CHAPTER I

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THE IMPOSTOR.

[Illustration: "In the meanwhile, Maud Barrington sat by the open window

in her room." (Chapter XVI.)]

THE IMPOSTOR

by

HAROLD BINDLOSS

Author of "Hawtrey's Deputy," "The Liberationist,"

"A Sower of Wheat," "The Pioneer," etc.

Ward, Lock & Co., Limited

London, Melbourne and Toronto

CONTENTS

I Rancher Witham

II Lance Courthorne

III Trooper Shannon's Quarrel

IV In the Bluff

V Miss Barrington Comes Home

VI Anticipations

VII Witham's Decision

VIII Witham Comes to Silverdale

IX An Armistice

X Maud Barrington's Promise

XI Speed the Plough

XII Mastery Recognized

XIII A Fair Advocate

XIV The Unexpected

XV Facing the Flame

XVI Maud Barrington is Merciless

XVII With the Stream

XVIII Under Test

XIX Courthorne Blunders

XX The Face at the Window

XXI Colonel Barrington is Convinced

XXII Sergeant Stimson Confirms his Suspicions

XXIII The Revelation

XXIV Courthorne makes Reparation

XXV Witham Rides Away

XXVI Reinstation

THE IMPOSTOR

CHAPTER I

RANCHER WITHAM

It was a bitter night, for although there was no snow as yet, the

frost had bound the prairie in its iron grip, when Rancher Witham

stood shivering in a little Canadian settlement in the great, lonely

land which runs north from the American frontier to Athabasca. There

was no blink of starlight in the murky sky, and a stinging wind that

came up out of the great waste of grass moaned about the frame houses

clustering beside the trail that led south over the limited levels to

the railroad and civilization. It chilled Witham through his somewhat

tattered furs, and he strode up and down, glancing expectantly into

the darkness, and then across the unpaved street, where the ruts were

ploughed a foot deep in the prairie sod, towards the warm, red glow

from the windows of the wooden hotel. He knew that the rest of the

outlying farmers and ranchers who had ridden in for their letters were

sitting snug about the stove, but it was customary for all who sought

shelter there to pay for their share of the six o'clock supper, and

the half-dollar Witham had then in his pocket was required for other

purposes.

He had also retained through all his struggles a measure of his pride,

and because of it strode up and down buffeted by the blasts until a

beat of horse-hoofs came out of the darkness and was followed by a

rattle of wheels. It grew steadily louder, a blinking ray of

brightness flickered across the frame houses, and presently dark

figures were silhouetted against the light on the hotel veranda as a

lurching wagon drew up beneath it. Two dusky objects, shapeless in

their furs, sprang down, and one stumbled into the post office close

by with a bag while the other man answered the questions hurled at him

as he fumbled with stiffened fingers at the harness.

"Late? Well, you might be thankful you've got your mail at all," he

said. "We had to go round by Willow Bluff, and didn't think we'd get

through the ford. Ice an inch thick, anyway, and Charley talked that

much he's not said anything since, even when the near horse put his

foot into a badger hole."

Rude banter followed this, but Witham took no part in it. Hastening

into the post office, he stood betraying his impatience by his very

impassiveness while a sallow-faced woman tossed the letters out upon

the counter. At last she took up two of them, and the man's fingers

trembled a little as he stretched out his hand, when she said--

"That's all there are for you."

Witham recognized the writing on the envelopes, and it was with

difficulty he held his eagerness in check, but other men were waiting

for his place, and he went out and crossed the street to the hotel

where there was light to read by. As he entered it a girl, bustling

about a long table in the big stove-warmed room, turned with a little

smile.

"It's only you!" she said. "Now I was figuring it was Lance

Courthorne."

Witham, impatient as he was, stopped and laughed, for the

hotel-keeper's daughter was tolerably well-favoured and a friend of

his.

"And you're disappointed?" he said. "I haven't Lance's good looks, or

his ready tongue."

The room was empty, for the guests were thronging about the post

office then, and the girl's eyes twinkled as she drew back a pace and

surveyed the man. There was nothing in his appearance that would have

aroused a stranger's interest, or attracted more than a passing

glance, and he stood before her in a very old fur coat, with a fur cap

that was in keeping with it in his hand. His face had been bronzed

almost to the colour of a Blackfoot Indian's by frost and wind and

sun, and it was of English type from the crisp fair hair above the

broad forehead to the somewhat solid chin. The mouth was hidden by the

bronze-tinted moustache, and the eyes alone, were noticeable. They

were grey, and there was a steadiness in them which was almost unusual

even in that country, where men look into long distances. For the

rest, he was of average stature, and stood impassively straight,

looking down upon the girl without either grace or awkwardness, while

his hard brown hands, suggested, as his attire did, strenuous labour

for a very small reward.

"Well," said the girl with Western frankness, "there's a kind of stamp

on Lance that you haven't got. I figure he brought it with him from

the old country. Still, one might take you for him if you stood with

the light behind you, and you're not quite a bad-looking man. It's a

kind of pity you're so solemn."

Witham smiled. "I don't fancy that's astonishing after losing two

harvests in succession," he said. "You see, there's nobody back there

in the old country to send remittances to me."

The girl nodded with quick sympathy. "Oh, yes. The times are bad," she

said. "Well, you read your letters; I'm not going to worry you."

Witham sat down and opened the first envelope under the big lamp. It

was from a land agent and mortgage-broker, and his face grew a trifle

grimmer as he read, "In the present condition of the money market your

request that we should carry you over is unreasonable, and we regret

that unless you can extinguish at least half the loan we will be

compelled to foreclose upon your holding."

There was a little more of it, but that was sufficient for Witham, who

knew it meant disaster, and it was with the feeling of one clinging

desperately to the last shred of hope he tore open the second

envelope. The letter it held was from a friend he had made in a

Western city, and once entertained for a month at his ranch, but the

man had evidently sufficient difficulties of his own to contend with.

"Very sorry, but it can't be done," he wrote. "I'm loaded up with

wheat nobody will buy, and couldn't raise five hundred dollars to lend

any one just now,"

Witham sighed a little, but when he rose and slowly straightened

himself nobody would have suspected he was looking ruin in the face.

He had fought a slow, losing battle for six weary years, holding on

doggedly though defeat appeared inevitable, and now when it had come

he bore it impassively, for the struggle which, though he was scarcely

twenty-six, had crushed all mirth and brightness out of his life, had

given him endurance in place of them. Just then a man came bustling

towards him, with the girl who bore a tray close behind.

"What are you doing with that coat on?" he said. "Get it off and sit

down right there. The boys are about through with the mail and

supper's ready,"

Witham glanced at the steaming dishes hungrily, for he had passed most

of the day in the bitter frost, eating very little, and there was

still a drive of twenty miles before him.

"It is time I was taking the trail," he said.

He was sensible of a pain in his left side, which, as other men have

discovered, not infrequently follows enforced abstinence from food,

but he remembered what he wanted the half-dollar in his pocket for.

The hotel-keeper had possibly some notion of the state of affairs, for

he laughed a little.

"You've got to sit down," he said. "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."

Witham 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 Witham

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 Witham 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

neighbour. 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 Witham 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.

Witham 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 in 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 Witham'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 Witham 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

swishen 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 Witham 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 off at other times. They were

blurred recollections of the land he had left eight years ago,

pictures of sheltered England, half-forgotten music, the voices of

friends who no longer remembered him, and the smiles in a girl's

bright eyes. Then he settled himself more firmly in the driving-seat,

and with numbed fingers sought a tighter grip of the reins as the

memory of the girl's soft answer to a question he had asked brought

his callow ambitions back.

He was to hew his way to fortune in the West, and then come back for

her, but the girl who had clung to him with wet cheeks when he left

her had apparently grown tired of waiting, and Witham sent back her

letters in return for a silver-printed card. That was six years ago,

and now none of the dollars he had brought into the country remained

to him. He realized, dispassionately and without egotism, that this

was through no fault of his, for he knew that better men had been

crushed and beaten.

It was, however, time he had done with these reflections, for while he

sat half-dazed and more than half-frozen the miles had been flitting

by, and now the team knew they were not very far from home. Little by

little their pace increased, and Witham was almost astonished to see

another bluff black against the night ahead of him. As usual in that

country, the willows and birches crawled up the sides and just showed

their heads above the sinuous crest of a river hollow. It was very

dark when the wagon lurched in among them, and it cost the man an

effort to discern the winding trail which led down into the blackness

of the hollow. In places the slope was almost precipitous, and it

behoved him to be careful of the horses, which could not be replaced.

Without them he could not plough in spring, and his life did not

appear of any especial value in comparison with theirs just then.

The team, however, were evidently bent on getting home as soon as

possible, and Witham's fingers were too stiff to effectively grasp the

reins. A swinging bough also struck one of the horses, and when it

plunged and flung up its head the man reeled a little in his seat.

Before he recovered the team were going down-hill at a gallop. Witham

flung himself bodily backwards with tense muscles, and the reins

slipping a trifle in his hands, knowing that though he bore against

them with all his strength the team were leaving the trail. Then the

wagon jolted against a tree, one horse stumbled, picked up its stride,

and went on at a headlong gallop. The man felt the wind rush past him

and saw the dim trees whirl by, but he could only hold on and wonder

what would take place when they came to the bottom. The bridge the

trail went round by was some distance to the right and because the

frost had just set in he knew the ice on the river would not bear the

load, even if the horses could keep their footing.

He had not, however, long to wonder. Once more a horse stumbled, there

was a crash, and a branch hurled Witham backwards into the wagon,

which came to a standstill suddenly. When he rose something warm was

running down his face, and there was a red smear on the hand he

lighted the lantern with. When that was done he flung himself down

from the wagon, dreading what he would find. The flickering radiance

showed him that the pole had snapped, and while one bronco still stood

trembling on its feet the other lay inert amidst a tangle of harness.

The man's face grew a trifle grimmer as he threw the light upon it,

and then, stooping, glanced at one doubled leg. It was evident that

fate, which did nothing by halves, had dealt him a crushing blow. The

last faint hope he clung to had vanished now.

He was, however, a humane man, and considerate of the beasts that

worked for him, and accordingly thrust his hand inside the old fur

coat, when he had loosed the uninjured horse, and drew out a

long-bladed knife. Then he knelt and, setting down the lantern, felt

for the place to strike. When he found it his courage almost deserted

him, and meeting the eyes that seemed to look up at him with dumb

appeal, turned his head away. Still, he was a man who would not shirk

a painful duty, and shaking off the sense of revulsion turned again

and stroked the beast's head.

"It's all I can do for you," he said.

Then his arm came down, and a tremor ran through the quivering frame,

while Witham set his lips tightly as his hand grew warm. The thing was

horrible to him, but the life he led had taught him the folly of

weakness, and he was too pitiful to let his squeamishness overcome

him.

Still, he shivered when it was done, and rubbing the knife in the

withered leaves, rose and made shift to gird a rug about the uninjured

horse. Then he cut the reins and tied them, and mounting without

stirrups rode towards the bridge. The horse went quietly enough now,

and the man allowed it to choose its way. He was going home to find

shelter from the cold, because his animal instincts prompted him, but

otherwise, almost without volition, in a state of dispassionate

indifference. Nothing more he fancied, could well befall him.