Winston of the Prairie | Page 5

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.
CHAPTER II
LANCE COURTHORNE
It was late when Winston reached his log-built house, but he set out
once more with his remaining horse before the lingering daylight crept
out of the east to haul the wagon home. He also spent most of the day
in repairing it, because occupation of any kind that would keep him
from unpleasant reflections appeared advisable, and to allow anything
to fall out of use was distasteful to him, although as the wagon had
been built for two horses he had little hope of driving it again. It was a
bitter, gray day with a low, smoky sky, and seemed very long to
Winston, but evening came at last, and he was left with nothing
between him and his thoughts.
He lay in a dilapidated chair beside the stove, and the little bare room
through which its pipe ran was permeated with the smell of fresh
shavings, hot iron, and the fumes of indifferent tobacco. A carpenter's
bench ran along one end of it, and was now occupied by a new wagon

pole the man had fashioned out of a slender birch. A Marlin rifle, an ax,
and a big saw hung beneath the head of an antelope on the wall above
the bench, and all of them showed signs of use and glistened with oil.
Opposite to them a few shelves were filled with simple crockery and
cooking utensils, and these also shone spotlessly. There was a pair of
knee boots in one corner with a patch partly sewn on to one of them,
and the harness in another showed traces of careful repair. A bookcase
hung above them, and its somewhat tattered contents indicated that the
man who had chosen and evidently handled them frequently, possessed
tastes any one who did not know that country would scarcely have
expected to find in a prairie farmer. A table and one or two rude chairs
made by their owner's hands completed the furniture, but while all
hinted at poverty, it also suggested neatness, industry and care, for the
room bore the impress of its occupier's individuality as rooms not
infrequently do.
It was not difficult to see that he was frugal, though possibly from
necessity rather than taste, not sparing of effort, and had a keen eye for
utility, and if that suggested the question why with such capacities he
had not attained to greater comfort the answer was simple. Winston had
no money, and the seasons had fought against him. He had done his
uttermost with the means at his disposal, and now he knew he was
beaten.
A doleful wind moaned about the lonely building, and set the roof
shingles rattling overhead. Now and then the stove crackled, or the
lamp flickered, and any one unused to the prairie would have felt the
little loghouse very desolate and lonely. There was no other human
habitation within a league, only a great waste of whitened grass
relieved about the homestead by the raw clods of the fall plowing, for,
while his scattered neighbors for the most part put their trust in horses
and cattle, Winston had been among the first to realize the capacities of
that land as a wheat-growing country.
Now, clad in well-worn jean trousers and an old deerskin jacket, he
looked down at the bundle of documents on his knee, accounts unpaid,
a banker's intimation that no more checks would be honored, and a

mortgage deed. They were not pleasant reading, and the man's face
clouded as he penciled notes on some of them, but there was no
weakness or futile protest in it. Defeat was plain between the lines of
all he read, but he was going on stubbornly until the struggle was ended,
as others of his kind had done, there at the western limit of the furrows
of the plow and in the great province farther east which is one of the
world's granaries. They went under and were forgotten, but they
showed the way, and while their guerdon was usually six feet of prairie
soil, the wheatfields, mills, and railroads came, for