THE MORTGAGE DEED
Alison was sitting alone in the general living-room of the Farquhar
homestead about an hour after breakfast when she laid down her sewing
with a start as a man whom she had not heard approaching suddenly
appeared in the doorway. He stood there, looking at her with what she
felt was a very suspicious curiosity, and there was no doubt that his
appearance was decidedly against him. His clothing, which had been
rudely patched with cotton flour-bags, was old and stained with soil;
his face was hard and grim; and she grew apprehensive under his fixed
scrutiny.
"Where's the rest of you?" he asked after an unpleasant silence of a few
moments.
Alison felt that it would be singularly injudicious to inform him, and
while she hesitated, wondering what to answer, he strode into the room
and fell heavily into the nearest chair.
"You'll excuse me," he apologized. "I'm played out."
The signs of weariness were plain on him, and Alison became a little
reassured. After all, she remembered, there was nothing of very much
value in the homestead; and she had never as yet had any reason to fear
the men she had come across upon the prairie. In fact, though one had
wanted to marry her offhand, their general conduct compared very
favorably with that of one or two whom she had met in English cities.
"Have you come far?" she asked.
"From the railroad--on my feet," answered the man. "I left it about
midnight two nights ago, and since then I've only had a morsel of food."
Then he smiled at her. "You haven't told me yet where Harry Farquhar and
his wife have gone."
It was clear that he had already satisfied himself that they were out,
and Alison reluctantly admitted it.
"Mrs. Farquhar has driven over to the bluff," she said. "She took her
husband with her, but she was to drop him at the ravine where the
birches are. He wanted to cut some poles."
The look of annoyance in the man's face further reassured her, as it
implied that he regretted Farquhar's absence almost as much as she had
done a few moments earlier.
"It's a sure thing I can't wait till they come back, and the trouble is
I can't make Mrs. Calvert's place without a rest, either."
He paused and gazed searchingly at Alison.
"You're Miss Leigh, aren't you? I guess you could be trusted; I've heard
of you."
Alison's astonishment was evident, and he smiled.
"It's quite likely," he added dryly, "that you've heard of me. My name's
Jake Winthrop."
Alison sat very still, and it was a moment or two before she spoke.
"What do you want?" she asked.
"Breakfast, if it wouldn't be too much trouble. Then, as Farquhar's out,
there's a piece of paper I'd like to give you. Guess it would be safer
out of my hands; the police troopers are after me."
Alison set the kettle and frying-pan on the stove. She was
compassionate by nature, and the man looked very jaded and weary. When
she sat down again he handed her a rather bulky folded paper which
appeared to be some kind of legal document.
"What am I to do with this?" she asked.
"You can give it to Farquhar, or keep it and hide it," said the man. "I
guess the last would be wisest. Nobody would figure you had the thing,
and I can't give it to Lucy, because Nevis would sure get after her."
"Is it very important?"
"It might be. I can't go and ask a lawyer now. Guess the man would feel
it was his duty to put Slaney on my trail, and I couldn't go near the
settlement in daylight without doing the same. Anyway, it's my mortgage
deed, and I have a notion that it might give me a pull on Nevis if the
troopers get me. If I'm right, he'll be mighty anxious to get it back
again."
"I don't understand," returned Alison. "If he was afraid of your using
it against him, he wouldn't have given it to you at all."
Winthrop grinned.
"He didn't. I got him out of his office late at night and crept in for
it. I knew where he kept the thing because I'd seen him put it in his
safe."
Alison was far from pleased with this confession, but while she
considered it another point occurred to her.
"But don't people generally get a duplicate of a paper of this kind?"
she asked.
"I had one, but Nevis wanted me to do something that didn't seem quite
what we had agreed on, and I went over with the deed to show him he was
wrong. He said I'd better leave it, and somehow or other I could never
get it out of his hands again."
"Ah," said Alison softly, "I think I wouldn't mind helping you against
that man. But you must tell me exactly what you mean to do."
"I'm going across to see Lucy--and out West somewhere after that. If I
can get away, and strike anything that will pay me, it's quite likely
that I'll leave Nevis alone. If I can't, or there's a reason for it
later, I'll write you, and Farquhar or Thorne could take the deed to a
lawyer and see if he could get at Nevis with it. In the meanwhile it
would be wiser if you just hid the thing away. If Farquhar knows nothing
about it, I guess it would save him trouble."
Alison did not answer for a moment or two. She felt that she was acting
imprudently in allowing herself to be drawn into the affair, but she was
sorry for the man. He was a friend of Thorne's, and that counted for a
good deal in his favor. In addition to this, the idea of playing a part,
and possibly a leading part, in something of the nature of a complicated
drama appealed to her, and there was, half formulated at the back of her
mind, the desire to prove to Thorne just what she was capable of.
"Well," she said at length, "you may leave it with me."
Then she set about getting him a meal, and a little while later he
limped wearily away. He left her with the impression that it would be
wise of Nevis to abandon his pursuit of him, for there was something in
the man's manner which indicated that he might prove dangerous if
pressed too hard. The morning had slipped away before she could get the
thought of him out of her mind.
In the meanwhile, he was plodding across the white wilderness under a
scorching sun. The atmosphere was crystallinely clear, and an almost
intolerable brightness flooded the wide levels. A birch bluff miles away
was etched in clean-cut tracery upon the horizon, but though the weary
man kept his eyes sharply open he felt reasonably safe from observation,
which it seemed desirable to avoid. He did not believe that any of the
scattered farmers would betray him, even if some pressure should be put
upon them with the view of extracting information, but it was clear that
they would be better able to evade any attempts Nevis or Slaney might
make to entrap them into some incautious admission if they had none to
impart. Winthrop based this decision on the fact that a man certainly
cannot tell what he does not know.
It was consoling to remember that the wide, open prairie is by no means
a bad place to hide in. A mounted figure or a team and wagon shows up
for a vast distance against the skyline, while a few grass tussocks less
than a foot in height will effectually conceal a man who lies down among
them with the outline of his body broken by the blades from anybody
passing within two or three hundred yards of him. Winthrop was aware,
however, that it would be different if he attempted to run away; and
once he dropped like a stone when a buggy rose unexpectedly out of a
ravine. The man who drove it was an acquaintance of his, but he seemed
to gaze right at the spot where Winthrop was stretched out without
seeing him. The latter was not disturbed again, but he cast rather
dubious glances round him as he resumed his march. There was another
long journey in front of him that night, and he did not like the signs
of the weather. It struck him as ominously clear.
He was, as it happened, not the only person who noticed this, for other
people who had at different times suffered severely in pocket from the
vagaries of the climate had arrived at much the same opinion that
afternoon, with more or less uneasiness according to their temperament.
The wheat was everywhere standing tall and green, and the season had
been on the whole so propitious that from bitter experience they almost
expected a change. As the small cultivator has discovered, the simile of
a beneficent nature is a singularly misleading one, for the stern truth
was proclaimed in ages long ago that man must toil with painful effort
for the bread he eats, and must subdue the earth before he can render it
fruitful. In the new West he has made himself many big machines,
including the great gang-plows that rip their multiple furrows through
the prairie soil, but he still lies defenseless against the fickle
elements.
Elcot Hunter, at least, was anxious that night as he sat in the general
living-room of his homestead opposite his wife. She was not greatly
interested in the book she held, and she glanced at him now and then as
he sat poring over a newspaper which was noted for its crop and market
reports. They afforded Hunter very little satisfaction, for they made it
clear that the West would produce enough wheat that season to flood an
already lifeless market.
The windows of the room were open wide, and the smell of sun-baked soil
damped by the heavy dew came in with the sound made by the movements of
a restless horse or two. The fall of hoofs appeared unusually distinct.
The wooden house, which had lain baking under a scorching sun all day,
was still very hot, but the faint puffs of air which flowed in were
delightfully cool, and at length Florence, who was very lightly clad,
shivered as one that was stronger than the rest lifted a sheet of
Hunter's paper.
"It is positively getting cold," she remarked.
"Cold?" returned Hunter. "I wouldn't call it that."
He resumed his reading, and three or four minutes had slipped by when
Florence turned to him with irritation in her manner.
"Haven't you anything to say, Elcot?" she broke out. "Are those crop
statistics so very fascinating?"
Hunter looked up at her with a rather grim smile. She lay in a low cane
chair beneath the lamp, with her figure falling into long sweeping
lines, attired in costly fripperies lately purchased in the East, but
there was not the least doubt that they became her. Indeed, with the
satiny whiteness of her neck and arms half revealed beneath the gauzy
draperies, and her hair gleaming lustrously about a face that had been
carefully shielded from the ravages of the weather, she seemed strangely
out of place in the primitively furnished room of a western homestead.
The man noticed it, as he had done on other occasions, with a pang of
regret. There had been a time when he had expected her to rejoice in his
successes and console him in his defeats, and it had hurt when she had
made it clear that any reference to his occupation only irritated her.
He had got over that, as he had borne other troubles, with an
uncomplaining quietness, and, though she had never suspected this, he
had often felt sorry for her. Still, he was a man of somewhat unyielding
character, and there was occasionally friction when he did what he
considered most fitting, in spite of her protests.
"Well," he said in answer to her question, "they have, anyway, some
interest to a farmer who has a good deal at stake." He threw the paper
down. "Things in general aren't very promising, and I may be rather
tightly fixed after the harvest. I seem to have been spending a great
deal of money lately."
Florence felt guilty. After all, as she was the principal cause of his
expenses, it was generous of him to put it as he had done. Indeed, she
decided to make a confession about the loan from Nevis sometime when he
appeared to be in an unusually favorable mood.
"You have a splendid crop, haven't you?" she asked.
"The trouble is that I may not get much for it, and a wheat crop is
never quite safe until it's thrashed out. I'm uncertain about the
weather."
"The aneroid has gone up; I looked at it."
"It's gone up too much and too suddenly," said Hunter. "That sometimes
means a bad outbreak from the north."
Florence was moved by a sudden impulse. The man was bronzed and
toughened by labor, but there was, as she had noticed since she came
home, a jaded look in his face.
"Elcot," she asked, "do you think I oughtn't to have gone away?"
The man seemed to consider this.
"No," he answered, "I don't think that, so long as you were able to
manage it with the little help I could give you." He paused a moment,
and looked puzzled, for there was a suspicion of heightened color in
Florence's face. "On the whole, I'm glad you went, if you enjoyed the
visit."
"You don't seem very sure. Wasn't it rather dull for you here?"
It was, so far as he could remember, the first time she had displayed
any interest on this point, and he smiled.
"Oh, I had the place to look after, as usual. It's fortunate that it
occupies a good deal of my attention."
Florence leaned forward suddenly.
"Elcot, won't you tell me exactly how much you mean by that?"
It was a moment or two before Hunter answered.
"Well," he said gravely, "since you have suggested it, perhaps I better
had, though it means the dragging in of questions we've talked over
quite often already. I took up farming because I couldn't stand the
cities and it seemed the thing I was most fitted for. On that point I
haven't changed my opinions. Where I did wrong was in marrying you." He
checked her with a lifted hand as she was about to speak. "If you had
never met me, you would probably have taken the next man with means who
came along."
"Yes," admitted Florence, meeting his gaze. "I think that's true. Having
gone so far, hadn't you better proceed?"
"I'm trying to look at it from your standpoint; I've never been sorry on
my own account."
Florence laughed in a strained fashion.
"That's a little difficult to believe. Still, one must do you the
justice to own that you have, at least, never mentioned your regrets."
"I don't think I've often mentioned my expectations either. That's one
reason I'm speaking now. You seem--approachable--to-night."
"I suppose they were not fulfilled?"
"If they were not, it was my own fault. I took you out of the
environment you were suited to and content with."
"I wasn't," Florence declared sharply. "Things were horribly unpleasant
to me then. I was struggling desperately to earn a living, and had to
put up with a good deal from most disagreeable people."
Again a faint, grim smile crept into her husband's eyes.
"After all, perfect candor is a little painful now and then; but let me
go on. At least, I brought you into an environment with which you were
not content. The kind of life I led was irksome to you; you could not
help me in it; even to hear me talk of what I did each day was
burdensome to you. I couldn't speak of my plans for the future, or the
difficulties that must be met and faced continually. For a while I felt
it badly."
"Yes," Florence acknowledged, "it must have been hard on you, Elcot."
"It could be borne, but there was another side of the matter. It was
clear that you were longing for company, stir, gaiety--and I could not
give them to you. As I've often said, I'm not rich enough to make a mark
in any of the cities, unless I went into business, for which I've
neither the training nor inclination, and most of my money is sunk in
the land here. It's difficult to sell a farm of this size for anything
like its value unless wheat is dear. Besides, the friends you would wish
to make wouldn't take to me. That is certain; I lived among people of
their description before I met you. I couldn't in any way have helped
you to make yourself a leading place in the only kind of society that
would satisfy you. All this has stood between us--no doubt it was
unavoidable--but it made the troubles I could share with no one a
little worse to bear, and my few successes of less account to me. After
all, since I could, at least, send you to the cities now and then, it
was fortunate that I had my farm." He stopped a moment and added
deprecatingly: "Whether you will be able to get away next winter is more
than I know. As I said, the outlook is far from promising in the
meanwhile."
Florence did not answer immediately. At last, she could clearly grasp
the man's point of view. Indeed, she realized that during the few years
they had lived together she had taken all he had to offer and had given
practically nothing in return. She felt almost impelled to tell him that
her last visit to the cities had brought her very little pleasure, and
that she would be willing to spend the next winter with him at the
lonely homestead; but she could not do so. A surrender of any kind was
difficult to her, and she had by degrees built up a barrier of reserve
between them that could not immediately be thrown down. Besides, there
was in the background the memory of Nevis's loan.
"Things may look better by and by," she said lamely.
Neither of them spoke for a few minutes, and it seemed to Florence that
the room grew perceptibly colder, while once or twice a little puff of
air struck with a sudden chill upon her face. Then there was a sharp
drumming, which ceased again abruptly, upon the shingled roof, and she
followed Hunter when he strode out on the veranda. An impenetrable
darkness now overhung most of the sky, and there was a wild beat of
hoofs as three or four invisible horses dashed across the paddock.
Florence knew that the beasts were young, and understood that they were
valuable. Her husband moved toward the steps.
"I'll put them into the stable, or, if I can't manage that, turn them
out on the prairie," he said. "I'm afraid of the new fence. They're not
accustomed to it yet, and there are two barbed strands in it."
"Take one of the hired men with you," Florence called after him, but he
made no answer, and the next moment a mad beat of hoofs once more broke
out as the uneasy horses galloped furiously back across the fenced-in
space.