FIRE AND HAIL
On the morning after her return from Winnipeg, Beatrice sat in her
father's study, with Mowbray facing her across the table. He looked
thoughtful, but not so shocked and indignant as she had expected.
"So you are determined to throw Harding over!"
"Yes," Beatrice said in a strained voice. "It seems impossible to do
anything else."
"A broken engagement's a serious matter; we Mowbrays keep our word. I
hope you're quite sure of your ground."
"What I heard left no room for doubt."
"Did you hear the man's defense?"
"I refused to listen," said Beatrice coldly. "That he should try to
excuse himself only made it worse."
"I'm not sure that's very logical. I'll confess that Harding and I
seldom agree, but one must be fair."
"Does that mean that one ought to be lenient?" Beatrice asked with an
angry sparkle in her eyes.
Mowbray was conscious of some embarrassment. His ideas upon the subject
were not sharply defined, but if it had not been his daughter who
questioned him he could have expressed them better. Beatrice ought to
have left her parents to deal with a delicate matter like this, but
instead she had boldly taken it into her own hands. He had tried to
bring up his children well, but the becoming modesty which characterized
young women in his youth had gone.
"No," he answered; "not exactly lenient. But the thing may not be so bad
as you think--and one must make allowances. Then, a broken engagement
reflects upon both parties. Even if one of them has an unquestionable
grievance, it proves that that person acted very rashly in making a
promise in the first instance."
"Yes," said Beatrice; "that is my misfortune. I was rash and easily
deceived. I made the bargain in confiding ignorance, without reserve,
while the man kept a good deal back."
"But your mother tells me that he declared he had never seen the woman;
and Harding is not a liar."
"I used to think so, but it looks as if I were mistaken," Beatrice
answered bitterly as she turned away.
Leaving him, she found a quiet spot in the shadow of a bluff, and sat
down to grapple with her pain. It had hurt more than she had thought
possible to cast off Harding, and she could bear her trouble only by
calling pride to her aid. There was, she told herself, much about the
man that had from the first offended her, but she had made light of it,
believing him steadfast and honorable. Now she knew she had been
deceived. She had been ready to throw away all the privileges of her
station; she had disregarded her friends' opinion--and this was her
reward! The man for whom she would have made the sacrifice was gross and
corrupt; but nobody should guess that she found it strangely hard to
forget him.
Lance came upon her, there at the edge of the woods; but her head was
buried in her arms and she did not see him. The boy turned at once and
went to have a talk with his father. His expression was very resolute
when he entered Mowbray's study.
"What are you going to do about Bee's trouble, sir?" he asked abruptly.
His father gave him an amused smile.
"I haven't decided," he said. "Have you anything useful to suggest?"
"I feel that you ought to put it right."
"Can you tell me how?"
"No. Of course, it's a delicate matter; but you have a wider knowledge
and experience."
"Umh!" the Colonel grunted. "Why do you conclude that your sister's
wrong?"
"I know the man. He's not the kind she thinks."
"Your mother saw the woman, and heard what she said."
"There's been a mistake," Lance persisted. "I've a suspicion that
somebody may have put her up to it."
"Made a plot to blacken Harding, you mean? Rather far-fetched, isn't it?
Whom do you suspect?"
Lance turned red, for his father's tone was sarcastic, and he thought of
Gerald; but he could not drop a hint against his brother.
"I don't know yet, but I'm going to find out."
"When you have found out, you can tell me," Mowbray answered, and gave
the boy an approving smile. "You're quite right in standing by your
friend, and you certainly owe Harding something. If you can prove him
better than we think, nobody will be more pleased than I."
Lance had to be satisfied with this. He did not know how to set about
his investigations, but he determined to visit Winnipeg as soon as he
could.
For the next week or two there was quietness at the Grange. The dry
weather held, and boisterous winds swept the sunburned plain. The sod
cracked, the wheat was shriveling, and although in public men and women
made a brave pretense of cheerfulness, in private they brooded over the
ruin that threatened them. To make things worse, three or four days a
week, heavy clouds that raced across the sky all morning gathered in
solid banks at noon, and then, as if in mockery, broke up and drove
away. Few of the settlers had much reserve capital, and the low prices
obtained for the last crop had strained their finances; but Harding was,
perhaps, threatened most.
He had, as had been his custom, boldly trusted to the earth all he had
won by previous effort, and this year it looked as if the soil would
refuse its due return. Still, his taking such a risk was only partly due
to the prompting of his sanguine temperament. While he had hope of
winning Beatrice he must stake his all on the chance of gaining
influence and wealth. He had lost her; but after a few black days during
which he had thought of abandoning the struggle and letting things
drift, he quietly resumed his work. What he had begun must be finished,
even if it brought no advantage to himself. The disaster that seemed
unavoidable braced him to sterner effort; but when dusk settled down he
stood in the dim light and brooded over his withering wheat. Being what
he was, a man of constructive genius, it cut deep that he must watch the
grain that had cost so much thought and toil go to waste; but the red
band on the prairie's edge and the luminous green above it held only a
menace.
One day Harding drove with Devine to a distant farm, and they set out on
the return journey late in the afternoon. It was very hot, for the wind
had died away, and deep stillness brooded over the lifeless plain. The
gophers that made their burrows in the trail had lost their usual
briskness, and sat up on their haunches until the wheels were almost
upon them. The prairie-chickens the horses disturbed would not rise, but
ran a few yards and sank down in the parched grass. The sky was leaden,
and the prairie glimmered a curious, livid white. Harding's skin
prickled, and he was conscious of a black depression and a headache.
"If this only meant rain!" he exclaimed dejectedly. "But I've given up
hope."
"Something's surely coming," Devine replied, glancing at a great bank of
cloud that had changed its color to an oily black. "If this weather
holds for another week, the crop will be wiped out, but somehow I can't
believe we'll all go broke."
Harding had once thought as his comrade did, but now his optimistic
courage had deserted him. The future was very dark. He meant to fight
on, but defeat seemed certain. It would be easier to bear because he had
already lost what he valued most.
Presently the wagon wheels sank in yielding sand, and that roused him.
"Our hauling costs us high with these loose trails. I'd counted on
cutting more straw with the crop this year and using it to bind the
road. But now we may not have any grain to send out."
The plan was characteristic of him, though his dejection was not. As a
rule, straw has no value in a newly opened country, and not much is cut
with the grain, the tall stubble being burned off; but Harding had seen
a use for the waste material in improving the means of transport.
"Well," said Devine, "we'd better hustle. The team won't stand for a
storm."
Harding urged the horses, and as the wheels ran out on firm ground the
pace grew faster, and a distant bluff began to rise from the waste. When
they were a mile or two from the woods there was a rumble of thunder and
the light grew dim. The dark sky seemed descending to meet the earth,
the bluff grew indistinct, but the burned grass still retained its
ghostly whiteness. Then the temperature suddenly fell, and when a puff
of cold wind touched his face Harding used the whip. He knew what was
going to happen.
Throwing up their heads in alarm as a pale flash glimmered across the
trail, the team broke into a gallop, while the light wagon rocked and
swung as the wheels jolted over hummocks and smashed through scrubby
brush. Harding did not think he could hold the horses in the open when
the storm broke, and he did not wish to be hurled across the rugged
prairie behind a bolting team. Springing down when they reached the
trees, he and Devine locked the wheels and then stood waiting at the
horses' heads. All was now very still again, but a gray haze was closing
in. Now and then leaves stirred and rustled, and once or twice a dry
twig came down. The faint crackle it made jarred on the men's tingling
nerves.
Harding found it difficult to keep still. He slowly filled his pipe for
the sake of occupation. The match he struck burned steadily, but its
pale flame was suddenly lost in a dazzling glare as the lightning fell
in an unbroken fork from overhead to a corner of the bluff. Then the
pipe dropped and was trodden on, as the men swayed to and fro, using all
their strength to hold the plunging team. It was only for a moment they
heard the battering hoofs, for a deafening crash that rolled across the
heavens drowned all other sound, and as it died away the trees began to
moan. A few large drops of rain fell, and then, as the men watched it,
gathering a faint hope, the rain turned to hail. A savage wind struck
the bluff, the air got icy cold, and the hail changed from fine grains
to ragged lumps. Harding could hear it roar among the trees between the
peals of thunder, until the scream of wind and the groan of bending
branches joined in and formed a wild tumult of sound.
Though the men stood to lee of the woods, the hail found them out,
bruising their faces and cutting their wet hands; even their bodies
afterward felt as if they had been beaten. It raked the bluff like
rifle-fire, cutting twigs and shredding leaves, and the wild wind swept
the wreckage far to leeward. Light branches were flying, and Harding was
struck, but his grapple with the maddened horses demanded all his
thought. The lightning leaped about them and blazed through the woods,
silhouetting bending trees and the horses' tense, wet bodies, before it
vanished and left what seemed to be black darkness behind.
Then, when the men were getting exhausted, the thunder grew fainter and
the bitter wind died away. There was a strange, perplexing stillness in
the heavy gloom, until the cloud-ranks parted and a ray of silver light
broke through. The grass steamed as the beam moved across it, and
suddenly the bluff was warm and bright, and they could see the havoc
that had been made.
Torn branches hung from the poplars, slender birch-twigs lay in heaps,
and banks of hail, now changing fast to water, stretched out into the
wet, sparkling plain.
Harding's face was very stern as he picked up a handful of the icy
pieces.
"With a strong wind behind it, this stuff would cut like a knife," he
said. "Well, it has saved our putting the binders into the grain."
Devine made a sign of gloomy agreement. There was no hope left; the crop
they had expected much from was destroyed.
They clambered into the wagon and drove for some time before the first
farmstead began to lift above the edge of the plain. In the meanwhile
the hail that glistened in the grass tussocks melted away, and only a
few dark clouds drifting to the east marred the tranquillity of the
summer evening. The men were silent, but Devine understood why his
comrade drove so hard, holding straight across dry sloos where the tall
grass crackled about the wheels, and over billowy rises where the
horses' feet sank deep in sand. He was anxious to learn the worst, and
Devine feared that it would prove very bad.
At last they crossed a higher ridge and Harding, looking down, saw his
homestead lying warm in the evening light. He had often watched it rise
out of the prairie, with a stirring of his blood. It was his; much of it
had been built by his own labor; and he had won from the desolate waste
the broad stretch of fertile soil that rolled away behind it. But he now
gazed at it with a frown. As the buildings grew into shape, dark patches
of summer fallow broke the gray sweep of grass, and then the neutral
green of alfalfa and clover, running in regular oblongs, appeared.
Behind, extending right across the background, lay the wheat, a smear of
indefinite color darker than the plain. That was all they could see of
it at that distance. They were going fast, but Harding lashed the horses
in his impatience.
Devine, however, looked more closely about, and it struck him that the
ground had dried with remarkable rapidity; indeed, if he had not felt
the hail, he could hardly have believed the plain had been wet. For all
that, not venturing to hope for fear of meeting a heavier shock, he said
nothing to his comrade, and presently they dipped into a hollow. They
could not see across the ridge in front, and Harding urged his horses
savagely when they came to the ascent. The animals' coats were foul,
spume dripped from the bits, and their sides were white where the traces
slapped, but they breasted the hill pluckily. The men were grim and
highly strung, braced to meet the worst. To Harding it meant ruin and
the downfall of all his plans; to Devine his wedding put off. It might
be some years before he made good, and he feared that he could no longer
count on his comrade's help. If Harding were forced to give up his farm,
he might leave the prairie.
At last, when the suspense was telling upon both, they reached the
summit and Harding stood up to see better.
"Why, the ground has not been wet!" he exclaimed, unbelieving. "The hail
has not touched us!"
It was true; the fire and the ragged ice had passed over that belt of
prairie and left its wake of ruin farther on. Still, though the wheat
was none the worse, it was none the better. It stood as when they had
seen it last, limp from drought and cut by blowing sand. Disaster was
only suspended, not removed. But there was hope.
"Things don't look half so bad as they might!" said Harding cheerfully.
"I don't deserve it. I got savage and bitter; and bitterness is a bad
substitute for grit. Now I'll brace up, and face the future the way a
man ought!"