m 209
XX. The First Stake 223
XXI. Gregory Makes Up His Mind 234
XXII. A Painful Revelation 244
XXIII. Through The Snow 254
XXIV. The Landing 265
XXV. News of Disaster 276
XXVI. The Rescue 287
XXVII. In the Wilderness 299
XXVIII. The Unexpected 308
XXIX. Cast Away 320
XXX. The Last Effort 331
XXXI. Wyllard Comes Home 342

MASTERS OF THE WHEAT-LANDS

CHAPTER I

SALLY CREIGHTON

The frost outside was bitter, and the prairie which rolled back from
Lander's in long undulations to the far horizon, gleamed white beneath
the moon, but there was warmth and brightness in Stukely's wooden barn.
The barn stood at one end of the little, desolate settlement, where the
trail that came up from the railroad thirty miles away forked off into
two wavy ribands melting into a waste of snow. Lander's consisted then
of five or six frame houses and stores, a hotel of the same material,
several sod stables, and a few birch-log barns; and its inhabitants
considered it one of the most promising places in Western Canada. That,
however, is the land of promise, a promise which is in due time usually
fulfilled, and the men of Lander's were, for the most part, shrewdly
practical optimists. They made the most of a somewhat grim and frugal
present, and staked all they had to give--the few dollars they had
brought in with them, and their powers of enduring toil--upon the
roseate future.

Stukely had given them, and their scattered neighbors, who had driven
there across several leagues of prairie, a supper in his barn. A big
rusty stove, brought in for the occasion, stood in the center of the
barn floor. Its pipe glowed in places a dull red, and now and then
Stukely wondered uneasily whether it was charring a larger hole through
the shingles of the roof. On one side of the stove the floor had been
cleared; on the other, benches, empty barrels and tables were huddled
together, and such of the guests as were not dancing at the moment, sat
upon the various substitutes for chairs. A keg of hard Ontario cider had
been provided for the refreshment of the guests, and it was open to
anybody to ladle up what he wanted with a tin dipper. A haze of tobacco
smoke drifted in thin blue wisps beneath the big nickeled lamps, and in
addition to the reek of it, the