The Englishwoman stood in the doorway of her shack, rifle in hand, and gazed calmly at the blustering cowman, who had dismounted, and, fists on hips, was standing before her. For the first time in his life Bull Langdon found himself face to face with a woman who was not afraid of him. Her cold, unwavering glance traveled over him, from his flat head down to his great, coarse feet, and back with cool disparagement straight into his flinching eyes.
"You seen anything of that gell, Nettie Day?"
Angella disdained to answer. She was looking over his head, and presently she said:
"Will you kindly remove yourself from my place? I don't want you here."
"You don't, heh? Well, I'm here to get something of my own, do you get me?"
"Oh, yes, I get you all right; but you'll take nothing offmyplace, you may be sure of that."
He stood his ground with bravado, and blurted out his errand; he had come for Nettie, and intended tohave her and his kid. She belonged to him; was his "gell," and he had bought her along with her "dad's old truck." He'd have been over sooner, but his cattle had tied him down since his return from the States, and he "wan't the kind o' man to neglect his cattle for a woman."
As he spoke, Angella's level gaze rested coolly upon him, and met his blustering outburst with a half-smile of detached and amused contempt. But when he made a movement as if to enter the house, Angella Loring slowly brought her rifle to her shoulder, and aimed straight at him. With the practiced eye of a dead shot, she squinted down the length of the barrel, and the Bull sprang back, when he saw her finger crooked upon the trigger.
"What the h—— you tryin' to do?"
She answered without lowering the gun or moving her finger.
"You clear off my place! If you attempt to enter my house I'll shoot you down with less compunction than I would a dog."
He slouched a few paces farther back, and an evil laugh broke from his lips. Once he had reached his horse's side, his bravado returned.
"Guess there ain't goin' to be no trouble gettin' what's my own. The law's on my side. I've got as much right to that kid, that's my own stuff, as the gell has."
"Oh, have you?" said Angella coolly. "Unfortunately for you, the child is no longer even Nettie's. It's mine. She gave me her child for adoption."
"She hadn't no right to do that," said the Bull in a sudden access of rage. "It ain't hers to give away."
"Oh, isn't it, though?"
"No, it ain't, and I'll show you a thing o' two. There won't be no funny business with guns neither when a couple of mounties come up here after what's mine."
"I wouldn't talk about the law if I were you. You see, when you committed that crime against Nettie, she happened to be a minor. I don't know just how many years in the penitentiary that may mean for you. Her lawyers will know."
At the word "penitentiary," his face had turned gray. Nettie's youth had never occurred to him before, nor what it might mean for him.
"Besides," went on the Englishwoman, "apart from the legal aspects of the case, I wonder that you take a chance in a country like this. Consider what is likelyto happen to you, if the truth about Nettie becomes known in this ranching country. We have an unwritten law of our own in such cases, you know, and everybody has been blaming an innocent boy. What will they say—what will they do, when they know that the most detested and hated man in the country attacked a young, defenseless girl when she was alone in his house? I wouldn't care to be in your shoes whenthatfact leaks out, as you may be sure it will. I'll take care of that! You can trust me to denounce you without reserve!"
The Bull shouted, purple with rage:
"There ain't no man livin'I'mafraid of, and there ain't no man in the country strong enough to lay a finger on me, see. I could beat every son of a gun in Alberta to a pulp."
"I don't doubt that. You look as if you might have the strength of a gorilla; but then where a hand will not serve a rope will, and you know it will be short work for your own men to hang you to a tree when young Cyril Stanley ropes you. Now I've talked to you enough. You get off my place, or I'll put a shot in that ugly fist of yours that'll lame you for the rest of your days."
He had remounted and she laughed at his haste; yetas he rode off, the venomous expression on his face turned her heart cold with a new fear, and her ears rang ominously with his parting words.
"So long, old hen, you'll sing another tune when we meet again."
"Jake, I want you to ride like 'hell on fire' to Springbank, where you'll find Dr. McDermott. Ask at the post office for him, and you may meet him on the trail. Don't spare Daisy, even if you have to kill her riding. Leave her at Springbank to rest up, and come back with the Doc. And Jake, if you get back by tomorrow night, I'll—I'll give you a whole pound of brown sugar and a can of molasses. Now skedaddle, and for God's sake, don't fail us."
"Me go! Me fly on the air!" cried the breed excitedly. Without saddle or bridle—nothing but a halter rope, Jake was on the Indian broncho, and was off like a flash over the trail.
Angella concealed her fears from the white and trembling Nettie.
"Nothing to worry about," she said carelessly. "He's afraid of my gun, Nettie, the big coward!"
"Oh, Angel, I'm not afraid for myself, but for thebaby. He's a terrible man when he's in a passion, and he never gives up nothing that's his."
"But you're not his," said Angel sharply, "and neither is the baby. He's mine. You said I could have him, and I won't give him up."
"Oh, Angel, I don't want you to. He's better with you than anyone else, and although I do love him—" Nettie's voice was breaking piteously—"yet there are times when Ican'tforget that he's the Bull's——"
"He's not. He's all yours, Nettie. There's not a trace of that wild brute in our baby. I don't see how you can even think it. Just look at the darling," and she held up the laughing, fair-haired baby at arm's length. The days spent out of doors in the field had done much to give him the health and strength that had not been his at birth. He had Nettie's eyes and hair, but not her seriousness, for he crowed and laughed all day long, the happiest and most contented baby in the world.
Nettie looked at him now with swimming eyes.
"Heissweet!" she said in a choking voice, and kneeling beside Angella, on whose lap the baby lay, she buried her head in his little soft body.
Jake did not return the following night, nor thenight after. Though each sought to hide her anxiety from the other, the two women kept a constant look-out along the trail, straining their ears for the comforting sound of the motor, which on a still day could sometimes be heard at two or even three miles' distance.
They would have gone away somewhere, but for the fact that the threshers were due in a few days' time, and it would have meant ruin to leave the crop unthreshed. Once the threshing was done, and the grain safely stored in the granary, or sold direct to the commission men who had already called upon Angella, they would be free to make a trip to Calgary, and there seek counsel and protection.
Meanwhile, every night they bolted and barricaded their door, and with the baby between them, with loaded guns side by side on the bed, hardly slept through the night. Wide-eyed and silent in the darkness they kept their vigil, each hoping that the other slept.
On the third night, toward morning, Nettie started up with a cry. She had heard something moving outside the shack. They gripped their rifles and sat up listening intently. Then Angella declared that it was only the wind, and Nettie said:
"It sounds like thunder, doesn't it? Maybe we're goin' to have another storm."
"Let it storm," said Angella, glad of the other's voice in the darkness. "Our crop's harvested, and no hail can hurt us now. Is the light still going in the kitchen?"
"Yes." After a moment, Nettie said:
"I ain't afraid of nothing now for myself, but I don't want nothing to happen to you—and my baby."
"My baby you mean," corrected Angella, pretending to laugh. But with all the tenderness of her maternal heart, she drew the baby close to her side.
After another long tense pause, when they again imagined things stirring about the place, Angella said suddenly:
"Let's talk. I can't sleep and neither can you, and we never do talk much."
"I expect that's because we've always had to work most o' the time," said Nettie. "Isn't it queer that you and me should be such friends."
"Why queer?"
"I'm what they call 'scrub' stock—and you——"
"So'm I—scrub. That's the kind worth being. Thecommon clay, Nettie. The other kind is shoddy and false and——"
"Oh, Angel, I think you're so sweet and good."
"I'm not sweet and good," said Angella stoutly, "and there's nothing heroic about me."
"I don't care what you are," said Nettie, "I'll always love you. Sometimes when I get thinkin' of how hard everything's been for me in this life, I think of you and Mrs. Langdon, and I say to myself: You're a lucky girl, Nettie. Not everybody in the world has got a friend! Have they, Angel?"
"No—very few of us have," said Angella sadly. "Nettie, did you hear that!"
"What?"
"It sounded like—like a moan. Listen!"
In the dark silence of the night, the long-drawn moaning sound was repeated.
"It's cattle," said Nettie.
"Are you sure?"
"Oh, yes, I know their calls, though I didn't know there was any near us."
"Passing along the trail probably. It's getting toward the fall, you know."
"Angel, do you believe in God?"
"No—that is, yes—in a way I do. Do you?"
"Yes. Mrs. Langdon used to say that God was in us—in our hearts. He can't be in every heart, can he?"
"Why not?"
"Well, Bull Langdon's for instance. Godcouldn'tabide inhisheart, could he?"
"No, I should think not."
"But Mrs. Langdon believed it. She used to say that God loved him as well as any of us, but that Bull was 'in error,' and that some day God would open his eyes, and then he would be powerful good."
"Hm! He'd have to open his eyes pretty wide, I'm thinking," said Angel. "But try and sleep now, Nettie. I'm feeling a bit drowsy myself. Maybe we can snatch a wink or two before morning. Good-night, Nettie."
"Good-night, Angel. I think it's true. Godisin our hearts. I believe it."
"I believe he's in yours, anyway," said Angella softly. "Good-night, old girl."
But God dwelt not in the heart of Bull Langdon. Under the silver light of the moon, that lay like a spell upon the sleeping land, and across the shining valley, came the cowman, driving a great herd of steers.Penned in corrals for shipment to the Calgary stockyards, they had been without food for two days, and now they came down the hill, eager and impatient for the feed that had been too long denied them.
The Bull, on his huge bay mare, drove them rapidly before him whirling and cracking his long whip over their heads. The Banff highway was deserted. He chose the gritty roads, and, heads down, the hungry steers nosed the bare ground, till they came to the level lands, and turned into the road allowances between the farms. The grain fields, odorous of cut hay and grain, inflamed the hunger-maddened steers, and they moaned and sniffed as they were driven mercilessly along.
All day and most of the night they traveled without pause and in the first gray of the dawn they arrived at the frail fences of the Lady Angella Loring. Down went the two insecure lines of barbed wire that the women had set up, never counting they would be needed to withstand the impetuous stampede of wild cattle.
When Angella and Nettie stepped out of their shack later that morning their shocked eyes were greeted with Bull Langdon's vindictive work. The road was still gray with the raised dust of the departing animals turning off the road allowance for the main trail, theBar Q brand showing clearly on their left ribs. Filled to the neck with the reaped grain, they were rolling heavily along the way into Calgary.
The two girls stood before their barren fields, overwhelmed by the magnitude of the disaster that had befallen them. Not a word was said, but Angella, as if grown suddenly old, turned blindly to the house, while Nettie threw herself down desperately upon the ground and burst into bitter tears.
Her little work-roughened hands fallen loosely by her side, Angella sat at the crude wooden table of her own making, and tried to figure a way out of the appalling problem now facing her. She had bought her implements on the installment plan, and the money was now due; she owed the municipality for her seed; a chattel mortgage was on her stock. That year's crop would have wiped out all her indebtedness, and left her free and clear.
When her crops had failed before, she had made up her losses by working at the Bar Q, and the small proceeds of the sale of eggs and butter; but now she had not only herself to consider. There were two other living creatures entirely dependent upon her. To thedesolate, heart-starved woman, Nettie and her baby had become nearer and dearer to her than her own kin.
Nettie, still lying on the bitten down stubble, was roused from her stupor of grief by a pulling at her sleeve, and looking up, she saw the half-breed Jake. He was kneeling beside her, holding out a little bunch of buttercups, and in the poor fellow's face she read his grief and anxiety. Nettie tried to smile through her tears, and she took the flowers gratefully.
"Thank you, Jake. Where'd you come from?" she asked, wiping her eyes, though her breath still came in gasping sobs, and she could not hide her tears.
"Jake come out like 'Hell on fire' in Doctor's nortermobile. Beeg, beeg ride—run like wind—run like hell on road. Doc"—he jerked his thumb back—"go into house. He eat foods. Jake got a hongry inside too.Shetell Jake she give'm molasses and sugar." He smacked his lips at thought of his favorite food, but the next moment he was studying Nettie's wet face in troubled bewilderment.
"What's matter, Nettie?Himhurt Nettie yes again?"
"Oh, yes, Jake, again." Her lip quivered.
The half-breed's face flamed savagely.
"The Bull! He no good! Jake kill 'im some day sure."
He waved his arms wildly, and Nettie shook her head, smiling at him sadly.
"Keep away from him, Jake. He's powerful strong, and there wouldn't be nothing much left of you if he once got his hands on you."
"Jake not afraid of the Bull," said the half-breed, shaking his head. "Listen, Nettie. Me—Jake Langdon—me take a peech fork, beeg long likea this, and me jab him in the eye of the Bull, yes? That's kill him."
"Oh, no, Jake. He'd get it from you. He'd rastle it out of your hands."
"Then me—Jake steal on house when he's sleep. Get a long big nail—like this big—hammer him into ear. That same way many Indian do."
"Keep away from him, Jake. You'll only get the worst of it."
"Jake don't mind worst. That's nothing. Jake no like see cry on Nettie."
"Well, then, I'll not cry any more. You pick me some more buttercups, Jake, and—and don't you worry about me.I'mall right."
Inside the shack, Dr. McDermott had broken his habitual Scotch reticence and blazed into fluent fury. He had met the Bar Q herd along the road, and had suspected something wrong. As he drove by Angella's fields he realized what had happened, and her first words confirmed his suspicions.
"Bull Langdon turned his steers into my crop. He has ruined us."
"The hound! The dirty, cowardly hound! I'll have him jailed for this."
"You can't, doctor," said Angella wearily, "we didn't have the legal fence—just two wires. You warned us. I wish I had taken your advice."
"Then I'll beat him to a pulp, with my own hands!" said the enraged doctor.
Angella looked up at him with a pitying smile.
"No, man you shan't do that. I wouldn't have you soil your hands touching him."
Her head dropped, and for a long time no word was spoken in the little shack. Dr. McDermott, tongue-tied, stared down at the bowed head of Angella. Presently she said, without looking up, but in a sort of hopeless, dead way:
"Dr. McDermott, I'm through. I can't go on fighting. I'm beat."
"Through!" roared her friend, who had once preached so violently against her laboring as a man, "lass, you've only begun! You're of a fighting race—a grand race, and you'll go down fighting. You're not of the breed to admit you're beat."
"Little you know of my breed," she said sadly.
Dr. McDermott took the chair opposite her, thrust out his chin and forced her to look at him.
"Do you remember the stable lad ye whipped because he'd not let you ride the young Spitfire?" he said. "Don't you remember the lad that twenty-five years ago your father sent away to college in Glasgow?"
Her eyes grew wide and bright as she stared at him as though she saw him for the first time. Color touched her cheeks, she looked like a girl again. For a moment she could not speak, but only stare at him. Out of the mists of memory she was seeing again the barefooted boy she had stolen away many a time to play with; it was incredible that he and this rugged Scotch doctor, who had forced his friendship upon her out in the wilds of Canada, should be one and the same.
"Are you really that boy?"
And then, with a catch in her voice:
"Why, I must have been blind." A little sob of delight at this miraculous encounter rose in her throat.
"Then you are—Angus. That was your name, wasn't it. Oh, Ihavebeen blind!"
"Twenty-five years is a long time, my lady."
"Don't call me, my lady. I hate it."
"I'm glad of that, ma'am," said the doctor solemnly, which made her laugh.
"And now," he pleaded, roughly, though in desperate earnest, "you'll be taking back the money that your father spent to make a doctor of a stable lad, will you not? You'll let me stake you, lass?"
"Oh, you've more than paid that debt. This ranch alone——"
"It's a homestead—a free gift of the Canadian Government. It'll not begin to pay for the cost of a mon's education. A debt's a debt, and I trust you'll allow a mon to wipe out a heavy obligation."
At that Angella smiled, but her eyes were wet.
"If you put it that way, Dr. McDermott, of course, there's nothing else for me to do but let you—let you—stake me—will you?"
"I will!" said the man, scowling at her angrily, thenhe cleared his throat, and asked for a "bite of food for a hungry mon who's been working day and night to hammer a bit of common sense into a bunch of farmers whose heads are made of wood."
Angella even laughed as she bustled about the kitchen, preparing a quick meal for the doctor, and when she set it before him she asked:
"Who's sick now, doctor?"
"The whole country's nigh down," he muttered. "If they don't heed the warning I've been trying to hammer into their systems for months now, there'll be a sad lot of sick and dead folk before the winter's out, I tell you."
"As bad as all that?"
He replied solemnly:
"Couldn't be worse. Mark my words, if the plague comes up to the country from Calgary, where it's got a foothold already, our population will be cut in half."
Like a thief in the night the plague crept into Alberta, disguised at first in the form of light colds to which the sufferers paid small attention, but before the year was out those neglected colds had turned into the scourge whose virulence singled out the strong, the fair and the young for its victims.
Calgary was like a beleaguered city at bay against the attack of a dread enemy. The printed warnings everywhere in the newspapers and placarded in public places and street cars; the newspaper accounts of the progress of the sickness in Europe, the United States and eastern Canada, with the long list of deaths threw the healthy city of the foothills into a state of panic.
Schools were closed; the people were afraid to go to church; disinfectant was sprayed over every store and office. The faintest symptom of a cold, the least sneeze was diagnosed as plague, and the growing fear in which the people awaited the disaster created a hysterical condition that probably precipitated its coming. Slowly and surely, undeterred by precaution and prayeralike, the terrible plague was drawing in upon Alberta.
The first definitely diagnosed cases came in early summer, when the weather is raw and cold as it always is there. At that early season only two or three cases were discovered, but all the members of medical and nursing professions volunteered or were conscripted for service. By a curious negligence, no means of protection were taken for the vast country that surrounded the City of the Foothills on every side, and it was even said that many cases that the authorities failed to report had been sent off "to the country."
If the city authorities were indifferent to the fate of the country regions, on which, by the way Calgary was wholly dependent, there was one man at least who kept the welfare of his beloved country close to his heart. The erstwhile Scotch stable lad, who for many years had dedicated his thought, his labor and his heart to the farming and ranching people of Alberta, begrudged himself even a few hours sleep. Night and day, he "kept the road," keeping the keenest watch for the first outbreak of the epidemic, well knowing that plague respected neither person nor place, but leaped across the great cities even to the remotest places of the earth.
The warm summer brought an abatement of the menace, but when the first frost came in with the fall, the plague fell like a cloudburst upon the country.
Calgary, the city of sunlight and optimism, became a place of suffering and death. Scarcely a house but the dreaded visitor entered to take his tragic and inexplicable toll of the youngest and strongest there. People went about half-dazed, as if they were living in a nightmare. Hospitals, schools, churches, theaters, every available public building was turned into a house of refuge. No one was allowed on the street without a mask of white gauze fastened over nose and mouth.
The terrible crisis brought to light the extreme scarcity of nurses and doctors. Although an army of volunteer nurses were recruited by the city authorities, they were inadequate to the needs of all those stricken households, where one after another died for sheer lack of care and attention. The hospitals and all the emergency stations were filled to overflowing.
In spite of the almost superhuman expenditure of effort, the death lists grew from day to day. Crêpe hung from every second door in the city, and every day a ghastly procession of hearses, automobiles, and everyvehicle that moved on wheels, passed through the streets laden with Calgary's dead.
All the surrounding towns had succumbed meanwhile, and the smaller the towns, the heavier was the mortality for lack of skilled doctors and nurses and fit accommodation for the patients.
Most desperate of all, however, was the plight of those who lived on farms and ranches and at camps beyond the reach of help. The state of things in the Indian Reserves was appalling. The Indians were dying like flies, their misery forgotten by their white protectors. In their ignorance and helplessness, they sought help at the farms and ranches, only to be turned away, and often they carried the plague into places which had been immune until then.
Half the countryside was down with the disease, and still Dr. McDermott was vainly applying to the city and provincial authorities for help. Seeing that his demands were falling on deaf ears, he tried to impress into service men and women ranchers whose families had not yet been attacked, trying to make them understand that at such a time it was everybody's duty to do what he could. But the fear that had paralyzed the cities had now reached the farmers, and the doctor'sappeal brought little response. In their desire to escape, many families shut themselves up in their homes, discharged their help and hung signs on their gates: "Keep away!" They closed their doors in the faces of friends and strangers both, and only opened them when they in their turn were forced to cry for help. A few did respond, it is true, to the doctor's call for help, but nearly always were themselves overtaken before they had served very long, and the demand for help of any kind was so overwhelming that it was well-nigh impossible to do more than show the sick how to take care of themselves.
Overworked and exhausted, worn out with lack of sleep, Dr. McDermott stopped one day at Angella Loring's ranch.
The two girls were coming in from the field, Angella in the democrat with the baby, and Nettie on foot, driving home a team of work horses. They had been plowing and repairing the broken fences, for undaunted by the destruction of their crop, they were pluckily on the land again, preparing for the next year's seeding.
Dr. McDermott, his bag on the step by him, watched them as they watered and fed their horses and put up for the night. Then, each taking a handle of the baby'sbasket, they came through the barnyard to the house.
For the first time since she had known her doctor friend, he failed to greet Nettie with his cheery:
"And how's my lass today?"
Gaunt and haggard, he stood up and scrutinized them gravely before grunting:
"Hm! All right, eh? Not touched. Well, sit down, girls. I've thot to tell you will make your hearts a wee bit heavy."
Dr. McDermott opened his black bag and took out some pills and a large bottle of disinfectant, which he set on the steps. Angella, the baby in her arms, her brows slightly drawn, looked down at the lined face of the doctor, and saw he had brought bad news.
"Let's go in," she said. "You look as if a cup of tea won't come amiss. Let me pass. I'll make it at once."
"You'll hear me through first, and I've no time for tea. There's a bit of sickness running about the country. 'Tis the same they've had in the old land. You'll put this disinfectant about your place, and on your person, and in case—in case of certain symptoms, you'll go straight to bed, and you'll stay there till I tell you when to get up, and you'll begin then to takethe pills I'm leaving. What's more, you'll send Jake at once for me."
There was a pause, as Nettie's eyes met Angella's.
"Needn't worry about me, doc," said Nettie. "I'm awfully healthy. You don't have to give me no pills."
The doctor glared at her furiously.
"That's the ignorant sort of talk I've been listening to all summer; but the very ones who boasted of their strength are the ones stricken."
"What are the symptoms?" interposed Angella.
"Symptoms? Fever, backache, headache, nose bleed, a tendency to sneeze, hot and cold flashes."
Angella's face paled, and her glance went furtively from Nettie to the baby.
"Are there many down?" she questioned with assumed casualness.
"Thousands, ma'am, in the city, and God knows how many in the country."
"What are they doing for help?"
"In the country they are doing without it—shifting for themselves."
Angella looked startled, and Nettie turned round, her slow gaze fixed upon the doctor's face.
"Who's taking care of them, then?" she asked.
"They're takin' care of themselves. They creep out of bed and crawl to each other, and some of 'em die before they can get back to their own beds. In most of the families that have it, they are all down at once."
"Now, look here," said Angella abruptly, "you've got to have some supper before you start off."
"No time for supper. There's nine in the Homan family down, including the help. I'm on my way now."
He had snapped his bag closed. Nettie passed by him into the house. Angella paused at the door and caught him by the sleeve to detain him.
"Really, doctor, it won't do you a bit of good to try and take care of people if you don't take care of yourself first; you've got to eat. So you come right in. It won't take me a minute to fix something for you."
"No, can't stop. I had a bite at noon, and will reach Homan's in time for another sup."
"Well, wait. A minute or two more or less won't matter. I want to know about this. Can't you get nurses from Calgary, and aren't there any other doctors in the country?"
"There are three besides myself over my territory, but two of 'em's down, and the other—" The doctorscowled and muttered something about "white-livered coward."
"And nurses?"
"I tell you I've been unable to getanyone. The city nurses have their hands full in town, and they won't come up to the country. As for the women themselves—the farm women, those who are not down, have gone plumb crazy with fright. I've gone from ranch to ranch like a beggar, imploring help."
Nettie had come out again. She had changed from her overalls to the blue house dress that Mrs. Langdon had made for her and over this she had thrown a plaid shawl. The blue woolen tam that Angella had knitted for her was on her head, and she looked singularly young and sweet. A few articles of clothing were knotted in a neat bundle under her arm.
"Doc," she said, "I'm going with you."
There was a long pause. Dr. McDermott blinked up at her, scowled, grunted something under his breath, and cleared his throat loudly. Angella stood stiffly by the door, not attempting to move, and her arm tightened involuntarily about the baby.
"I'm awfully strong," went on Nettie, "and I ain't likely to ketch nothing, and it don't matter if I do, faras that goes. It's up to me to help those that need me. You'll let me go, won't you, doc?"
"You're a good lass," muttered the doctor, "and you'll be a grand help to me."
At last Angella found her voice.
"Nettie, you're forgetting your—baby!" she said.
Nettie turned sharply round and the bundle fell from her hand.
"No, no, Angel, I've not forgotten him; but you'll be good to him, won't you? and he'll never miss me."
"Nettie Day, don't dare talk like that," said Angella savagely. "I won't let you go if you have any thought like that in your head."
But Nettie did not hear her. For the first time since her baby's birth she was holding it in her arms, and the feel of the little warm face against her own brought a pang to her heart that was both agony and joy. Motherhood seemed to have come to her in a sudden rush of feeling, and her face was as white as death when she at last gave her child back solemnly to Angel. The movement awakened the baby, and now its cry was more than she could bear. She clasped her hands over her ears, and rushed to the gate. Dr. McDermott picked up her bundle and followed.
Of the thirty or forty men previously employed at the Bar Q, only two remained that winter—a Chinaman and Batt Leeson at the Bull Camp. The foothill ranch was completely deserted, and the Bull was left alone to look after his several thousand head of cattle.
When the plague reached the country regions, there was a general exodus from the ranches, for tales were rife of stricken men corralled like cattle in bunkhouses and barns and left to shift for themselves.
That winter the cattle in the foothills roamed the range like mavericks, rustling for their water and feed. But even then they were better off than the purebred stock at Barstairs, being hardy stuff bred to the range and the open fields, where they found ample feed. The pampered purebred cattle had always been used to care and nursing, having been practically raised by hand, and were accustomed to feed from troughs heaped up with food by the watchful attendants and hands. Now penned in narrow pastures and cattle sheds, wherethe ground was bare as stone, they were irregularly left to the tender mercies of the half-dazed and always drunken Batt Leeson, and spasmodically fed and seldom watered.
Chum Lee, paralyzed with fear of the "black plague," which had cut down all of his "boys" at the Bull Camp, lived in terror that it would overtake him also. Chum Lee had no desire to die in the white man's land; he wanted to repose in peace under the sacred soil of his ancestors. He would have run away from the camp, but the barren country, with its vast blanket of snow, gave no hope of any refuge, and he feared Bull Langdon as though he were an evil spirit.
Back and forth between the two ranches the Bull's great car tore like a Juggernaut of Fate. It did not in the least concern the cattleman that his men had died like flies, or that three—quarters of the country was down with the plague. What alarmed and incensed him was the fact that his cattle, the magnificent herd that he had built up from the three or four head rustled from the Indians, were roaming the range uncared-for and neglected. Many of them, drifting before a bitter blizzard, had perished in coulee and canyon, and worse still was the deterioration of the purebreds. The lossof a single head of this stock meant several thousand dollars.
Nor was the Bull exclusively occupied with the loss of his cattle; he brooded unceasingly over Nettie Day, though the vision of her refused to leave his tortured mind and at the thought of the child she had borne he would rage up and down like a caged beast. The child had made her more than ever his, he gloated; yet how should he ever gain possession of her? He knew that the "Loring woman's" words had not been idle, and in imagination he saw the black walls of the penitentiary looming in the future. Nevertheless, he intended to have her; though the whole world might stand against him, he would get her back. He would bide his time, and his day would come—— The Loring woman would not always be on guard. His day would come.
Nettie was nursing the stricken farmers; the pariah and despised of the foothills was going from ranch to ranch caring for those who had condemned her. She had sat up for many nights soothing and ministering to their suffering; she had closed the eyes of their best beloved, and her tears had dropped upon the faces of their dead. In their hours of deepest anguish andagony, they had clung to her cool, strong hands, as to an anchor.
The country people had reversed their opinion and judgment of Nettie Day; her past was forgotten; she was their Nettie now.
By the end of January the plague had reached its peak. Whole families had persisted and others were slowly creeping back to health and hope again. It would not be long, Dr. McDermott promised Nettie, before she would be free to return to her baby and her friend.
She began to count the days, and to scan the skies for that shadowy arch across the heavens that in Alberta precedes a "Chinook" and is the forerunner of mild weather, for Dr. McDermott was expected to come for her with the first Chinook. Nettie thought with ceaseless yearning of her baby; away from him, he had taken visible shape in her mind, and, at last able to overlook the horror of his paternity, she loved him with all the passion of her young warm heart. When the Chinook at last broke up the fierce cold Dr. McDermott kept his word, and on the day he was to come for her, Nettie walked on air. She was going home—to her baby!
When the doctor arrived, however, his face was grave, and his heart lay heavy within him. His labors were far from done. The Bow Claire Lumber Camp had succumbed to the plague, and nearly a hundred men were down.
Calgary had promised help, but its former promises had not proved reliable, and in all that vast country few would be found willing to go deep into the heart of the timber lands to nurse the lumber-jacks.
The doctor's Ford chugged to the back door of the Munson farmhouse, where Nettie had been nursing the last of her patients. She was there to meet him, her old plaid cape about her and the woolen tam upon her head. Her face was aglow, and her eyes shone as bright as stars; he had telephoned her to expect him by noon, and had told her to be ready and not keep him waiting.
Nettie had kissed the surviving three little Munsons and their mother, suddenly filled with passionate remorse for her past cruelty to the girl who had now saved their lives. She had shaken hands with the husky voiced father, who had simply and reverently begged God's blessing for her, and to hide her own tears, she had run from them and shut the doorbetween them. Now she was in the Ford, with the robes tucked comfortably about her; breathlessly she squeezed the arm of her old friend.
"Oh, doc, just to think, I'm goin' home now—home to Angel and my baby! Oh, it's just heaven to be here beside you and on our way."
The "doc" had one of the new self-starters and there was no need of cranking this year. They buzzed down the road in the "tin Lizzie," making a great racket and leaving in their wake a malodorous cloud of smoke. For some time they went along in silence, and gradually Nettie's happy mood fell from her as she noted the gravity of the doctor's face. She touched his arm timidly, though her heart began to misgive her.
"Can you really spare me now, doc?"
There was no answer from her old friend, and Nettie pressed his arm, repeating her question.
"Can you, doc?" And then, as still he did not answer: "Is any one else down now?"
"Nettie." Dr. McDermott had slowed up. He tried to hide the anxiety in his face, for he did not intend to ask any further sacrifice of the girl, but he wantedher to know the facts. "Nettie, the Bow Claire Lumber Camp is down."
"The Bow Claire!"
The color receded from her face, her hand went to her heart as her thoughts flew instantly to Cyril. Slowly she realized the meaning of the doctor's solemn words.
"Nearly a hundred men, Nettie, and not a soul to care for them."
There was a long pause, while Dr. McDermott looked steadily ahead. The car was pounding and sending out jets of steam from its lately frozen radiator.
"Doc," cried the girl suddenly, "this ain't the road to Bow Claire. Turn your car around!"
"A promise is a promise," said the doctor. "I promised I'd bring you home to your child, lass, and I'll keep my word if you say so."
"But I don't say so. I don't want to go home—yet. I shouldn't be happy—even with my baby. My place is where I am needed most, and you should know where that is, doc."
"Dear lass," said the doctor gently. "They're needing you sore at Bow Claire."
"Then turn your car around, doc, and don't you m-mind if I seem to be c-cryin'. It's just because—becauseI'm excited, and oh! I'm so g-glad of the chance—of the opportunity, doc, to go 'long with you to Bow Claire."
Dr. McDermott blinked through his misty glasses. He swung his wheel sharply around, backed along the slippery, thawing ground, and went over a culvert into a snow bank on the side of the road.
There was a grinding cough of the engine, and it stopped dead. Again and again Dr. McDermott started the car, and back and forth it chugged in a vain effort to pull out of the slippery snow pit. From under a pile of produce and baggage, the doctor produced a snow shovel and began the process of "digging out," making a road before and behind where the car might back and get a fair start onto the road again. As he shoveled the snow, digging under the car and all around it, they heard the honk of an approaching motorist and gradually Bull Langdon's huge touring car swung into sight. At the sound of the automobile horn, Dr. McDermott had straightened up, intending to ask for aid, but when he saw who it was he doggedly resumed his digging alone.
Bull Langdon took in the situation at a glance, and the sight of Nettie cooled the fever that had possessedhim for days. She was visibly terrified at seeing him, and shrank back inside the Ford. The Bull observed her agitation with fierce delight and all the old feeling of domination over her came back to him. He got down from his car and examined the spot where the back wheel seemed to have wedged itself in.
"Stuck, are you?" he gloated.
"We'll be out in a minute."
"Not on your life you won't. You'll not pull out of that today."
"Very well, if that's what you think, suppose you haul us out."
"Ain't got a rope, and my engine won't stand the gaff."
Dr. McDermott's wrathful stare met the Bull's insolent smile. He turned his back upon him, and applied himself with savage energy to his work.
"Where you headed for?"
"None of your damned business."
"It ain't, heh?"
The Bull was now in high good humor. His hand rested upon the Ford, close to where Nettie was crouching behind the curtain. His bold eyes held hers fascinated with terror.
"Tell you what I'll do," he suggested after a moment's pause, "I'll take you aboard my car and pack you wherever you're goin'. You can 'phone the garage at Cochrane to send out and haul in your Lizzie."
Dr. McDermott could not see Nettie, but he could feel the silent, desperate appeal which her fear of the Bull prevented her crying aloud.
"No," he felt her imploring him. "No—never! I would rather stay here forever than go with him."
He looked the cattleman up and down with the same stare of cold contempt and reprobation as that which had caused Bull Langdon to quail before Angella Luring.
"We'll pull out without your help," said Dr. McDermott curtly. "Don't need you. Don't want you."
"Hmph!" chuckled the Bull. He cut a chunk of chewing tobacco, and bit calmly into it. He spat, and blinked his eyes at Nettie, then buttoning up his big beaver fur coat, he moved towards his car. Climbing aboard, he grinned down at the girl as he pushed the self-starter with his foot. The engine instantly responded with its soft purring and the great car glided along the road. A madness raged through the Bull as he drove; his pent-up passion of months wasfinding an outlet at last. The faster the car flew, the greater was his sense of relief and elation, as he told himself he would find the car still stalled in the same spot at nightfall when he returned for the girl.
As soon as the Bull's car had disappeared from sight Nettie was out of the Ford.
"Oh, doc, he'll be back. I know he will."
"Let him. Nothin' to be afraid of. Feel in the pocket of the can—no, the other one. Give me that—"
Nettie passed the revolver to him, and the doctor thrust it into his hip pocket.
"Now, lass, can you give me a hand?"
Together they pushed with might and main upon the car; it went up a few paces, and slid back into the snow. Again they pushed, and this time, at the doctor's order, Nettie found and thrust under the wheel a stone that held it in place. The doctor then climbed aboard, and with Nettie pushing behind, the Ford snorted forward a few feet, slipped back, but jerked ahead again. There was a tremendous grinding noise, and the whirling wheel went over the side of the culvert; the car jumped forward. With a whoop of triumph, Dr. McDermott made room for Nettie and they were off again. With loud clanking the flivver flewalong those crazy roads, panted up incredibly steep and slippery grades, plunged into snow fields and on into the timber land, where only the narrow cattle trails made a path through the woods to the lumber camp. They "made the grade" in two and a half hours of hard riding, and pulled into the dead-still camp with a cheering honking of their horn.
The meeting with Nettie on the road doubled the Bull's determination to possess her again The exhilaration of the chance encounter and the frustration of his plans when, returning, he found the little car gone, had roused his desire to a pitch of insanity. Everything else was forgotten; his cattle, his ranches, his great money losses, the impossibility of obtaining help, even the deterioration of his prized bulls at Barstairs—all these cares and anxieties ceased to exist in the overpowering passion that consumed him.
Bull Langdon was incapable of love in its finer sense, but in his blind and brutal way, he was madly in love with Nettie Day. His passion for the girl was like a fire that burned and raged within him, seeking an outlet where there was none and for the time being the man was like a maniac.
He thought of the girl ceaselessly, chortling with delight as he pictured her beauty, now sweeter than ever before in its young maturity. He had not noticeda new quality of spirituality that suffering had added to her loveliness, a certain light that seemed to radiate from her; all he had seen was that the summer's work in the fields had reddened her cheeks and brightened her eyes, and that her lips were like a scarlet flame.
If he pictured Nettie as she had looked at him from her seat in the doctor's Ford with her wide frightened eyes, his mind went back also to those other days, when he had held the girl in his arms. Many a night as he tramped the floor of the empty ranch house, his half-crazed mind lived over and over the joy of those days when he had held her in his power—"like purebred stuff in the Squeezegate." She had been weak and docile then, a timid, terrified captive; but now there was a new expression in her face, a look that was like a shield—a warning guard that held him back and warned him that if trapped again she would struggle to the death. He told himself he had no desire to hurt her—he wanted only to have her back, where he believed she belonged by right; he would make her the second Mrs. Langdon. And at the thought of Nettie, at the Bar Q, reigning in the great ranch house, keeping the place clean and sweet as his first wife had done, the Bull threw out his arms and clinched them to him,as if in fact the struggling girl were actually in their grasp, and he crooned words of savage tenderness to his vision, only to moan and whimper the next moment as he came back to reality again.
His desperation made him resourceful and cunning. He looked for Nettie Day at every farm and ranch in the foothills and in the adjoining prairie country. His car no longer tore along the roads from Bar Q to Barstairs, as he superintended the care of his demoralized herd. He had started now upon another hunt, and was running to earth a quarry whose price he set above all else.
His spying at the Loring ranch had revealed the fact that Nettie was not there, but, laying in wait for the unfortunate Jake, his son of an earlier passion, in due time he captured and tortured the half-breed. He had picked him up on the trail, racing bare-back upon some errand into the hills, and his questions as to the whereabouts of Nettie, accompanied by prods and kicks, had brought the stuttered information that she was "far way off on the hills. She at lumber camp. Everybody gone die on Bow Claire."
That was enough for the Bull. He knew now where the girl was, but the knowledge, instead of satisfyingand calming him, did the very reverse when he realized that Nettie and Cyril were once more together. That thought obsessed him, and filled his mind with murderous designs.
In the midst of his fury he reminded himself of Nettie's baby and a new idea, charged with possibilities, occurred to him. If he could not take the girl by force, there was one way by which she could be lured to Bar Q. He was amazed that he had not thought of it before. Human nature, he knew, was no different from cattle nature, where the young ones were concerned. The cattle mother would go, if necessary, through walls of fire and stone to reach her offspring, and what would keep Nettie Day from going to Bar Q, if she knew her baby was there? It was never necessary to throw the lariat upon the mother's neck; the roping of her child was always enough. Bull Langdon swung his car around.
Two "green" hands were now at Bar Q. They had been sent out by the Government Employment office, and for several days before his search for Nettie had begun Bull Langdon had been trying to break them into the cattle "game." They were English, guileless, clean-cut youngsters of good family, who looked upon the foully swearing cowman as a pathological subject that both interested and amazed them.
Their knowledge of ranching or "rawnching," as they called it, was of the vaguest, but they were good riders and the life appealed to them as sportsmen.
One of the anomalies of the ranching population of Alberta is its tremendous variety of types. Here you will find a man who can neither read nor write, and his neighbor, often his chum, will be the son of an English lord, one of those odd derelicts that drift over from the Old Country and take so kindly to the ranch life that more often than not they return unwillingly to their homes. University men andagriculturists experimenting with irrigation projects and intensive cultivation live side by side with business men and men from New York and other great cities in the States, who for diverse reasons have broken away from the cities, and gone in for farming on a big scale, raising the business of farming to the level of great enterprises rather than the slovenly and weary process it usually is. For the most part, however, the farming population of Alberta is made up of that solid, plodding type that have trekked out from eastern Canada or the midwestern states, tempted by the cheapness of the land and the richness of the soil. These are the backbone of the country and between these and the others are sandwiched colonies of peasants from Scandinavia and other parts of Europe.
It is with the hired man as with the owner. He may be an illiterate clod of the old type, or a fresh-faced college-bred son of a man of wealth, even of title, or again some chance wanderer, gone "broke" in the colony, and using up the remittance from home on drink and cards. Besides these there is also the type of English student and sportsman, who enjoys "roughing it" and hires out partly for experience and partly for a lark.
To this latter type the men at Bar Q belonged. They had come up largely to escape a city of gloom and plague, and were extremely anxious to remain at the great ranch. The Bull, intent on getting away, endeavored in a few days to teach them what he called the "A B C" of ranching. They demonstrated their ability to remain in the saddle eight or ten hours at a stretch, and to ride over thirty or forty miles without undue fatigue.
The Bull showed them "the ropes"; pointed out where certain cattle were to be gathered in; indicated the fields where they were to be driven, and promising to return "in a few days," as he rode off and left the "tenderfeet" in charge of the great ranch.
After his departure, the two young Englishmen rode over the place, marked the likely places for big game, took a "pot" or two at the yowling coyote on a hill; rode over the pleasant hills and pasture land, back to the comfortable bunkhouse, and decided that they had a "snap" and that "rawnching" was the life for them. It was a jolly sight better than hanging around a small city up to its neck in sickness. In the warm spell that followed soon after the departure of Bull Langdon, the Englishmen "rode the range" likehunters, and their methods of rounding up cattle, though weird, were highly effective. They raced and chased the cattle, galloping along at top speed, thrilled by the spectacle of the fleeing herd which they persistently and doggedly tried to overtake. The experienced cowpuncher lopes along leisurely behind or alongside a bunch of cattle, taking care not to hurry them, for to run cattle is to "knock the beef" off them. That spring the lean cattle of the Bar Q amazed even the least sophisticated ranch folk, and it is certain that the guileless Englishmen never dreamed they were to blame for the animals' emaciated condition.
When a cold spell followed the thaw, the Englishmen gaped at the thermometer, which was dropping rapidly towards thirty below zero, and retreated hastily into the warm bunkhouse, firmly convinced that no creature living could survive such a temperature. The rapid change from cold to warm and back to cold again is a peculiarity of the Alberta climate, but the Englishmen had thought that the Chinook was the first warmth of an early spring. The unexpectedly bitter weather alarmed and appalled them; they spent the day shut up in the house, piling huge logs into the great square wood stove, that spluttered and sent off anenormous heat. They concocted toothsome dishes for their entertainment, for, like most Englishmen, they were expert hands at "batching" and camping, and knew how to cook. Their fare included such game as venison, moose, mountain goat and sheep, to say nothing of the small game, mallard duck, prairie chicken, partridge, grouse and quail which abounded in the wild woods of Bar Q, and the Englishmen had prudently "brought them down" while rounding up the cattle, not knowing that the shooting had contributed considerably to the flight of the terrified herd.
This game, expertly drawn to the ranch by horse sleds, was piled up frozen in the immense storeroom adjoining the bunkhouse, where they also found an ample supply of stores. It was certain that no matter how long the siege of Arctic cold might last, the hands of the Bar Q would survive starvation.
Shut in the bunkhouse, their days were by no means empty, for when not engaged in cooking or feeding the wood stove, they wrote articles on "ranching in the wild northwest," or indited epistles home to thrilled relatives, who received from their letters a vague notion that their dear boys were sojourning in polar regions. Sometimes they would find in the letters from theirEnglish friends, whose knowledge of Canada was of the weirdest, warnings to be careful of the treacherous Esquimaux, and reminders to call, when they found time, upon some relative whose address was somewhere in their neighborhood, in Ontario or Nova Scotia. The ignorance abroad of the immense extent of the Canadian provinces was almost unbelievable. To all their folks at home the young Englishmen took delight in concocting thrilling romances in which they figured as big game hunters and fishermen, and through which they moved heroically, followed by bands of noble red men.