industry and care, for the room bore the impress of its occupier's
individuality as rooms not infrequently do.

It was not difficult to see that he was frugal, though possibly from
necessity rather than taste, not sparing of effort, and had a keen eye
for utility, and if that suggested the question why with such
capacities he had not attained to greater comfort the answer was
simple. Winston had no money, and the seasons had fought against him.
He had done his uttermost with the means at his disposal, and now he
knew he was beaten.

A doleful wind moaned about the lonely building, and set the roof
shingles rattling overhead. Now and then the stove crackled, or the
lamp flickered, and any one unused to the prairie would have felt the
little loghouse very desolate and lonely. There was no other human
habitation within a league, only a great waste of whitened grass
relieved about the homestead by the raw clods of the fall plowing, for,
while his scattered neighbors for the most part put their trust in
horses and cattle, Winston had been among the first to realize the
capacities of that land as a wheat-growing country.

Now, clad in well-worn jean trousers and an old deerskin jacket, he
looked down at the bundle of documents on his knee, accounts unpaid, a
banker's intimation that no more checks would be honored, and a
mortgage deed. They were not pleasant reading, and the man's face
clouded as he penciled notes on some of them, but there was no weakness
or futile protest in it. Defeat was plain between the lines of all he
read, but he was going on stubbornly until the struggle was ended, as
others of his kind had done, there at the western limit of the furrows
of the plow and in the great province farther east which is one of the