"He says that the swords and spears of the dervishes are often poisoned; then, you see, water is scarce, and the heat is terrible, so that a sick man has no chance like he has here." Ralph did not reply. For a moment or two he looked at his father, then went on with his hoeing. David walked by his side between the rows of turnips. His face was drawn and pale, and his lips twitched incessantly. "The world seems terribly topsy-turvy," he said at length, as if speaking to himself. "I oughtn't to be idling here, but all the heart's gone out of me somehow." "We must hope for the best," Ralph said, without raising his head. "The parson's boy is the last 'life,'" David went on, as though he had not heard what Ralph had said. "The last life. Just a thread, a feeble little thread. One little touch, and then----" "Well, and what then?" Ralph questioned. "If the boy dies, this little farm is no longer ours. Though I have reclaimed it from the waste, and spent on it all my savings, and toiled from dawn to dark for twelve long years, and built the house and the barn and the cowsheds, and gone into debt to stock it; if that boy dies it all goes." "You mean that the squire will take possession?" "I mean that Sir John will claim it as his." Ralph did not speak again for several moments, but he felt his blood tingling to his finger-tips. "It's a wicked, burning shame," he jerked out at length. "It is the law, my boy," David said sadly, "and you see there's no going against the law." Ralph hung his head, and began hoeing vigorously his row. "Besides," David went on, "you see I was party to the arrangement--that is, I accepted the conditions; but the luck has been on Sir John's side." "He took a mean advantage of you, father, and you know it, and he knows it," Ralph snapped. "He knew that I had set my heart on a bit of land that I could call my own; that I wanted a sort of resting-place in my old age, and that I desired to end my days in the parish in which I was born." "And so he put the screw on. It's always been a wonder to me, since I could think about it at all, that you accepted the conditions. I would have seen Sir John at the bottom of the sea first." "I did try to get better terms," David answered, looking wistfully across the fields, "and I mentioned ninety-nine years as the term of the lease, and he nearly turned me out of his office. 'Three lives or nothing,' he snarled, 'and be quick about it.' So I had to make up my mind there and then." "You'd have been better off, father, if you'd dropped all your money down a mine shaft, and gone to work on a farm as a day labourer," Ralph said bitterly. "I shouldn't have had to work so hard," David assented. "And you would have got more money, and wouldn't have had a hundredth part of the anxiety."