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 Winston 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.
Winston 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 into 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 Winston'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.
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