“Is your father back yet, Tom?” the bartender asked as he served a line of customers.

“He’ll come up Monday night, I expect,” Tom answered, rather proud of the attention he was receiving.

The bartender pushed a box of cigars toward him.

“Have a cigar, Tom,” he said.

“No, thank you,” Tom answered, “not any.”  Tom could not smoke, but he drew a plug of chewing tobacco from his pocket and took a chew, to show that his sympathies were that way.

“I guess perhaps some of you men met Mr. Motherwell in Winnipeg.  He’s in there hiring men for this locality,” the bartender said amiably.

“That’s the name of the gent that hired me,” said one.

“Me too.”

“And me,” came from others.  “I’d no intention of comin’ here,” a man from Paisley said.  “I was goin’ to Souris, until that gent got a holt of me, and I thought if he wuz a sample of the men ye raise here, I’d hike this way.”

“He’s lookin’ for a treat,” the bartender laughed.  “He’s sized you up, Tom, as a pretty good fellow.”

“No, I ain’t after no treat,” the Paisley man declared.  “That’s straight, what I told you.”

Tom unconsciously put his hand in his coat pocket and felt the money his father had put there.  He drew it out wondering.  The quick eyes of the bartender saw it at once.

“Tom’s getting out his wad, boys,” he laughed.  “Nothin’ mean about Tom, you bet Tom’s goin’ to do somethin’.”

In the confusion that followed Tom heard himself saying: 

“All right boys, come along and name yer drinks.”

Tom had a very indistinct memory of what followed.  He remembered having a handful of silver, and of trying to put it in his pocket.

Once when the boys were standing in front of the bar at his invitation he noticed a miserable, hungry looking man, who drank greedily.  It was Skinner.  Then someone took him by the arm and said something about his having enough, and Tom felt himself being led across a floor that rose and fell strangely, to a black lounge that tried to slide away from him and then came back suddenly and hit him.

The wind raged and howled with increasing violence around the granary where Arthur lay tossing upon his hard bed.  It seized the door and rattled it in wanton playfulness, as if to deceive the sick man with the hope that a friend’s hand was on the latch, and then raced blustering and screaming down to the meadows below.  The fanning mill and piles of grain bags made fantastic shadows on the wall in the lantern’s dim light, and seemed to his distorted fancy like dark and terrible spectres waiting to spring upon him.

Pearl knelt down beside him, tenderly bathing his burning face.

“Why do you do all this for me, Pearl?” he asked slowly, his voice coming thick and painfully.

She changed the cloth on his head before replying.

“Oh, I keep thinkin’ it might be Teddy or Jimmy or maybe wee Danny,” she replied gently, “and besides, there’s Thursa.”