Winston of the Prairie | Page 3

"Now, after the way you fixed me up
when I stopped at your ranch, you don't figure I'd let you go before you
had some supper with me?"
Winston may have been unduly sensitive, but he shook his head.
"You're very good, but it's a long ride, and I'm going now," he said.
"Good-night, Nettie."
He turned as he spoke, with the swift decision that was habitual with
him, and when he went out the girl glanced at her father reproachfully.
"You always get spoiling things when you put your hand in," she said.
"Now that man's hungry, and I'd have fixed it so he'd have got his
supper if you had left it to me."
The hotel-keeper laughed a little. "I'm kind of sorry for Winston
because there's grit in him, and he's never had a show," he said. "Still, I
figure he's not worth your going out gunning after, Nettie."
The girl said nothing, but there was a little flush in her face which had
not been there before, when she busied herself with the dishes.
In the meanwhile Winston was harnessing two bronco horses to a very
dilapidated wagon. They were vicious beasts, but he had bought them
cheap from a man who had some difficulty in driving them, while the
wagon had been given him, when it was apparently useless, by a
neighbor. The team had, however, already covered thirty miles that day,
and started homewards at a steady trot without the playful kicking they
usually indulged in. Here and there a man sprang clear of the rutted
road, but Winston did not notice him or return his greeting. He was
abstractedly watching the rude frame houses flit by, and wondering,
while the pain in his side grew keener, when he would get his supper,

for it happens not infrequently that the susceptibilities are dulled by a
heavy blow, and the victim finds a distraction that is almost welcome in
the endurance of a petty trouble.
Winston was very hungry, and weary alike in body and mind. The sun
had not risen when he left his homestead, and he had passed the day
under a nervous strain, hoping, although it seemed improbable, that the
mail would bring him relief from his anxieties. Now he knew the worst,
he could bear it as he had borne the loss of two harvests, and the
disaster which followed in the wake of the blizzard that killed off his
stock; but it seemed unfair that he should endure cold and hunger too,
and when one wheel sank into a rut and the jolt shook him in every
stiffened limb, he broke out with a hoarse expletive. It was his first
protest against the fate that was too strong for him, and almost as he
made it he laughed.
"Pshaw! There's no use kicking against what has to be, and I've got to
keep my head just now," he said.
There was no great comfort in the reflection, but it had sustained him
before, and Winston's head was a somewhat exceptional one, though
there was as a rule nothing in any way remarkable about his
conversation, and he was apparently merely one of the many
quietly-spoken, bronze-faced men who are even by their blunders
building up a great future for the Canadian dominion. He accordingly
drew his old rug tighter round him, and instinctively pulled his fur cap
lower down when the lights of the settlement faded behind him and the
creaking wagon swung out into the blackness of the prairie. It ran back
league beyond league across three broad provinces, and the wind that
came up out of the great emptiness emphasized its solitude. A man
from the cities would have heard nothing but the creaking of the wagon
and the drumming fall of hoofs, but Winston heard the grasses patter as
they swayed beneath the bitter blasts stiff with frost, and the moan of
swinging boughs in a far-off willow bluff. It was these things that
guided him, for he had left the rutted trail, and here and there the swish
beneath the wheels told of taller grass, while the bluff ran black athwart
the horizon when that had gone. Then twigs crackled beneath them as

the horses picked their way amidst the shadowy trees stunted by a
ceaseless struggle with the wind, and Winston shook the creeping
drowsiness from him when they came out into the open again, for he
knew it is not advisable for any man with work still to do to fall asleep
under the frost of that country.
Still, he grew a trifle dazed as the miles went by, and because of it
indulged in memories he had shaken oft at other times. They were
blurred recollections of the land he had left eight years ago,