"Bring him in," said a low voice; and before the sergeant could prevent her, the speaker, s.n.a.t.c.hing up the lantern, moved forward to meet the bearers. It was no sight for young eyes, and I saw Steel shudder; but there was wild Erse blood in the girl, and, holding one arm up, she stood erect, facing us again.

"This was my father, and he was a kind man to me," she said, with a choking gasp that was not a sob, and from which her voice broke high and shrill. "For the sake of a few acres and cattle he was driven to his death, and may black sorrow follow the man who ruined him. Sorrow and bitterness, with the fear that will drive sleep from him and waste him blood and bone until he takes the curse of the widow and orphan with him into the flame of h.e.l.l!"

Then the eerie voice sank again, and it was with a strange dignity she concluded: "I thank you, neighbors. You can bring him in."

Another paler flash lit up the prairie as they carried Redmond in, and, when a wagon came bouncing up to the fence, Steel said: "Here's Mrs.

Gordon; they have lost no time. Are you coming back, Ormesby? I've had about enough of this."

I had no wish to linger, and when we rode homewards through the deluge that now thrashed our faces, the sergeant, who overtook us, said: "Man, I feel creepy! She's no' quite canny, and yon was awesome."

"It was impressive; but you can't attach much importance to that poor girl's half-distracted raving," I said, partly to convince myself.

"Maybe no," said Sergeant Mackay. "Superst.i.tion, ye say; but I'm thinking there's a judgment here as well as hereafter, and I'd no' care to carry yon curse about with me."

CHAPTER IX

A PRAIRIE STUDY

So Redmond came home, and we buried him the following night by torchlight on a desolate ridge of the prairie. It was his daughter who ordered this; and if some of those who held aloft the flaming tow guessed his secret they kept it for the sake of the girl who stood with a stony, tearless face beside the open grave. He had doubtless yielded to strong compulsion when driven into a corner from which, for one of his nature, there was no escape, and now that he was dead, I had transferred my score against him to the debit of the usurer. As we rode home after the funeral I said something of the kind to Steel, who agreed with me.

"If you concluded to try it, Thorn and Jo and I, taking our affidavits as to what we saw that night, might make out a case for you; but I don't know that we could fix it on Lane, and it strikes me as mean to drag a dead man into the fuss for nothing," he said. "Redmond has gone to a place where he can't testify, but he has left his daughter, and she already has about all she can stand."

"Strikes me that way, too; and Lane's too smart to be corraled," added Thorn.

"We'll get even somehow without Redmond, and to that end you two will have to run Gaspard's Trail," I said. "I'm going down to Montreal with Carolan's cattle."

A project had for some little time been shaping itself in my mind. I had a small reversionary interest in some English property, and though it would be long before a penny of it could accrue to me, it seemed just possible to raise a little money on it. Considering Western rates of interest, n.o.body in Winnipeg would trouble with such an investment, but I had a distant and prosperous kinsman in Montreal who might find some speculator willing. Montreal was, however, at least two thousand miles away, and traveling expensive; but the Carolan brothers had promptly accepted my offer to take charge of their cattle destined for Europe, which implied free pa.s.ses both ways. It was not the mode of traveling one would have expected a prosperous rancher to adopt, but I needed every available dollar for the approaching struggle, and was well content when, after the untamed stock had nearly wrecked the railroad depot, we got them on board the cars.

The only time I ever saw Sergeant Mackay thoroughly disconcerted was that morning. We came up out of the empty prairie riding on the flanks of the herd. The beasts had suffered from the scarcity of water and were in an uncertain temper, while, as luck would have it, just as they surged close-packed between the bare frame houses, Mackay and a trooper came riding down the unpaved street of the little prairie town. There was no opening either to right or to left, and the more prudent storekeepers put up their shutters.

"Look as if they owned the universe, them police," said the man who cantered up beside me. "Sure, it would take the starch out of them if anything did start the cattle."

Mackay pulled up his horse and looked dubiously at the ma.s.s of tossing horns rolling towards him. "'Tis not in accordance with regulations to turn a big draft loose on a peaceful town. Why did ye not split them up?" he said. "Ye could be held responsible if there's damage done."

"I'm afraid these beasts don't understand regulations, and I had to bring them as best I could," I answered; and my a.s.sistant shouted, "Get out of the daylight, sergeant, dear, while your shoes are good."

Mackay seemed to resent this familiarity, and sat still, with one hand on his hip, an incarnation of official dignity, though he kept his eyes upon the fast advancing herd until the big freight locomotive which was awaiting us set up a discordant shrieking, and backed a row of clanging cars across the switches. That was sufficient for the untamed cattle.

With a thunder of pounding hoofs they poured tumultuously down the rutted street, and I caught a brief glimpse of the sergeant hurriedly wheeling his horse before everything was blotted out by the stirred-up dust. The streets of a prairie town are inches deep in powdered loam all summer and in bottomless sloughs all spring.

A wild shout of "Faugh-a-ballagh!" rang out; and I found myself riding faster than was prudent along the crazy plank sidewalk to pa.s.s and, if possible, swing the stampeding herd into the railroad corral. How my horse gained the three-foot elevation and avoided falling over the dry-goods bales and flour bags which lay littered everywhere, I do not remember; but my chief a.s.sistant, Dennis, who, yelling his hardest, charged recklessly down the opposite one, afterwards declared that his beast climbed up the steps like a kitten. Then, as I drew a little ahead, Mackay became dimly visible, riding bareheaded, as though for his life, with the horns, that showed through the tossed-up grit, a few yards behind him. Fortunately the stockyard gates were open wide, and Dennis came up at a gallop in time to head the herd off from a charge across the prairie, while a second man and I turned their opposite wing.

Mackay did his best to wheel his horse clear of the gates, but the beast was evidently bent on getting as far as possible from the oncoming ma.s.s, and resisted bit and spur. Then there was a great roar of laughter from loungers and stockyard hands as the dust swept up towards heaven and the drove thundered through the opening.

"Where's the sergeant?" I shouted; and Dennis, who chuckled so that his speech was thick, made answer: "Sure, he's in the corral. The beasts have run him in, but it's mighty tough beef they'd find him in the old country."

Dennis was right, for when the haze thinned the sergeant appeared, as white as a miller, flattened up against the rails, while a playful steer curveted in the vicinity, as though considering where to charge him. He was extricated by pulling down the rails, and accepted my apologies stiffly.

"This," he said, disregarding the offer of a lounger to wash him under the locomotive tank, "is not just what I would have expected of ye, Rancher Ormesby."

While the stock were being transferred to the cars amid an almost indescribable tumult, I met Miss Redmond on the little sod platform.

"I am glad I have met you, because I am going to Winnipeg, and may never see you again," she said. "There is much I do not understand, but I feel you have been wronged, and want to thank you for your consideration."

Redmond's daughter had received some training in an Eastern convent, it was said, and I found it hard to believe that the very pale, quietly-spoken girl was the one who had called down the curses upon Foster Lane. Still, I knew there was a strain of something akin to insanity in that family, and that, in addition, she was of the changeful nature which accompanies pure Celtic blood.

"You should not indulge in morbid fancies, and you have very little cause for grat.i.tude. We were sincerely sorry for you, and tried to do what we could," I said.

Ailin Redmond fixed her black eyes intently upon me, and I grew uneasy, seeing what suggested a smoldering fire in them. "You are not clever enough to deceive a woman," she said, with a disconcerting composure. "I do not know all, but perhaps I shall some day, and then, whatever it costs me, you and another person shall see justice done. It may not be for a long time, but I can wait; and I am going away from the prairie.

Still, I should like to ask you one question--how did your cattle get inside the fence?"

"The fire drove them; but instead of fretting over such things, you must try to forget the last two months as soon as possible," I answered as stoutly as I could, seeking meanwhile an excuse for flight, which was not lacking. "Those beasts will kill somebody if I neglect them any longer."

Ailin Redmond held out her hand to me, saying very quietly: "I shall never forget, and--it is no use protesting--a time will come when I shall understand it all clearly. Until then may the good saints protect you from all further evil, Rancher Ormesby."

As I hurried away a tented wagon lurched into the station, and when I last saw Redmond's daughter she stood near the lonely end of the platform talking earnestly with the traveling photographer.

Dennis had not recovered from his merriment when, much to the satisfaction of those we left behind, the long cars rolled out of the station, while many agents remembered our visit to the stations which succeeded. Blinding dust and fragments of ballast whirled about the cars as the huge locomotive hauled them rocking over the limitless levels.

From sunrise to sunset the gaunt telegraph poles reeled up from the receding horizon, growing from the size of matches to towering spars as they came, and then slowly diminishing far down the straight-ruled line again. For hours we lay on side-tracks waiting until one of the great inter-ocean expresses, running their portion of the race round half the globe, thundered past, white with the dust of a fifteen-hundred-mile journey, and then, with cars and cattle complaining, we lurched on our way again.

At times we led the beasts out in detachments to water at wayside stations, and there was usually much profanity and destruction of property before we got them back again, and left the agent to a.s.sess the damage to his feelings, besides splintered gangways and broken rails. It was at Portage or Brandon, I think, that one showed me a warning received by wire. "Through freight full of wild beasts coming along.

There'll be nothing left of your station if you let the lunatics in charge of them turn their menagerie out."

The beasts had, however, grown more subdued before the cars rolled slowly into Winnipeg, and gave us little trouble when, leaving the prairie behind, we sped, eastwards ever, past broad lake and foaming river, into the muskegs of Ontario; so that I had time for reflection when the great locomotive, panting on the grades, hauled us, poised giddily between crag face and deep blue water, along the Superior sh.o.r.e.

The Haldanes were in Montreal, and I wondered, in case chance threw me in their way, how they would greet me, and what I should say. I was apparently a prosperous rancher when they last spoke with me, and a tender of other men's cattle now, while it might well happen that in their eyes a further cloud rested upon me.

The long and weary journey came to an end at last, and when the big engines ceased their panting beside the broad St. Lawrence I left Dennis and his companions to divert themselves in Montreal after the fashion of their kind, and, arraying myself in civilized fashion, proceeded to my relative's offices.

A clerk said that Mr. Leyland, who was absent, desired me to follow him to his autumn retreat, but I first set about the business which had brought me, una.s.sisted. n.o.body, however, would entertain the species of investment I had to propose, and it was with a heavy heart I boarded the cars again some days later.

Leyland and his wife appeared unaffectedly glad to see me at their pretty summer-house, which stood above the smooth white shingle fringing a wide lake, and at sunset that evening I lay smoking among the boulders of a point, while his son and heir sat close by interrogating me. Part of the lake still reflected the afterglow, and after the monotonous levels of the prairie it rested my eyes to see the climbing pines tower above it in shadowy majesty. Their drowsy scent was soothing, and through the dusk that crept towards me from their feet, blinking lights cast trembling reflections across the gla.s.sy water. Several prosperous citizens retired at times to spend their leisure in what they termed camping on the islets of that lake.

"Air you poor and wicked?" asked the urchin, inspecting me critically.

"Very poor, and about up to the average for iniquity," I said; and the diminutive questioner rubbed his curly locks as though puzzled.

"Well, you don't quite look neither," he commented. "Poor men don't wear new store clothes. The last one I saw had big holes in his pants, and hadn't eaten nothing for three weeks, he said. Pop, he spanked me good 'cos I gave him four dollars off'n the bureau to buy some dinner with.

Say, how long was it since you had a square meal, anyway? You did mighty well at supper. I was watching you."

"It is about two months since I had a meal like that and then it was because a friend of mine gave it to me," I answered truthfully; and Leyland junior rubbed his head again.

"No--you don't look very low down, but you must be," he repeated. "Pop was talking 'bout you, and he said: 'You'll do your best to see the poor devil has a good time, 'Twoinette. From what I gather he needs it pretty bad.'"

I laughed, perhaps somewhat hollowly, for the child commented: "Won't you do that again? It's just like a loon. There's one lives over yonder, and he might answer. Ma, she says people should never make a noise when they laugh; but when I sent Ted on the roof to get my ball, and he fell into the rain-b.u.t.t, she just laughed worse than you, and her teeth came out."

"Your mother would probably spank you for telling that to strangers. But who is Ted?" I said, remembering that a loon is a water-bird that sets up an unearthly shrieking in the stillness of the night; and the urchin rebuked me with the cheerful disrespect for his seniors which characterizes the Colonial born.