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Updated: June 19, 2025
"It was during the few days I spent between the logging camp and Waynefleet's ranch." Mattawa, who hove on the same handle, grinned. "Well," he said, "this is a tolerable sample of blame hard weather while it lasts, but we get months of it back East. Still, I guess we don't work then. No, sir, unless we're chopping, we sit tight round the stove." Mattawa was right in this.
He was clearly a stranger, and, when she led the oxen on to the bridge, tapping the brawny neck of one with a long stick, he turned to her. "Can you tell me if Waynefleet's ranch is near here?" he asked. Laura glanced at him sharply, for there was no doubt that he was English, and she wondered, with a faint uneasiness, what his business was.
He never did notice a point of that kind, and, if anyone had ventured to call his attention to it, he would probably have been indignant as well as astonished. As a rule, however, nobody endeavours to impress unpleasant facts upon men of Waynefleet's character. In their case it is clearly not worth while. "Do you intend to go on with that dressmaking much longer?" he asked petulantly.
The frost had grown keener as darkness crept over the forest, and the towering pines about the clearing rose in great black spires into the nipping air, but it was almost unpleasantly hot in the little general room of Waynefleet's ranch. Waynefleet, who was fond of physical comfort, had gorged the snapping stove, and the smell of hot iron filled the log-walled room.
There was a trace of colour in Laura Waynefleet's face, and she quivered a little under his grasp, but she looked at him steadily, and read his mind in his eyes. The man was stirred by sudden, evanescent passion and exaggerated gratitude, while pity for her had, she fancied, also its effect on him; but that was the last thing she desired, and, with a swift movement, she shook off his hand.
"No, sir," he said severely, "Miss Waynefleet's going right round. Now you're coming along with me, and we'll show them how to waltz." Laura smiled good-humouredly, and he swept her into the dance, while Nasmyth was seized upon by a girl, who drove him through it much as she did her brother's steers in the Bush. "A bump or two don't count for much.
Money was, as a rule, signally scarce there, but even when there were a few dollars in Waynefleet's possession, it seldom occurred to him to offer any of them to his daughter. It is also certain that nobody could have convinced him that it was only through her efforts he was able to keep the ranch going at all.
There's a little business waiting at the settlement, anyway, and you can see about getting the new tools and provisions in." Waynefleet's face was expressive of a vast relief. The few bitter weeks spent in the cañon had taken a good deal of the keenness he had once displayed out of him.
Then he swung his axe again, and Gordon, who saw Waynefleet approaching, strolled away towards the ranch-owner. It was a hot summer evening, and a drowsy, resinous fragrance stole out of the shadowy bush when Nasmyth, who had now spent six months at Waynefleet's ranch, lay among the wineberries by the river-side.
As usual, just what happened never quite came out, but that man left his partner to face the boys, who scarcely managed to escape with their lives that night. The man who holds Waynefleet's mortgage should be here at any moment." The man arrived in a few minutes. After he had sat down and had taken the cigar Acton offered him, he was ready to talk business.
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