You won't be much older by then. Yes'm," she turned to
business, "I don't say but what it's high for rhubarb, but there ain't
another bunch in the market, and won't be for a week yet."

Under cover of this discussion Lorne bade the Crows good morning,
retreating in the rear of the lady who found the rhubarb high. Mrs
Crow's drop of acid combined with his saving sense of the humour of it
to adjust all his courage and his confidence, and with a braver face
than ever he involuntarily hastened his steps to keep pace with his
happy chance.

CHAPTER X

In the wide stretches of a new country there is nothing to bound a local
excitement, or to impede its transmission at full value. Elgin was a
manufacturing town in southern Ontario, but they would have known every
development of the Federal Bank case at the North Pole if there had been
anybody there to learn. In Halifax they did know it, and in Vancouver,
B.C., while every hundred miles nearer it warmed as a topic in
proportion. In Montreal the papers gave it headlines; from Toronto they
sent special reporters. Of course, it was most of all the opportunity of
Mr Horace Williams, of the Elgin Express, and of Rawlins, who held all
the cards in their hands, and played them, it must be said, admirably,
reducing the Mercury to all sorts of futile expedients to score, which
the Express would invariably explode with a guffaw of contradiction the
following day. It was to the Express that the Toronto reporters came for
details and local colour; and Mr Williams gave them just as much as he
thought they ought to have and no more. It was the Express that managed,
while elaborately abstaining from improper comment upon a matter sub
judice, to feed and support the general conviction of young Ormiston's
innocence, and thereby win for itself, though a "Grit" paper, wide
reading in that hotbed of Toryism, Moneida Reservation, while the
Conservative Mercury, with its reckless sympathy for an old party name,
made itself criminally liable by reviewing cases of hard dealing by
the bank among the farmers, and only escaped prosecution by the amplest
retraction and the most contrite apology. As Mr Williams remarked, there
was no use in dwelling on the unpopularity of the bank, that didn't need
pointing out; folks down Moneida way could put any newspaper wise on the
number of mortgages foreclosed and the rate for secondary loans exacted
by the bank in those parts. That consideration, no doubt,