The Project Gutenberg EBook of Dennison Grant, by Robert Stead

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Title: Dennison Grant
A Novel of To-day

Author: Robert Stead

Release Date: June 3, 2006 [EBook #3264]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DENNISON GRANT ***

Produced by Donald Lainson

DENNISON GRANT

A Novel of To-day

By Robert Stead

CHAPTER I

"Chuck at the Y.D. to-night, and a bed under the shingles," shouted
Transley, waving to the procession to be off.

Linder, foreman and head teamster, straightened up from the half load
of new hay in which he had been awaiting the final word, tightened the
lines, made an unique sound in his throat, and the horses pressed their
shoulders into the collars. Linder glanced back to see each wagon or
implement take up the slack with a jerk like the cars of a freight
train; the cushioned rumble of wagon wheels on the soft earth, and the
noisy chatter of the steel teeth of the hay-rakes came up from the rear.
Transley's "outfit" was under way.

Transley was a contractor; a master of men and of circumstances. Six
weeks before, the suspension of a grading order had left him high and
dry, with a dozen men and as many teams on his hands and hired for the
season. Transley galloped all that night into the foothills; when he
returned next evening he had a contract with the Y.D. to cut all the
hay from the ranch buildings to The Forks. By some deft touch of those
financial strings on which he was one day to become so skilled a player
Transley converted his dump scrapers into mowing machines, and three
days later his outfit was at work in the upper reaches of the Y.D.

The contract had been decidedly profitable. Not an hour of broken
weather had interrupted the operations, and to-day, with two thousand
tons of hay in stack, Transley was moving down to the headquarters of
the Y.D. The trail lay along a broad valley, warded on either side by
ranges of foothills; hills which in any other country would have been
dignified by the name of mountains. From their summits the grey-green
up-tilted limestone protruded, whipped clean of soil by the chinooks of
centuries. Here and there