"It's a wee laddie—born before its time, and nane too strong." He had a habit when unduly moved of lapsing into Gaelic, and what he muttered was unintelligible to the woman, wholly taken up with the baby in her arms. Could she have understood him she would have heard the doctor say that a woman who could mother another woman's "bairn" would be a good mother to her own.
Outside the snow was still heavily falling. Great mounds were piling up on all sides. That world of snow might have appalled the stranger, but to the farmer it meant certain moisture in the soil. A spring snowstorm was even more desirable for the land than rain, as it melted gradually into the earth. Already the sun was gleaming through the falling snowflakes, and the intense cold had abated.
"Weel, weel, I'll be off for a while, lass. There's much still to attend to."
"You can't go out in that storm," said Angella roughly. "Wait, I'll get you something to eat. Not even your Ford could plow through snow like that."
"Maybe not, and I'll not be taking the Ford."
"Well, I've no vehicle to lend you."
"I'll go afoot," said the doctor, wrapping his woolen scarf about his neck, preparatory to going out.
"You're a fool to go out," said Angella crossly. "Wait till you have a cup of coffee anyway."
"I'll be going just across the land, to the lad's cabin. I heard last night that he was back."
"Who's cabin? What land?"
"Young Cyril Stanley's—the scallawag. I'll havethot to say to him, I'm thinking, will bring him across in a hurry."
"He needn't come here!" Angella had started up savagely. "I don't want any man here, least of all a dog like that who'd do such a thing to a girl. He can keep away frommyhouse. He's not fit to—to even look at her now. No man is."
"Weel, weel, 'tis true, but we're all liable to mistakes, ma'am, and young blood is hot and careless, and who are we—you and I—to judge another? We must look to our own consciences first, ma'am."
"Yes, stand up for him—defend him. You men all hang together. I know you all, and I hate you. I——"
She broke off, for the doctor was looking at her with such a strange look of mingled earnestness and tenderness, that the stormy words died on her lips, and she dropped her wet face upon the soft little one in her arms.
Dr. McDermott closed the door softly.
The tour of the Bar Q purebred bulls had been a disastrous and costly one. From city to city, at a staggering expense, went the prize herd, from which extraordinary things had been expected. Wherever they touched it was their misfortune to be turned back or shunted farther afield. That winter the country was suffering from the fearful scourge, which having stricken down its victims by the thousands in Europe had passed over the sea to America.
Then there was a time when the Bar Q herd was condemned by a harassed and irritated authority who, upon the diagnosis of an incompetent veterinary surgeon, pronounced the cattle to be suffering from foot and mouth disease, and an order was issued for the slaughter of the entire herd, and the burning of all sheds, cars or other houses in which they had been penned. Bull Langdon found himself held indefinitely in the States, as he fought by injunction proceedings the destruction of his herd, which would have meant an incalculable loss—even ruin—to him.
The adjournments and delays, the long, drawn-out legal processes, kept the herd in the States from December till February, and when at last they were freed the penned-in brutes were in a deteriorated condition. Their long confinement, the unaccustomed traveling, and the lack of proper care, made the once smooth bulls difficult to handle and dangerous, so that by the time the herd was ready to start back for Canada more than one of the "hands" who had come to the States with them deserted the outfit rather than risk looking after the uncertain animals on tour.
Bull Langdon, raging and fretting over the enforced delays in the States, harassed by his losses and his failure to obtain a showing of the famous herd, was in a black mood when at last the outfit reached Barstairs.
Here fresh trouble awaited him. Of all the bulls, the Prince had proved the most dangerous and erratic of temper; his ceaseless bellowing and attempts to break loose had done much to make the outfit unpopular throughout their travels. Always uncertain and dangerous, back at Barstairs he became well-nigh uncontrollable, and there was no "hand" of the entire outfit, save Cyril, who dared approach the raging beast, as behind heavily barred fences he ranged up and downrestlessly, calling his resounding cries to the cattle that he could smell even if he could not see them in adjoining pastures, and something of the wild spirit of the animal appealed to his owner, whose own pent-up rage seemed to find vent in a savage roaring voice. A kindred spirit bound them together. Often, when the exasperations of the tour threatened to overwhelm him, he would go to where the Prince ranged up and down within the narrow space of his shed bellowing and moaning his demands for freedom. At such times Bull Langdon, from the other side of the bars, would call to the bull, not soothingly, but in a tone of encouragement, as though cheering and "rooting" for the rebellious brute.
"Go to it!" he would snarl through the bars. "Let 'em know you're here! Keep 'em awake. Make their nerves jump. Go to it,bull!"
Up to the time of their return to Barstairs, Cyril Stanley had looked after the animal, and so long as he was at hand the Prince remained fairly well under control. But Cyril, who had been silent and morose all through the tour in the States, suddenly decided, once back in Canada, to quit the outfit. The cattleman received his quiet request to be relieved of his job with consternation and fury.
What did he want to leave for? Hadn't he had his pay raised four times already? Hadn't he got $500 he'd been promised? He had practically full charge of the herd already, and the foreman's job and wages would belong to him before spring.
But neither bluster nor curses moved him, and the offer of increases in wages, heavy bonuses and enormous salary were steadily refused. Money meant nothing now to Cyril. He was heartily sick of the whole business. He felt the restlessness that comes to a man as soon as he feels himself free again and on his native soil, and longs to be moving along the trail. To roam from place to place seemed all that was left to him since his dream of a home had been shattered, and long absence had not cured him of the sickness of love. He had had enough of cattle. He was done with ranching, and when the Bull demanded just what it was that he proposed to do, he answered after a thoughtful pause: "Think I'll hike for Bow Claire. Plenty of work there, I guess. The river'll be high when the snows begin to melt, and they'll be wantin' 'hands' and loggers at the camp."
Meanwhile, Bull Langdon found his hands full. Those were the days of labor unrest when there werea dozen employers in the employment offices for every employee; when wages were soaring; when men looked the "bosses" squarely in the face, and made their own terms. The cattleman had returned at a time when labor was so scarce and independent in Alberta, that many of the farmers were forced to do their own work, or grub together with other farmers on shares. It is certain that there was not a ranchman in the country willing to work with Bull Langdon. Even those he had formerly been able to tyrannize over gave him a wide berth; never had the Bar Q been so short-handed, and the departure of Cyril, who was invaluable among the purebred, was a real disaster to the Bull camp.
For some time Langdon had been beset with an almost insensate craving for Nettie Day. All the time he had been in the States she had never been wholly absent from his mind, though the anxieties of the tour had kept his desire for the girl in check; but once back in Canada, his mind reverted to her incessantly.
As he stood watching Cyril Stanley disappear at a slow lope over the hills, it occurred to him that he might be making for Bar Q and Nettie, and the thought gave him pause. The idea that Nettie and Cyril should come together again was more than he could stand. Theblood rushed madly to his head, and everything went red before his eyes.
Batt Leeson, a hand who had served directly under Cyril, was the second-best upon the place; he could be trusted to look after the cattle, and was known to be a conscientious workman, although he had never yet been entrusted with any position of authority. When Cyril's job was offered him, therefore, he was rather afraid and hesitant. However, there was no foreman at this time at the Bull camp, which had been stripped for the trip to the States, and there was no other man in the outfit fit to be one.
The Bull considered the possibility of Cyril's changing his mind and returning to Bar Q. He knew what logging in the lumber camps meant, and that though the work would not daunt the young man, the food and the dirt would. The daily association with them "damn dirty forriners," as Bull named the Russian loggers, would soon be too much for a white man, he decided, and counted upon Cyril's return.
When he left the camp he was by no means easy in his mind about his cattle. He took the trail for Bar Q in his big car, racing ahead in the teeth of a veritable cyclone, but the good car held its straight coursegallantly. It was late at night when Bull Langdon reached the ranch in the foothills, and the noise of his arrival could not be heard above the gale. When he saw that light in the kitchen, he came warily upon the place. Sniffing the air like a bloodhound tracking down his prey, he cautiously approached the kitchen where Nettie's light still burned. Concealed in the darkness of the living room his greedy eyes devoured the girl as she moved about the room busy at the great range. All thought was swept from his mind, leaving only the mad desire to crush in his arms once again the girl who awakened in him this overmastering passion.
Meanwhile, Cyril Stanley had mechanically turned his horse's head toward the foothills. He had no definite purpose in mind; he was vaguely conscious of being hungry for a sight of Nettie. His long absence had not cured him; he loved the girl as deeply as on that first day when their eyes had met across the space of the poor D. D. D. shack, and the room was full of laughter.
How pretty she had looked, in spite of her shabby dress; how her hair had shone in the sun! How gentle and sweet and good she had been to her little brothersand sisters! Even the strange woman in the C. P. R. shack had melted before Nettie's shy effort to help her in those days, reflected the unhappy Cyril. No one could have resisted her, and he told himself that it was small wonder that he had "fallen so hard" for her. He had seen many women in the big cities of America, but had found no face like Nettie's. No, he wouldn't changehisgirl for any girl in the States. And as in his thought he called her "his," he awoke suddenly to the realization that Nettie was "his" no longer; someone had stolen her heart from him! Yet such a longing was on him to see the beloved face again, that he resolved to risk her displeasure by going to Bar Q before burying himself in the deep woods at the lumber camp.
On the road he fell in with a couple of riders from the hill country, and their suggestive gossip aroused him somewhat from his gloom, for he caught the girl's name and the sneer that came into their voices caused him to sit up abruptly, his hat pushed back, and his eyes full of dangerous interrogation. They protested they had only been "stringing" him, and rode rapidly off. What they had hinted was that the quicker the girl at Bar Q was married, the better, and that he, Cyril Stanley, had come back only just in time.
Cyril turned this over heavily in his mind, shaking his head as though the problem were beyond him, but he changed his course away from the hill, deciding to spend a few days at his homestead. He would stay in the little house he had built for Nettie; he wanted to look over the place that was to have been their home. He would go to Bar Q later. At least, Nettie would not refuse to bid him good-by.
As he rode along, his hat over his eyes, smarting tears bit at the lids, and the heart of the lad who used once to go singing along the trail and about his work was heavy as lead within him.
At the homely little cabin, faith and confidence in Nettie seemed to come back to him; perhaps her strange behavior had all been some hideous mistake. Perhaps she had been merely angry at his going to Barstairs. Well, a girl had a right to be angry, and maybe she had gotten over it by now. There was no accounting for a girl's moods, he reasoned; he "wasn't no saint himself" to hold anything against her. If only Nettie would smile at him again he would forget all he had suffered during all those cruel months. If only she would look at him and speak to him as she used to do. Nettie!Hisgirl! His own, out of all the world. Ithad been love at first sight; so much they had always agreed on, and she had been fond of repeating that it was also a love that would never die. She had meant it then, as they sat hand in hand amongst the berry bushes, with the evening sunlight on the tree-tops glistening like moon rays on the whispering leaves.
The longer Cyril stayed there gazing around the cabin that was filled with things Nettie herself had helped him to make, the stronger grew his hope and faith. A new exhilaration suddenly possessed him, making him feel that life was worth living again. He looked with a new warmth and kindness upon the world, and not even the slowly gathering storm that darkened the March day could quell his mounting spirits.
He was whistling and bustling about the shack when he heard a hanging upon the door, and opened the door to find Dr. McDermott standing there. He greeted his old friend with unaffected delight, for the doctor was always associated in his thoughts with Nettie, whom he had brought into the world in the best day's work he ever accomplished, so thought Cyril.
"Hello, doc. Gee, it's great to see your good old mug again. How'd you know I was back? How're you?"
But the old doctor was scowling at him like an angrybulldog, underlip thrust out, and his face puckered into lines of unmistakable disapproval; worse still, he was pointedly refusing Cyril's proffered handshake.
"No, sir," he said, "I'll not shake hands with a scallawag. Not till he's done the right thing, by gad!"
"Wow, doc! What's bitin' you?"
"Lad," said Dr. McDermott sternly, "I'm not here on any pleasure call. I've come as a matter of duty, mon to mon to ask—to demand—that you do the right thing by that puir lass."
"Lass? Who do you mean?"
"You know domned well who I mean. None other, mon, but Nettie Day."
At the mention of that name Cyril's face turned suddenly gray and stern.
"There are certain things I don't discuss with no man, doc. One of them's—Nettie. I don't let no man talk to me abouther. Some coyotes on the road stopped me, and started to blat some stuff about her, but they shut up tight enough and gave me the heels of their broncs before they'd barely got started with that line of talk. And I ain't lettin' even an old friend like you say anything about Nettie. What's fallen between her and me is our affair."
Dr. McDermott's fist came heavily down upon the table.
"Lad, ye're going to marry that girl, if I have to shove you by your neck to the parson."
A light flamed in the boy's face; his eyes widened as he stared incredulously at the doctor.
"I say," he said, all but weeping for joy, "that's a good joke on me. Isthatwhat you're drivin' at, doc? Marry her! Say, I'd marry Nettie Day this blessed minute if she'd have me!"
"Very good, lad. You'll have your chance. I've got her now at Miss Loring's. I'll go myself after the missionary, if you'll lend me a horse. Trail's not fit for a car. I'll do my best to get back first thing in the morning. Meanwhile, you'll have a chance to get your house in shape. You'll want it to shine for that wife and baby of yours."
"That wi—and— Say, what's the joke, anyway?"
The doctor was now in better humor. His errand had been highly successful, and after all a lad was only a lad, and he liked young Cyril Stanley. There was good stuff in Cyril—good Scotch stuff.
Cyril, taking the doctor's remark for one of the coarse jokes commonly cracked in that countryside atthe time of a wedding, laughed half-heartedly, but the words stuck queerly in his mind. To change the subject, he said:
"Doc, what do you suppose ever possessed Nettie to treat me as she did? When I got back from Barstairs—let me see, that was last October—no, a bit before that—What does she do but run away from me, and when I chased after her, she turned me down dead cold. Said she'd changed—wasn't the same, and a—and—she simply sent me packing—made me think someone'd cut me out with her and——"
Cyril broke off. The memory of that time was still an open wound in his mind.
"I don't blame her a bit," blustered the doctor, in assumed anger. "If it wasn't for that baby now, she'd do better to send you packing altogether. What's the matter with you young people today? Can't you hold back like respectable folk? Don't you realize that even though you marry the gell now, she'll always be branded with the shame of this thing; and it's not only the lass to be considered, there's the innocent child—the baby to consider."
"That's the third or fourth time that you've saidthat word. What do you mean, anyway? What baby? Whose?"
"Whose? Why, your own, lad—yours and Nettie's."
"Mine and—Have you gone plumb crazy, doc?"
"Not I, lad. I helped bring your child into the world this morning, and Nettie's resting quiet now, and waiting for you, I have no doubt. Now, lad——"
He broke off, for something in the look and motion of Cyril Stanley stopped him from further reproach.
"I've no intention of being hard on you. Young blood—is—young blood, and I was young myself once."
Cyril had staggered back, like one mortally struck. Slowly the truth had dawned upon him, and with the realization that Nettie had been false to him, something primitive and furious seemed to shake the foundations of his being; something that was made up of outrage and ungodly hatred.
"So—she's—got—a baby, has she?"
"A wee lad——"
"And you come to me—tometo get a name for it!"
"To you? Who else?"
"Who else?" jeered the lad frantically. "Askher!"
Dr. McDermott recoiled before the savage glare in the young man's eyes, and slowly he began to realizethe truth. He was stunned by the thought that another man than Cyril had been the cause of the girl's downfall. Who could it be? Slowly he turned the matter over in his mind, rejecting one by one each of the possible men he could think of, till at last the great sinister figure of the Bull loomed up before his mind's eye. He began clearly to recall a certain day at Bar Q when he had caught the evil expression of the cowman's face as, behind his wife's back, he followed Nettie Day with his greedy, covetous eyes.
Dr. McDermott's shoulders seemed to bend as if a great burden lay upon them, and he looked long and searchingly at the furious boy before him. When he spoke his voice was shaken with emotion.
"The Lord help you, lad!" he said. "The Lord help us all in our deep trouble. Give us sober and humble hearts. Teach us to bear as best we can the iniquities of the wicked who beset us. Amen."
The sound of the door closing fell like a lash on Cyril Stanley's brain. Alone with his frenzy and despair, he looked wildly round as if to find some outlet for his feelings. A great ax lay on the floor near the out-kitchen door, and the young man seized it and swung it high in his hand. It crashed down upon the table,splintering it in two. Again and again the ax descended until everything he had bought for Nettie Day lay in fragments about the room. Then he took from the storeroom a five-gallon can of kerosene, and emptied it deliberately over the floor.
He put on chapps, sheepskin, fur cap and spurs, tied up a few other necessaries in a bundle and walked heavily to the door. Outside, he smashed the windows and a gale of snow flew into the wrecked house. Lastly, he struck a match and, guarding the flame, he knelt in the doorway and threw it into a pool of kerosene.
The flames around the floor crept like snakes, then leaped up the walls, and from the piles of broken chairs and tables went roaring to the roof.
The house went up in a furious blaze. Long after Cyril Stanley had disappeared into the great timber country the smoke of his burning homestead rose above the blanket of snow, until the smoldering ruins were buried under the soft whiteness and covered from the eyes of the world. But later on the sunshine of the spring would melt the shroud away and reveal where his love lay ruined on the prairie.
Spring came late to Alberta that year, and it was May before the farmers were upon the land.
Zero weather followed the heavy March snowfalls, and May was well advanced before the first thaw began.
Angella Loring was particularly anxious that year to be upon her land early, for she wished to keep Nettie with her, and had conceived an ambitious scheme which she believed would tempt the girl to remain. Ever since her recovery Nettie had been waiting for the weather to break, so that she might go to Calgary and try to find work there, where she would be unknown, and Dr. McDermott had told her how great was the scarcity of help in the city. Angella, from the first day, had taken charge of the baby, and indeed it might have been her child rather than Nettie's. For Nettie was afraid of this child of the Bull's. Before the cold spell had broken, and while she was still weak, she would sit at the window and stare out over the bleak landscape withunseeing eyes. Spring is always an unpleasant season in Alberta, and that year it was even worse than usual. While Angella was away at the barns or the fields busy with her work, Nettie found herself shut in alone with her baby, but she never went near it, or attempted to take it in her arms or caress it.
The child was undersized and frail, but it cried very little, and its tiny, weird face looked curiously like a bird's. There was something pitifully unfinished about it although it was in no way deformed. It had simply been forced into the world before its time, and denied the sustenance of its mother's breast—for Nettie was unable to nurse her child—it made slow progress. At the end of April it weighed no more than the day it was born.
If Nettie, immersed in her own sorrow, was oblivious of her child's condition, its foster-mother was filled with alarm and anxiety. Dr. McDermott was no longer an unwelcome visitor at the shack, indeed he was often sent for when Jake, who had taken to haunting the ranch, and sleeping in Cyril's deserted sheds, could be despatched upon such an errand. No matter where he was, or what he was doing, the doctor seldom failed to respond to Angella's summons. Tramping into theshack, stamping the snow off his feet, he would look with pretended fierceness at the two women, looking for something to scold about and always, finding it, but although his words were rough, his hands were gentle as a mother's as he took the baby in his arms. He would gaze intently at the little creature with all a parent's anxiety while its mother held aloof, keeping her gaze riveted upon the window.
More than once, Angella Loring found herself very close to the doctor, and looking up, he would see her eyes were misty with solicitude over "her" baby. To cover his own feelings, he would ask her to fetch this and that and she waited upon him meekly. Once kneeling by his side, as the baby lay upon his knees, she saw its little wan face puckered into something that she firmly declared was a smile. In her delight and excitement she put her arms around the baby on his knee, and before she realized what was happening she found her hand enclosed in the doctor's warm clasp. Their eyes met, and the color slowly receded from her cheeks.
That night, she went into the bedroom, carefully closing the burlap curtain between it and the outer room, and searching amongst the contents of the boxshe had brought with her from England, Angella Loring found something that was no familiar object in that prairie shack—a mirror—a woman's hand mirror, of tortoiseshell, with a silver crest upon it. For some time she held it in her hand, face down, before she mustered courage to lift it slowly to her face. For a long time she gazed into the glass, the bright, haunted eyes slowly scanning the strange face, with its crown of soft gray curls. She was kneeling on the floor by her bed, and suddenly the hand holding the mirror fell into her lap, and Angella Loring said in a choking whisper looking down at her reflection, "I'm an old fool! God help me!"
Her program for that season was an ambitious one for a fragile woman; she purposed to put in one hundred and fifty acres of crop, and to hay over sixty more acres, and not content with working her own land, she intended to work and seed Cyril's as well. This latter was the stake to which she hoped to tie Nettie to her. She felt sure that the girl would not fail to respond to this opportunity to help the man she loved, for according to the homestead law of that time, land had to be fenced, worked and lived upon for a certain term of years, and by abandoning hishomestead, Cyril stood to lose the quarter, besides the waste of all the work and money already expended upon the place. When Angella laid her proposition before Nettie, she was rewarded by the first sign of animation the girl had shown since the doctor had brought her to the ranch. Her apathy and despair fell from her, and when Angella told her that unless Nettie would give her the help she needed she would be obliged to employ hired hands which she could not afford, Nettie's eagerness knew no bounds.
"Oh my, yes, Angel, I just wisht you'd give me the chance. I'd love to do the work. I'll do it alone if—you'll let me—I'll work my fingers to the bone to—to—make up to him—and to you, Angel."
"That's all right. I'm glad you feel that way, because I need your help badly. I believe it's going to be a crop year anyway, because the snow when it does melt is bound to mean all sorts of moisture for the land. Meanwhile, we can do a bit of fencing. Mine need repairing badly, and so do parts of Cyril's. We've got to cross fence between his pasture land and where the crop is to go in. He's got quite a few head of horses and cattle running loose, I see, and they've got to be driven off the grain land. I'm going out aftera couple of heavy horses of his I saw the other day on his land. I think I can corral them, and they'll come in first rate for the plow."
"Oh, Angel, let me go. I understand horses better'n you do. It's awful hard to drive them when they've been loose like that all winter. So let me go along."
"You'll stay right here. Look here, now,I'mgoing to run things here, and you do as you're told."
"Well, don't forget to take a halter, will you, and Angel, you want to keep away from their hind feet—even if you are on horse. Sometimes they kick right out. Dad was lamed that way, drivin' in wild horses. Got kicked while on horse-back, right in the shin. My, it was awful!"
"I'm all right. Don't you worry about me," said Angella. "Mind the baby while I'm gone, and look here, if he cries, there's barley gruel in that bottle. Heat it by standing it in hot water—but don't let it get too hot. I think he'll be all right till I get back."
Nettie did a curious thing that day when Angella had left her alone. She went over to the rough cot that Angella had made out of a grocery box for the baby, and for a long time she stood looking down at the little sleeper. Almost unconsciously her hand touched herbaby's tiny hand that clung at once to her finger and at that warm contact a flood of emotion overwhelmed Nettie's heart. It was as if tentacles had reached out and fastened upon her very soul; the little curled up fist seemed to scorch her with its mute reproach and appeal for her affection. Nettie pulled her hand fiercely away, and fled into the adjoining room, her breath coming and going tumultuously.
"I don't want to love him," she cried. "I don't want to. He'shis, and I wisht I'd died before I—I—come to this."
Seeking some physical outlet for her pent-up feelings she looked about her, and saw a pair of scissors on Angella's dressing table. A moment later she found herself slashing into her long hair. The heavy blonde braids dropped to the floor with a soft thud. Nettie, shorn of her beautiful hair, was not, however, disfigured, in fact her childlike, simple beauty seemed almost lovelier for the cropped head, accentuating her extreme youth. But when Angella coming in stopped on the threshold and stared at her condemningly, Nettie knew that she had done wrong.
"Nettie Day, what you have done is an act of sheervandalism," said the woman, who herself had cut her own hair to the scalp.
"Oh, Angel, I wanted to be like you. I didn't want no more to be like a woman——"
Angella's face paled.
"So I am not like a woman, then?"
"I didn't mean that, Angel. You're more like a woman in your heart than anyone I ever knew, 'cept Mrs. Langdon, and I just wanted to make myself so that—so that no one would ever want to look at me again. Just 's if I was same as a man and——"
"And I suppose you think you've succeeded," said Angella dryly. "Never fear. It will take more than the cutting of your hair to keep men from you, Nettie Day. However, it's your own hair, and I suppose you meant all right. They say 'Hell is paved with good intentions.' But you needn't think that because I—was fool enough to—to—make a freak of myself, that I approve of you or anyone else doing it."
"I'm sorry, Angel. I'm awfully sorry. I—I want to be as much like you as I can be. I want to wear them men's overalls too and do——"
"As for the overalls, that's all right,they'resensible; but, look here, Nettie, don't let me catch you doinganything like that to disfigure yourself again, and don't you go slashing any more into your hair. It doesn't look bad now, but even you would look a fright if you had cut it as I did—right to the scalp."
"It's growing in now. And it looks—right pretty, Angel," said Nettie wistfully. "D'you know, you ain't nearly as ugly as you think you are," she added with girlish naïveté, which brought a chuckle from Angella, warming the baby's bottle at the stove.
They began to fence in mid-April. The ground was hard, and having no proper hole diggers they were at a still greater disadvantage. However, Angella said she did not want to waste any time on repairing fences, once the land was ready for the crop. Cyril's quarter was already fairly well fenced, but the dividing line between the two quarters had never been completed. Now that the two places were to be worked as one the line-fence had become unnecessary. By persistent labor upon their first task of the season, they achieved an inadequate protection for the proposed crop. The uneven line of barbed wire, set on unsteady posts, aroused the derisive condemnation of Dr. McDermott, who warned them that cattle would have no troublein breaking through and that the two wires did not constitute a legal fence, three being the required number. Angella, colder and more unbending than ever in her attitude to the doctor, rejoined that "they would take their chances this year."
The herd law was in force, and it was against the law for cattle to be at large on the road or road allowances in that particular part of the country. The doctor grouchily warned them that that concerned stray cattle, but there was absolutely nothing to prevent a herd driven by riders from going through. Nothing, returned Angella indignantly, except the fact that reputable riders had a professional sense of honor, so far as other people's grain fields were concerned, and she knew none that would be likely to turn driven cattle into a grain field. Such things were not done in a country like Alberta. Besides, cattle were unlikely to be moved in the summer time, and by the fall, the harvest would be in, and the grain safe.
"Have it your way," returned the doctor. "But if you want to do a mon's work, you ought to do it in a mon's way." This gratuitous remark was received in the disdainful silence it deserved.
They had a truly gigantic task before them, theputting in of over one hundred and fifty acres of grain—flax, barley, oats, wheat, green feed and rye.
As soon as the land was in condition to be worked, they began. For days they had been sorting over and mending harnesses and bridles, sharpening the implements and getting everything into shape. Eight work horses had been brought up from the pasture, and for a few days had been fed oats and given especial care. Nettie had regained her strength and was invaluable to the less experienced, though self-reliant Angella because of her long familiarity with farm work and horses too.
The baby went into the field with them, carried in a large box, where among its pillows, Nettie's child slept in blissful unconsciousness of the tragedy of his existence. In the latter weeks he had been gaining strength, and his roving blue eyes had smiled more than once at the adoring Angella.
Nettie went on the plow, the hardest of the implements to ride. There had been some argument between the girls as to which implement each should ride, Angella contending that Nettie was not yet in a fit condition to stand the rough shaking on the plow; and Nettie stubbornly insisting that she felt "strong as an ox," and that she had ridden the plow since she was a littlegirl. "Dad put me into the field when I was just ten," she told Angella. "You know he couldn't afford to stay home to work our quarter, because our land was so poor; he had to go out on other farms to make some wages, because we was such a hungry family, and it took sights of food to fill us all."
So Nettie rode the plow, and then the disc, while Angella took the harrow and the seeder. Angella only yielded the plow to Nettie when the girl pointed out that the seeder required "brains," of which she sadly admitted she had little. She had never seeded, not even at home; Dad had always come back in time to do that. So Angella, feeling the importance of her two seasons' experience in seeding, argued no more, and, seeded six inches deep, a precautionary measure, she told Nettie, against a dry year. The weather favored them; intermittent rains and flurries of snow kept the ground damp enough for fertilization, but not too wet for sowing. Nevertheless, said Angella, you never could tell about Alberta's climate. Drought might start with June, and then where would the careless farmers be?
This period of hard work diverted Nettie's mind from its obsession of sorrow; for mind and body are alike exhausted at the end of a day from sunrise to sunset.Intent upon being a first-rate helper, her mind ceased to dwell upon her troubles.
Having finished the preparation of the ground and the seeding, they spent the next few weeks bringing their few head of stock to the corrals and all alone they branded, dehorned and vaccinated them against blackleg. Nettie then went over to Cyril's quarter with the plow and broke new land, by no means an easy job, since the ground was rough virgin soil, where rocks and bushes and tree stumps abounded. Meanwhile Angella summer fallowed on her own quarter.
July came in on a wave of intense heat. There was haying to be done on Cyril's quarter; Angella's fields had been overpastured, and she proposed to let them lie fallow for that year. The two girls put up seventy-five tons of hay. Angella was on the rake, an easy implement to ride, Nettie on the mower. Then Angella ascended the buck, and Nettie did the stacking, and as the big golden pile grew from day to day under their hands, their pride and satisfaction in their work was great. Angella felt that she had something to show for her work at last and pinned her faith upon a sure crop—the first since her arrival in Alberta.
Before and after their field work, they had plenty ofchores and housework to do. Nettie milked, looked after the sitting hens and spring chicks, and the great sow with her litter; she watered and fed the horses and cleaned the barns and stables. Meanwhile, Angella prepared the meals, made the butter, cleaned the house, and took full charge of the baby.
In Nettie's avoidance of her child there was fear rather than aversion. This child that had been forced upon her by the man she hated aroused strange tumults within her. At the thought of its father, she would shudder and tell herself she hated it because it was his; but there were moments when melting, passionate impulses consumed her, and then it took all her strength not to snatch her baby up and clasp it tightly to her breast.
Throughout the long day she sat on the hard seat of the implement, rocked and shaken from side to side, as the four-horse plow broke up the rough land, and she tried hard to keep her mind upon her work. As her expert hand guided her horses, making a clean, workmanlike job of which not even a man could have been ashamed, she found a certain comfort in the thought that she was working for Cyril Stanley. Yet, as the implement swept on its circular path over thefield, each time it passed near the box beside the straw stack where the baby slept, a sob of anguish would tear her heart anew.
The harvest was close at hand, and for the first time since she had come to Alberta, Angella Loring was to have a crop.
Billowing waves of golden wheat, going forty bushels or more to the acre, lay spread out before her, barley, glistening, and silvery, oats as tall as a man and thick and heavy, the grain, like living creatures, stirring and murmuring drowsily in the sunshine as the warm wind passed over it.
"Come, we are waiting to be reaped," it seemed to chant. "Gather us in, before the cold breath of the northland shall come shivering over the land, and freeze our strength with the touch of its icy finger."
Their labors over the two women who had put in the crop would walk slowly in the cool of the day through the grain, and the soft swishing of their skirts brushing a pathway through the thick grain sounded like a whisper of peace in the quiet evening. The marvelous harvest moon hung like a great orange ball above the fields; the prairie land seemed to stretch illimitably into the distance; the far horizons disappeared into a chainof white hills, rising like a mist against the sky still resplendent with the incomparable prairie sunset.
They talked little for the one was shy and reticent by nature, and in the other reticence and brevity of speech had become a habit. Yet each felt and understood the thought of the other, as they looked across at the moving grain, which was the visible sign of their long and arduous labor.
There was hail in the south and further west; it zigzagged across the country, beating down the tall grain; the stones lay as big as eggs upon the ground, breaking windows and lashing in its vindictive fury whatever stood in its path. The grain shuddered beneath the onslaught and bent to the ground. An angry black cloud overspread the sky like a gigantic hand from whose outstretched fingers the hail was falling. Not a stalk was left standing in the fields over which the storm passed, but its course was curiously eccentric. It ignored whole municipalities, and no one could tell where next it would choose to vent its wicked rage. Anxiously the girls had watched the path of the mad cloud, taking count of the destructive force that was wreaking such havoc upon the grain lands. Nettie prayed—prayed to the God of whom she knew so pitifully little, but to whom Mrs. Langdon had been so near, and begged that their fields, Angela's and Cyril's, might be spared.
The rural telephone wires were busy all that day and evening, with the calls of the excited farmers.
"Were you struck?"
"Yes, wiped out."
"Insured?"
"Not a red cent."
"Gosh, I'm sorry. There's not a spear left in my fields neither, but I got ten dollars on the acre."
"Think they'll allow you one hundred per cent. loss?"
"Sure they will."
"Hm! Betcha you'll thresh just the same."
Then the bang of a hanging up receiver; but the ceaseless buzzing went on, with all the other parties on the main wire listening in, gloating or commiserating over each others' misfortunes.
"How about Smither's?"
"Say, his fields aren't touched."
"You don't say. Isn't it the devil how them hail storms skip and miss."
"Munsun's got wiped off the map. So did Homan."
"Pederson's ain't touched even."
"Trust them Swedes to have the luck every time."
"Did you hear about Bar Q?"
"No, what?"
"Heard they got it hardest of all. My land! There isn't a field the hail didn't get. The whole three thousand acres on the grain ranch. I see where his nibs won't do much threshing this year."
"He should worry. You can bet your bottom dollar he's got double insurance on his crop, and, say, anyway, he'll have a sight of green feed for his cattle. They say he's short of hay in the hill country this year. I'll bet he cuts the hailed stuff for feed."
"I wouldn't wonder!"
And so on.
As it happened, Nettie and Angella's crops were among the few that had escaped untouched. When the storm had passed and the sun blazed out again over the battered fields there, strong and sturdy, shining in the clear light, the grain they had sown seemed to smile at them and call aloud to be reaped without further delay.
It was now mid-August, and the grain was ripe. Angella rode the binder, a picturesque implement with canvas wings, which when in operation resembles a sort of flying machine. Nettie followed on foot, stooking. This was a man's job, for the sheaves of grain were heavy, and it was no easy matter to bend and grasp thethick bundles and stook them in stacks; but Nettie was strong and willing. She even tried to keep pace with the binder, by running to the stacks, until Angella brought up her horses sharply and refused to go on with the work, unless Nettie took her time about the stooking.
The harvest occupied three long weeks, but the day came at last when the work was all completed. There was no longer any danger of frost, hail or drought. Nothing remained to be done but the threshing. Under the mellow evening light that suffuses the Alberta country at the harvest season, the girls, having gleaned bravely and well, rode in from their last day of harvesting.
Sound carries far in the prairie country, and they could hear distinctly the buzz of the threshing machine eight miles away, droning like a comfortable bee, working steadily through the night. In a few days, the threshers would "pull in" to Angella's ranch and the harvested grain would be poured into the temporary granaries that they had constructed from a portion of the barn.
As they stood together in the twilight, looking across at the harvest field, they felt, though they might nothave been able to express their thoughts in words, that they had made of that land of theirs a picture no human brush could ever copy. And as this thought came simultaneously to their minds, their eyes met, and they smiled at each other like sisters. As they turned reluctantly from the contemplation of their masterpiece, Nettie's last glance toward the hills saw the figure of a rider silhouetted against the skyline. On his first appearance at the top of the grade, she did not recognize him, but as he approached, an uncontrollable agitation shook her from head to foot.
"Angel! Look—look—look—look—it's—the Bull! Oh—h——"
"You have nothing to fear, Nettie. Nettie!"
"Oh, Angel, he's come for me! I knowed he would! I've been lookin' for him, dreadin' it and now he's here. Oh, what am I to do? Where can I hide?"
As on the night when the Bull had trapped her in her room and she had listened paralyzed with fear to the breaking down of her door, her eyes darted wildly about for a means of escape. This time, instead of the narrow room, the whole of the far-flung prairie lay before her with the great grain stocks which she herself had piled together. She broke from Angella's grasp,and fled across the field, and darting from one stack to another, crouched down in despair behind the farthest one.
Angella made no movement to stop the fleeing girl. Her eyes narrowed slightly as she gazed keenly at the man to discover whether it was indeed Bull Langdon; then she turned and quietly went into her house. She put the child in its basket into the inner room, and took down her rifle; the rifle her neighbors in the early days had jeered at but learned to respect. Angella did not load it in the house, but slowly and calmly as Bull Langdon rode up she fitted the bullets in place.
In a country like Alberta, especially in the ranching sections, it is not difficult for a person to disappear, if he is so minded.
Nettie had lived several months with Angella Loring before her presence there was discovered. On one side of Angella's quarter was a municipality of open range, and on the other, Cyril Stanley's quarter section. Beyond Cyril's ranch was bush stretching for several miles to the Elbow River that intersected, south and north, the land towards the foothills fifty miles out of which was the Bar Q hill ranch. Beyond this dense timber land began, and in its very heart stood the Bow Claire Lumber Camp on the banks of the Ghost and Bow Rivers. Past the timber land the foothills still continued, growing higher and higher till they merged into the chain of Rocky Mountains.
Gossip about Nettie Day had been confined to the foothill ranching country. Her story had run from ranch to ranch, and the general comment wasexpressed in the customary country phrases of: "I never would have believed it" or "I told you so." But Nettie disappeared from the foothills, and curiosity, in a ranching country as has been said above, is short-lived. Besides, the death of Mrs. Langdon provided the ranchers with fresh excitement, and questions as to Nettie's whereabouts were rarely heard.
At this time new cares had begun to take possession of the country people of Alberta. Even as early as the spring, strange symptoms of unrest might have been observed, and here and there fear seemed to look out of the ranchers' eyes. Strange stories were percolating into the ranches of sickness in the cities, a certain sickness which the authorities purposely misnamed in order that the danger of panic might be averted. The ranch people stuck closely to their homes that spring and summer and were not cordial to strangers or of the usually welcome regular visitors from the city—the insurance and real estate men, the drug seller and the sly affable stranger who sold his Pain Killer to the hands with a wink. All these "paper-collar dudes" as the farmers called them, and the motor hoboes and camp-tramps, who stopped at the ranches to ask for anything from a measure of milk to a night'slodging, experienced that summer a cold reception, for the ranch people were shrewd enough to appreciate the fact that the plague might be carried to them through just such mediums as these. So they stuck close to home, and although the papers were filled with scare-head accounts of the fearful scourge in the east, Alberta believed or hoped it would prove immune.
In Yankee Valley, no one knew that the girl from the D. D. D. had returned, or that, with her child, she had found a refuge in the home of the Englishwoman who preferred to live like a hermit rather than accept the friendship of her neighbors. Angella's land lay well back from the main road and trails and there Nettie had found a true sanctuary. One day, Batt Leeson, who had taken Cyril's place at the Bull camp, was riding by Cyril's quarter, en route to the foothills and paused at the sight of a girl in a man's blue overalls, driving a six-horse plow team over new breaking.
Nettie, at a pause in the harvesting, while they were waiting for a field of oats to ripen, was filling in the time by breaking new land on Cyril's quarter.
Batt, gazing at her with his mouth open and his eyes blinking incredulously, could not believe it possible. To make doubly sure, he rode close to the fence line,and from behind the shelter of a tree, he waited for the plow to make its next round of the field. On and on it came, its dull rumble and clatter of iron the louder for the stillness of the prairie. Over a piece of rising ground came Nettie Day upon the implement. Her head was bare, and her hair shone red-gold in the sunshine, seeming to radiate light like a halo. It had been cropped close as a boy's, and the gentle wind lifted and blew it back from her flushed face as she drove.
"Well, I'll be switched!" said the ranch hand.
He was, in fact, overjoyed at his discovery and would go back to the foothills with a rich morsel of news. He imagined himself saying, "What d'you think? That there girl that got into trouble at Bar Q is workin' on the land of the fellow that—" Once Cyril Stanley had punched his face for a much slighter offense than mentioning his (Cyril's) name in connection with a girl, and Batt hit his tongue upon the name of the man he suspected as the cause of Nettie Day's downfall.
Chuckling with satisfaction, he followed the girl with his gloating eyes, but she was looking straight ahead and never turned her head to where the rider watched her from the trail.
Things had been going from bad to worse at Bar Q. More than the usual number of calves had died from blackleg, and a number of first-class heifers had perished in the woods where the larkspur poison weed grew wild. A Government veterinary surgeon, after a hurried survey of the animals on the home range, had put a blanket quarantine on all the cattle, which prevented their removal for months—in fact, until the "vet" gave them a clean bill of health.
The cowman's stock and ranch had been badly neglected in his absence. His cattle had been allowed to go at large; the fences were out of repair and the customary careful segregation of each different grade was a thing of the past. He found the whole ranch at sixes and sevens, and raged at the foremen for their neglect, swearing that not "a stitch of work" had been done all the time he had been away. He celebrated his return by "firing" all hands at the foothill ranch, and the new outfit who took their places proved worse than the old. Their term at the ranch was soon over, and the constant changing of hands that now began had an exceedingly bad effect upon the place. Good help was very scarce at that time, and wages had been as highas one hundred dollars a month with board, so Bull Langdon had his hands full at Bar Q.
He went about in a state of chronic evil humor in these days, and found nothing about the place to suit him. Without his wife, the big ranch house got upon his nerves, for with the genius of the born home-maker she had created an atmosphere of comfort and peace that had made it impressive even on her husband's insensitive mind. She had catered to his appetite and his whims, and he had become used to having a woman's tender care about him; indeed, he had grown to depend upon the very services he had so roughly rewarded in the past. He could neither accustom himself to the empty house not endure the meals at the cook car.
In these days he slept on the ground floor of the house, in the dining room. During his wife's lifetime the room had shone with orderliness and cleanliness; now boots, rough coats and trousers, shirts, and the cattlemen's riding accessories were strewn all over it, while the unmade bed, the unwashed pots and pans, the traces of muddy boots upon the floor, and the dust of weeks had turned it into a place of indescribable dirt and confusion.
The Bull had refused to sleep upstairs since his wife'sdeath; her bedroom door remained closed. Nettie's, too, still hung on its broken hinges, and sometimes on a windy night the knocking of that broken door, screeching and swinging upon its single hinge, was more than the overwrought cattleman could stand, and he would tramp out to the bunkhouse, and sleep there instead. He felt the need of his home more and more, however, and like a spoiled child whose favorite toy had been taken from him, he fumed and stormed at the ill-luck that had robbed him.
One day he returned to the house after a hard day's riding, and the sight of its grime and disorder set a spark to his already smoldering rage. His thoughts turned, as always at such moments, to the girl whose place he honestly believed was there in his house where he had intended to install her. She had been gone long enough. He had put up with enough of her damned nonsense now, and it was time to round her up. He regarded Nettie as a stray head of stock, that had slipped from under the lariat noose, and was wandering in strange pastures. True, she was a prized head, but that only strengthened the Bull's determination to capture her. He considered her his personal stuff; something he had branded, and he was not the man to partwith anything that belonged to him, as doggedly and repeatedly he assured himself she did, having been bought with the rest of her dad's old truck.
Batt Leeson riding in from Barstairs brought him the first news of the girl that he had had since the night she had fled in terror from his house.
"Say, boss, who d'you suppose I seen when I rode by Yankee Valley?"
"How the h—— should I know?"
"Well, I seen that Day girl that used to work up here."
Bull Langdon, busy making of a bull-whip, twisting long strips of cowhide about a lump of lead, stopped short in his work, and looked up sharply at the slowly chewing, slowly talking ranch hand.
"What's that you say?"
"I was sayin' that I seen her—Nettie Day—over to Yankee Valley, and where d'you suppose she's living? Say, she must be tied up now to that Stanley fellow, because I seen her on his land and——"
"That's a damned lie!" shouted the cattleman, and dashed the loaded cowhide to the floor with a foul oath. Batt, his knees shaking with terror, retreated before the advance of the enraged cowman.
"It's true as God what I'm telling you. I seen her with my own eyes. She was breakin' land on Stanley's quarter."
Bull Langdon's eyes were bloodshot and his face twitched hideously.
"That young scrub's at Bow Claire. His homestead's burned to the ground. You can't come to me with no such tale as that."
"B—b-b-b—but I tell you she's workin' his land. Iseenher. I stopped right close and looked her over to make sure. I ain't makin' no mistake. Thought at first I might be, cause I figure that a girl in her condition wouldn't be——"
"What-cha mean by her condition?"
"Sa-ay boss." Batt scratched his head, uncertain whether to proceed; itching to tell the tale of the girl's fall, but fearing the menacing spark in the cattleman's eyes. "I thought you knew."
"Knew what?"
"'Bout her condition."
Batt essayed a sly, ingratiating wink, but it had no placating effect upon the man before him.
"I don't know what the devil you're talking about."
"Gosh, boss, everyone knows 'bout Nettie Day.She'sagoin' to have a baby—mebbe she's got it now. I expect she has."
"What-t!"
The Bull's eyes bulged; a tidal wave of unholy joy threatened to overwhelm him.
A baby! His! His! His own! His and that gell's!
He threw back his head and burst into a storm of laughter. His wild mirth shook the beams and rafters of the old room, and seemed to reverberate all through the great house.
"Well, by G——!" said the cowman and reached for his riding boots. He pulled them savagely on, still chuckling and chortling, and pausing ever and anon to smack his hip.
"Goin' riding, boss?"
"You betcher life I am."
"Where you goin'?"
"I'm going to a round up," said Bull Langdon, clicking his lips.
"After some loose stock?"
"A purebred heifer with a calf at heel," said Bull Langdon. "They've got my brand upon them."