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"Seems to me you've a damned lot to answer for," Tell Mapleson hissed in rage. "If the Church can make a holy man out of such a villain, I'm glad I'm a heretic." "I'm answering for it," the priest said meekly. Only my father sat with face impassive and calm. "This half-section of land in question is the property of Thomas O'Meara, son and heir to Patrick O'Meara, as the records show.
He lived on the next half-section and assisted Jernyngham in the management of his ranch, besides sharing the cost of labor, implements and horses with him, though Prescott had cause for believing that the arrangement was not to his friend's benefit. "You'd be better off if you didn't work with that man," he said. "It's possible," Jernyngham agreed. "I know he robs me, but he saves me bother.
Then he bought the McKinnon place, a half-section to the north of this, after McKinnon had lost all his buildings because he was too shiftless to make a fire-guard. And when the railway work was finished Dinky-Dunk took up wheat-growing. He is a great believer in wheat. He says wheat spells wealth, in this country.
And when he had verified the names and seen that none of his half-section were missing, Sergeant Sapin, with his thin, sickly face and his pinched nose, softly said: "There will be one less to-morrow night."
They'd even eaten the wooden boards the mangers were built of. Hugh Cochrane couldn't get over it, and was going to sell the ranch for fourteen hundred dollars when Dinky-Dunk heard of it and stepped in and bought the whole half-section.
A mile away to the west stood a low stone house and immediately in front of us opened a half-section of unfenced sod. To the north, as far as I could see, the land billowed like a russet ocean, with scarcely a roof to fleck its lonely spread. I cannot say that I liked or disliked it.
As luck would have it, or seemed to have it, Dinky-Dunk had to hit the trail for overnight, to see about the registration of his transfers for his new half-section, at the town of H . So as soon as Dinky-Dunk was out of sight I hurried through my work and had Tumble-Weed and Bronk headed for the old Titchborne Ranch.
Though supposed to be an Austrian, little was known about him or his antecedents except that he owned the next half-section of land to Jernyngham's and farmed it successfully. It was, however, believed that he was of an unusually grasping nature, and his neighbors took precautions when they made a deal with him.
After eight years of this dreary work of clearing the Fountain Lake farm, fencing it and getting it in perfect order, building a frame house and the necessary outbuildings for the cattle and horses, after all this had been victoriously accomplished, and we had made out to escape with life, father bought a half-section of wild land about four or five miles to the eastward and began all over again to clear and fence and break up other fields for a new farm, doubling all the stunting, heartbreaking chopping, grubbing, stump-digging, rail-splitting, fence-building, barn-building, house-building, and so forth.
"In the midst of this you connived with others to steal the records from the courthouse. You were a treble villain, for you set the Rev. Mr. Dodd to a deed you afterwards held over him as a threat and drove him from the town for fear of exposure, forcing him to give you the papers he held against Jean Le Claire's claims to the half-section on the Neosho.
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