He talked Canada, farming, and life in general, with the peculiar ease that comes of having left home _sans recommandation_, to return in your own Studebaker-Flanders, and passed to the genial intimacy of interrogation which Northern folk tolerate only from their kind. Lancaster would have got his answers all right, but from Brack it smacked of the travelling bagman, and he discovered presently that he was getting nothing. He dropped it, then, and struck boldly for his point. “I’ve come asking for sympathy!” he said, with a confidential smile. “You’ll have heard about the meeting, I guess, and how they think they’ve got the laugh on me over the Lugg, your Wolf and the rest. Well, they can go on laughing till the cows come home, but they’ll not make me take anything back. The Lugg’s got an eye-opener safe and handy for them, and when that comes along, I guess some of them will laugh on the wrong side of their mouths! But I’ve a notion--though I’m not saying why or how--that there’s somebody thinks as I do of the crawling old son of a gun, somebody that reckons with me that it should never have been built--and that’s you yourself right here, Mrs. Whinnerah! Tell me if I’m wrong. Don’t mind me!” She didn’t mind him. He was certainly wrong, she told him, with her light, expressionless eyes fixed on his ingratiating countenance. Foiled again, he became less flippant. “You’ll say it’s no affair of mine what you think, but when a man has a bang-up honest conviction, it’s up to him to get it proved if he can. I’m still smarting at the way they petered me out. I didn’t expect they’d catch on right away, but I did look for decent consideration. Oh, they’ll hold to it that I’ve had it--I’ve got _that_ fixed! They’ll point to the meeting and say the matter was fairly discussed; but they know as well as I do that the whole arrangement was a barnstormer fake, stage-managed down to the smallest cue. The agent saw to that! It’s the old fairy-tale--Lancaster fiddled and the farmers danced, and the man shouting trouble was bucked out. I’m mighty sore about it, I say. I meant well, and I’m sore!” He was in earnest, now. He drew his chair forward, laying his hand on the string-cover of the round table between them.