudy and generally regarded as his successor in Provincial politics, the Reverend Harper Freeman, Methodist minister, tall and lank, with shrewd kindly face and a twinkling eye, the Reverend Alexander Munro, the Presbyterian minister, solid and sedate, slow to take fire but when kindled a very furnace for heat. These, with their various wives and daughters, such as had them, and many others less notable but no less important, const.i.tuted a sort of informal reception committee under Fatty Freeman's general direction and management.

And here and there and everywhere crowds of young men and maidens, conspicuous among the latter Isa MacKenzie and her special friends, made merry with each other, as brave and gallant a company of st.u.r.dy sun-browned youths and bonnie wholesome la.s.sies as any land or age could ever show.

"Look at them!" cried the Reverend Harper Freeman, waving his hand toward the kaleidoscopic gathering. "There's your Dominion Day oration for you, Mr, Patterson."