After all, there must be a good deal to be
said for the man who raises four bushels of good wheat where his
comrade with equal facilities raises three.

In the meanwhile Hawtrey was talking to Sally, and it was not
astonishing that they talked of farming, which is the standard topic on
that strip of prairie.

"So you're not going to break that new piece this spring?" she said.

"No," said Hawtrey; "I'd want another team, anyway, and I can't raise
the dollars; they're hard to get out here."

"Plenty under the sod," said Sally, who was essentially practical.
"That's where we get ours, but you have to put the breaker in and turn
it over. You"--and she flashed a swift glance at him--"got most of
yours from England. Won't they send you any more?"

Hawtrey's eyes twinkled as he shook his head. "I'm afraid they won't,"
he said. "You see, I've put the screw on them rather hard the last few
years."

"How did you do that?" said Sally. "Told them you were thinking of
coming home again?"

There was a certain wryness in her companion's smile, for though
Hawtrey had cast no particular slur upon the family's credit he had
signally failed to enhance it, and he was quite aware that his English
relatives did not greatly desire his presence in the Old Country.

"My dear," he said, "you really shouldn't hit a fellow in the eye that
way."

As it happened, he did not see the girl's face just then, or he might
have noticed a momentary change in its expression. Gregory Hawtrey was
a little casual in speech, but so far most of the young women he
bestowed an epithet of that kind upon had attached no significance to
it. They had wisely decided that he did not mean anything. In another
moment or two the Scottish fiddler's voice broke in.

"Can ye no' watch the music? Noo it's paddybash!" he cried.

His French Canadian comrade waved his fiddle-bow protestingly.

"Paddybashy! _V'la la belle chose!_" he said with ineffable contempt,
and broke in upon the ranting melody with a succession of harsh,
crashing chords.

Then it apparently became a contest as to which could drown the other's
instrument, and the snapping time grew faster, until the dancers
gasped, and men with long boots encouraged them with cries and stamped
a staccato accompaniment upon the benches or on the floor. It was
savage, rasping music, but one player infused into it the ebullient
verve of France, and the other was from the misty land where the
fiddler