"It seems to me that we must quietly try to come to an understanding once for all to-night. In the first place, why did you wish to marry me?"

Leland set his lips for a moment. It would have been a relief just then to tell her that it was to save her from Aylmer, but this appeared a brutality to which he could not force himself, for, in spite of what she had told him, he could not be sure that it had been his only reason. Her shrinking from him, painful to him as it was, nevertheless had its attraction.

"I believe I said that you were the most beautiful woman I had, at least, ever spoken to," he said. "I was a lonely man, and it seemed to me I might, perhaps, do big things some day, with a woman of your kind to teach me what I did not know. That was part of it, but I think there was more. It was a hard life and a bare one here, and I had a fancy that you could show me how much I might have that I was missing. A smile would have helped me through my difficulties; a word or two when one had to choose between the mean and right, and the knowledge that there was some one who believed in me, would have made another and gentler man of me. Well, it seems that you have none of them to give me."

He made an emphatic gesture. "Still, we have to face the position as it is, and my part's plain. Everything you have been used to you shall have, so far as I can get it for you. You can have any of your friends here who will make the journey and be civil to your farmer-husband, and you can go to them when it pleases you. To save you ever asking me for money, I will open you an account in a Winnipeg bank, and you need never see me unless you wish to."

"Ah," said Carrie, "you are, at least, generous. To make the understanding complete, what do you expect from me?"

Leland moved and laid his hand upon her shoulder again.

"Only to remember that, however little you think of your husband, you are my wife, after all."

The girl's cheeks burned, but she looked up at him with a little hard laugh. "I think I could have struck you for that, but it must go with the rest. Still, even if I were all that your imagination could picture me, and went as far as Mrs. Heaton did, why should it trouble you?"

Leland stooped lower over her with the veins swollen on his forehead and a glint in his eyes.

"You and your father tricked me--taking all I had to offer for nothing,"

he said. "I suppose I ought to hate you, too--and still I can't."

Once more he gripped her cruelly. "By the Lord, dolt that I am, I think I almost love you for the grit that made you show your scorn. Still, that doesn't count. It is for me to go it alone."

He let his grasp relax and left her suddenly, turning at the door.

"You will want a companion. Will you write for Mrs. Annersly to-morrow?"

"I will," said Carrie coldly. "Under the circ.u.mstances it is advisable.

She will be a protection."

He went out and she saw no more of him for a day or two, but that night she found a blue mark upon the whiteness of her shoulder.

CHAPTER VIII

LELAND SEEKS DISTRACTION

Dusk was creeping up from the eastwards across the great snow-sheeted plain when Leland pulled his horses up where a little by-track branched off from the beaten trail. Behind him the wilderness, losing its gleaming whiteness and fading into shades of soft blue-grey, ran level to the hard blueness on the northern horizon. In front of him there were rolling rises ridged with sinuous bands of birches, black in broken ma.s.ses against the lingering light in the south and west. There was room for wheat enough to glut markets of the world on the leagues of rich black loam that undulated to the frozen waters of Lake Winnipeg. Already miles of it were banded together by belts of two-foot stubble; but as yet the plough had not invaded the land of bluff and ravine, creek and coulee, where the s.h.a.ggy broncho and the wild steer ran.

Leland was wrapped to the eyes in an old fur coat, and his breath rose like steam into the dead still air. A cloud of thin vapour floated above the horses. It was exceptionally cold, and Gallwey, who sat half-frozen beneath the piled-up robes, wondered why his companion had pulled the team up there when they were within some twenty minutes' ride from shelter. Still he did not consider it advisable to inquire, for certain colts of a blooded sire had been missing, and Leland, who had shown signs of temper during the day, looked unusually grim. Flinging the reins to Gallwey, he stepped down stiffly from the sleigh.

"Drive on slowly, Tom. You don't want to keep a warm team standing in this frost," he said.

Gallwey contrived to clutch the reins, though his hands were numbed through the big mittens.

"What are you going to do?" he asked.

"Look at these tracks," said Leland drily. "They kind of interest me."

Gallwey spoke to the team, and the sleigh, which consisted of a light waggon-box mounted on a runner frame, slid on. Sleighs such as are used about the Eastern cities are not common in the Northwest, where, indeed, the snow seldom lies so deep or long; and the prairie farmer either makes shift with his waggon or contents himself with the humble bob-sled. He now noticed what he had been too cold to notice before, that there was something peculiar about the print of hoofs breaking out here and there, a blur of scattered blue smudges in the trail he followed. Some seemed deeper than others, and there were long s.p.a.ces where they disappeared altogether. This did not seriously concern him, so he drove on until he reached the first grove of stunted birches which clung beneath the shelter of a winding rise. Here he waited until Leland rejoined him. It was quite dark now, and he could not see his comrade's face at all, but, as he flung himself into the sleigh, he laughed in a fashion of his that Gallwey knew usually portended trouble.

"Go on," Leland said. "I want my supper, and a little talk with Jeff Kimball, too. One would have figured that man had a little more sense in him. It's 'most two weeks, I think, since you had any snow?"

"A week last Monday. Just enough to dust the trail. Is there anything particular to be deduced from that?"

"Only that we had the rustlers round next day, and I've a kind of notion my colts went then."

Gallwey sat silent while the sleigh glided on. He did not know, of course, that Leland had quarrelled with his wife, but he had noticed the man's grimness during the day, and now he was struck with the ring of his voice as he spoke of the rustlers.

The cattle war in Montana across the neighbouring border, in which the great ranchers and small homesteaders contended for the land, was over; and, when the United States cavalry restored order, little bands of broken men, ruined in the struggle, and cattle-riders who found their occupation gone, had undertaken a smuggling business along the frontier.

The Prohibition Act was enforced in neighbouring parts of Canada, and there was accordingly an excellent profit to be made on any whisky they could run. There was, too, among the Chinamen in the United States a good demand for opium, which it was supposed came in via Vancouver. For the most part, the smugglers were tolerated, perhaps from the same motives that prompt otherwise honest people to pardon outlaws who rob the rich and the government. At any rate, a farmer seldom grumbled when a horse was requisitioned, though he knew that the animal might not be returned. As a reward for his silence, he was likely to find mysterious cases of whisky near his trail. His opposite conduct could carry with it many results. For instance, gra.s.s-fires, so dangerous to homesteads and ripening crops, had a suspicious way of starting in the harvest season.

The small farmer, accordingly, was loth to trouble the mounted police about anything he might have heard or seen, and the rustlers as a rule knew when to stop, and only seized a horse or killed a steer for meat when they urgently needed it.

"Do you think it's worth while making trouble?" said Gallwey, suggestively.

"I want my colts back," said Leland. "I guess I'm going to get them.

Shake that team up. It's getting cold."

Gallwey, who was half frozen already, called to the horses, and in another ten minutes they came into sight of a blaze of cheerful radiance in the gloom of a big bluff. Leland held the big cattle run in the vicinity, though it lay a long ride from his homestead.

Gradually a little log house grew into shape, and Leland, who drove the sleigh round to the back of it before he got out, turned to the man who had slouched from the doorway.

"I guess we'll leave the sleigh here," he said. "We have come for the night, and we'll put the team in while you get supper."

Though he could not see the man's face for the dark, Gallwey fancied he was a little disconcerted at this announcement. In another half-hour, however, they were sitting down to a meal. Leland said very little until it was over, when, taking his pipe out, he pulled a hide chair up to the stove and looked at the man. "Whom have you had round the place the last week or so, Jeff?" he said.

"Thompson," said the other. "He brought four or five horses along."

"He did. I saw his tracks where he headed off the trail for the back range. Quite sure he hadn't any more? That reminds me; I'll want to see him in a day or two about those steers."

Gallwey fancied this last was meant as an intimation that accuracy was advisable, and he watched the big, loose-limbed man who was filling his pipe just then. He appeared uneasy under all this scrutiny, for Leland was also quietly regarding him.

"Now I come to recollect, it was four."

"Anybody else?" said Leland.

"Custer; he came along with a bob-sled yesterday."

"You can't think of any more?"

"No," said the other man, who flashed a suspicious glance at him. "I can't quite figure how I could when they weren't there."

Leland smoked on tranquilly, apparently considering for a moment or two, and then, straightening himself a little, looked hard at the man.

"Jeff," he said quietly, "it's a kind of pity you don't know enough to make a decent liar."