"It doesn't amount to much," he said deprecatingly. "I've been too busy to fix it. I got thrown out of my waggon." Carrie became rigidly erect, a sparkle of indignation in her eyes. "That is really a little unnecessary," she said coldly. "I didn't presume to trouble you with any inquiries." Leland looked at her, as though puzzled, with half-closed eyes. "They wouldn't have been unnatural in the case of a man who was flung headlong out of his waggon." "One excuse will no doubt serve as well as another. The difficulty is that I happen to have some idea as to how you got your injuries." The man rose wearily. "I have the pleasure of telling you that I was thrown out coming down the ravine." "And I," said Carrie coldly, "was at the settlement at the time you furnished everybody with that interesting spectacle on the hotel verandah. I don't wish to be unduly fastidious, but hitherto, so far as I know, at least you have not taken the trouble to deceive me wilfully." Leland turned towards her with his cut lips pressed together, and his scarred face grim and hard, making a little gesture of weariness. "Well," he said, "I guess it doesn't matter. I don't suppose I could make you think anything but hard of me." He stopped a minute, and then laughed. "I have faced the world alone so far, and held my own with it. I suppose there is no reason why I shouldn't go on doing it." "I believe that is, after all, what most men have to do," said Carrie. "I shall endeavour to be as small a burden on you as I can manage." Then she turned and left him; but, as had happened on other occasions, her heart smote her in spite of her anger, for he looked shaken and very weary and lonely in the big, desolate room. CHAPTER XIII CARRIE ABASES HERSELF The warm spring day was over. In that land of contrasts, where there is no slow melting of season into season, it is often hot while the last snow-drifts linger in the shadows of the bluffs. Carrie and Mrs. Annersly were sitting by an open window of Carrie's sitting-room. The sun had gone, but, as usual at that season, a filmy curtain of green overhung the vast sweep of prairie that had shaken off its hues of white and grey for the first faint colour of spring. Above hung a pale, sickle moon, and down the long slope, over which the harrow-torn furrows ran, lines of men and weary teams were plodding home. Round the rest of that half of the horizon, the prairie melted into the distance imperceptibly--vast, mysterious, shadowy, under a great tense silence--while the little chilled breeze that came up had in it the properties of an elixir.