He went round the wheat and oats, and then spent several days ripping odd strips here and there across the prairie in the track of the prevalent winds. It was fiercely hot weather, but he was busy every hour from dawn to dusk, and at nights his men grinned as they mentioned it. Charley Leland was getting very afraid of fire, they said. When he was satisfied with the ploughing, he had the axes and grub-hoes ground, and set the men to work cutting out the smaller growth of willows of underbrush in the strip of birches that stretched close up to the homestead from the bluff. When Gallwey, who had other duties, found him busy at it the first morning, he smiled a little. "I suppose it's really necessary. If not, it would be a considerable waste of time," he said. "Well," said Leland, drily, "I almost think it is. A good deal of this stuff is tinder-dry, and you can't plough through the bluff. I don't know if you have ever seen a bad fire in the underbrush? You can't beat it out, as you can now and then when it's in the grass." Gallwey looked thoughtful. "All this points to one thing. You feel tolerably satisfied that the rustlers will make another attempt?" "It's a sure thing." Leland straightened himself a little, with a lean, brown hand clenched on the haft of the big axe. "Before the snow is on the ground, I or the whisky boys will have had to quit this prairie. I don't want it to be me." Then he turned away abruptly, and, whirling the great blade high, buried it at a stroke in a dry and partly rotten birch. His comrade smiled. He had seen Leland's face, and there was something vaguely portentous in the flash of whirling steel and the crash of the blow. Charley Leland, he knew, could wait and take precautions, but it was also evident that when the time came, he could strike in a somewhat impressive fashion. Leland worked on for several more days, and then one night Carrie and he stood outside of the door of the homestead, watching a great pile of underbrush blazing furiously. The man smiled as he turned to his companion. His hands were blackened, and his old blue-jean garments singed. "Well," he said, "I guess I've done what I can. I had to do it, anyway, since you lent me that two thousand pounds. If the market would only stiffen, you'd get your money back with an interest that would astonish people in England." He broke off for a moment with a curious little laugh. "My dear," he said, "you and I should have been in Winnipeg to-night." Carrie said nothing, but the firelight was on her face when she looked up at her husband, and once more he was satisfied. CHAPTER XXV A PORTENTOUS LIGHT