It was the first day of August of that first year on the prairies that Jack and I hitched the oxen to the wagon, threw on board a kit consisting mainly of a change of clothes and a blanket for each of us, said a brave but undemonstrative good-bye to the girls, and turned our faces to the older settlements. We had seen Mrs. Alton's new house—twelve feet square, it was, and eight feet high to the plates—under way; we had Spoof's promise that twice a day he would study the shack at Fourteen with his field glass for the flag that Marjorie would nail to the roof in case of any emergency; we had laid up fuel and supplies against the immediate needs of the girls during our absence, and now we were setting forth to earn what money we could during the short season of high wages. Our own oat field could wait; we would cut it for feed, anyway, and a little frost wouldn't matter.
One thing—two things, to be exact—worried me more on that day of parting than I would have cared to confess. One of those things was Spoof, and the other was Harold Brook, of the Mounted Police. Brook might be expected to call any day on his return journey to headquarters;—I had hoped that that would be over before I left, and many a glance I shot at the sky-line to the north-west of Fourteen, but without catching a glimpse of the red tunic riding down upon us, as it had done once before, apparently out of the heavens.
The subject was a peculiarly difficult one. For days I questioned myself whether or not I should have a frank discussion of it with Jean, but I finally decided to say nothing, at least for the present. It was a thing which I could not even mention without seeming to cast a reflection on Jean's loyalty, and loyalty, as I have discovered, is one of those qualities which does not improve under questioning. Every question aimed at loyalty seems to knock a beam out of its structure, and I began to suspect that I could not spare any beams from my particular air-castle. So I decided on the bold course of taking everything for granted, and when I said good-bye to Jean I gave no hint of the matter that was uppermost in my thoughts. But Jean, being a woman, probably knew all about it; perhaps the extra warmth and pressure of her hand was an answer to the question which I had not the courage to ask.
On the second day out, as we halted on the side of a little knoll to let the oxen graze and to eat our lunch, we were suddenly aware of the rumble of an approaching vehicle and the tones of a lusty voice, lifted in something evidently intended for song. Even before we had identified the "flyin' ants" we caught the burden of the refrain——
"Lived a min-er, a forty-nine-er,An' his daugh-ter, Sweet Marie."
"Lived a min-er, a forty-nine-er,An' his daugh-ter, Sweet Marie."
"It's Jake, of all the world!" shouted Jack, and together we rushed down upon him. His pudgy form, sheltered from the hot sun by a broad felt hat, lolled on one end of the seat of his democrat. He was alone, and the springs of the seat, from being often ridden on by one person only, had a way of listing to the right and allowing Jake to find his own centre of gravity. In such matters Jake followed the line of least resistance, and bumped along contentedly on the low end of the seat while the other end projected itself abruptly into the atmosphere. His eyes were closed, or nearly so; a healthy freshet of tobacco juice meandered across his chin, and his red, sunburned face was so expressionless that at first we thought he had not seen us. Not until we were at his very wheel did he pull the horses up and show an interest in the surroundings.
"Hello, Sittin' Crow!" was his greeting. "Dang it, stand still a minute, you piebald lump o' fox-bait"—this to one of the bronchoes, switching at a horse-fly—"don' you know your friends when you meet 'em? Well, how goes it on the gopher ranch?"
We shook hands and made him stop and eat with us. "Well, if you're sure there's no dang'rous Injuns 'roun' here," he demurred.
Jake was fresh charged with Regina gossip, and that of the country for two hundred miles around. The settlers were streaming in, he said, but the country was so big it was just like pouring water in the sea. "Only more profitable," he added, thumping his hip pocket.
"This locatin' game is like a pint flask—all right while it lasts, but it don' get anywhere," Jake continued. "I've made some lumps o' easy money, but while I was doin' it other fellers that I brung into the bald-headed were busy bustin' the sod, an' to-day, dang me, they're better off 'n I am. Fellows with no more brains than a grindstone! Got a farm an' stock an' a wife an' kids, an' let me tell you, Crow, them last two is genooine collaterals. So I figgers to myself, 'Jake, you've trod the primrose cow-path, or whatever it is, long enough. It's time to get down to business.'"
"Yep," said Jake, taking a fresh mouthful of tobacco to give his words time to sink in. "After I saw you fellows trailin' those two fine girls out into the bald-headed I says to myself, 'Jake, this one-horse business is out o' date. Better get into double harness.' So bein' a man of action I wrote out an ad. an' put it in a big paper in the States. Here it is:"
Jake unfolded a scrap of paper from a note-book in which he kept a list of vacant quarter sections and handed it to us to read.
"WANTED—Wife, about 18 hands high, chestnut preferred, sound in wind and limb and built for speed. Good looks not necessary; I'm pretty enough for two. Jake, 148 —— St., Regina, Canada."
"WANTED—Wife, about 18 hands high, chestnut preferred, sound in wind and limb and built for speed. Good looks not necessary; I'm pretty enough for two. Jake, 148 —— St., Regina, Canada."
"Do you mean to say any fish rose to such a bait as that?" Jack demanded sceptically.
"Fish? Shoals of 'em. Say, in about four days I begun to get as much mail as a new millionaire. An' photographs! I wish I had some to show you, but she—Bella—burned 'em all up. They were what I call pictures o' real life. I got so much mail the postman says to me, 'Whatya doin', Jake; startin' a lottery?' an' I says 'Yep'. Guess I wasn't so far out, at that.
"Well, jus' as I was thinkin' o' goin' to a business college an' hirin' a few dozen stenographers, along comes this telegram." He produced a yellow sheet.
Meet me at Regina station Thursday five p.m. youll know me I am the only one in the world. Bella Donna.
Meet me at Regina station Thursday five p.m. youll know me I am the only one in the world. Bella Donna.
"Well, I reckons right off that Bella Donna is an alibi, or whatever you call a false name, an' that some o' the boys is pullin' a gag on me, but like a fool down I goes to the station, an' there I saw her comin' right up the platform like a sandhill crane out of a marsh. I knew her, jus' like she said, so when she comes up I calls her hand.
"'Madam,' says I, 'are you the lady o' the porous plaster?'
"I'll plaster you,' says she, 'if you give me any o' yer lip. But do you happen to know a Mr. Jake?' says she, gettin' out a paper; 'here's his address.'
"'Know him!' says I. 'I should say so. An' in case you're thinkin' o' marryin' him let me tell you somethin', jus' between friends. Jake buries a wife once a year, reg'lar.'
"'He does, eh?' says she. 'Well, I'm promisin' I'll be a relic' before he's a widower,' says she. 'Relic' is what she said, but it didn't sound right to me.
"'That's bettin' on a cinch,' says I, meanin' that she would get the red ribbon for relics at Regina fair already, but my wit goes over her head, as it of'en does, an' she comes back at me with 'Wha'd'youknow 'bout anybody marryin' Mr. Jake?'
"'Everythin', says I, humpin' my wish-bone with importance. 'Jake tells me every thin'. I'm his spiritooal adviser, so to speak, which includes matrimony. The women that wants to marry Jake—lots of 'em rich, too, Madam,' I says. 'I'm steerin' him clear o' them every day,' I says, 'partly out o' sympathy fer them, on accoun' o' his—hisseverehabits,' I says.
"'Whoareyou, anyway?' says she, an' with that I flashes my telegram on her. 'I'm the party of the first part,' says I, as they say in the law offices.
"With that she fixes me with an eye that made me think o' Sittin' Crow, f'rocious an' blood-thirsty.
"'So you're Jake,' she says, pullin' herself up 'till all her angles stood out like the haunches of a starved mustang. 'Well, you got a hell of a nerve,' she says.
"I begun to think maybe she was about right, but she gave me no time fer reflections.
"'Where's a preacher?' she says. 'You wanted speed, an' yer goin' to get it.' With that she hustled me over town an' had me married before I knew it, so I'd have to settle fer the supper, as I figgered it out afterward. Then after supper we go to my shack an' she climbs into my business papers like a hound after garbage.
"'Wha'd' you do fer a livin', may I ask?' she says, when she finds nothin' in my papers excep' receipts from the grocer's an' a bunch of letters in answer to my ad. 'This correspondence o' yours is interestin', but I wouldn't take it to be very fillin', she says, 'an' anyway, if this is all you have to do you're out of a job,' she says, an' with that she gathers up my bundles o' letters, photos an' all, an' throws 'em into the fire."
By this time the bacon and potatoes were sputtering in the frying pan and the smell of hot tea lent an extra tang to the prairie air, so Jack served the meal and for awhile Jake's account of his matrimonial exploit was lost in a hubbub of vigorous mastication. Bread and potatoes and bacon, washed down with strong tea, disappeared as though by magic, and in a few minutes Jake was in a mood to resume his narrative.
"'Do!' says I, musterin' all my dignity. 'I'm a specialist—a specialist in land. I know the sections with the weak lungs an' the broken knees an' the spavined joints, an' if a man pays me enough I put him wise, an' if he don' I let him get wise at his own expense,' says I. 'I'm a specialist, an' I charge like a specialist,' I says.
"'Humph!' says she, jus' like that. 'Between your fine words I figger that you pick up a dollar now an' again by tottin' these tenderfoot sod-busters out over the bald-headed.' I dunno where she got it, but she had all the language necessary, an' more. 'Let me see your bank book,' she says.
"So I dug it up, an' it showed a balance in my favor of forty-three dollars an' twenty cents. Fortunate there was nothin' in it about the hundred dollars I owed at the livery stable fer the board o' the flyin' ants, but I let sleepin' dogs lie, as the sayin' is.
"'How old are you, Jake, dear?' she says, all of a sudden as smooth as oil.
"'Forty-three,' I says, perhaps because that was the figger in my mind at the moment, an' I was shavin' it a little, at that.
"'Then you've made a dollar a year—so far,' says she, droppin' back to her nat'ral voice that kind o' sounds like two mill-wheels an' you between 'em. 'You'll die before you're sixty,' she says; 'I can see it in your eyes,' although I wasn't lookin' at her, findin' that rather painful, 'an' leave an estate o' less than sixty dollars. Jake, that wouldn't buy me an outfit fer the funeral, fer believe me I'm goin' to do you justice when the time comes. We're goin' to take a homestead.'
"'Not me,' I says. 'The seat o' my democrat is as near as I want to get to a homestead. They're all right fer sod-busters, but fer a woman o' culture——'
"I thought that would get her, but she was as imperv'ous to compliments as an ox to an oration, so to speak.
"'Very well,' says she. 'If you won't take a homestead, I will.'
"'You can't,' says I, with sudden boldness. 'You ain't a widow.'
"With that she gives me another o' those through-the-gizzard-and-nailed-to-the-wall looks o' hers. 'I will be, in about twenty seconds,' she says, 'if there's any more discussion,' she says. So here we are."
"Have you located?" I asked Jake, when he was silent for a minute, and seemed to have dropped off into meditation.
"Yep. It was easy fer me, knowin' as I do ev'ry willow between the Souris an' the Saskatch'wan. You remember section Sixteen, that you fellows were lookin' at? I didn't figger it was good enough fer you, bein' clients o' mine, but it would do me in a pinch, so I jus' filed on it myself."
"Aha!" said Jack, who was always a little shrewder than I. "So that is why we couldn't get Sixteen. Surely you weren't contemplating matrimony so far back as that?"
"Not exac'ly contemplatin' it, but takin' precautions." Jake admitted.
"Rather lets the wind out of your fine story," was Jack's comment. "How much do we take for gospel, and how much for romance?"
Jake clambered to his feet and struck a pose intended to be heroic. "Behold in me a young bridegroom," he orated. "Would you expec' me, on an auspicious occasion like this, to stick stric'ly to the map? Out o' the fullness o' my heart I have given you good measure."
We expressed the hope that Bella Donna would prove a sticker.
"She will," Jake prophesied. "Of course that ain't her real name; I jus' gave you that fer—fer instance, an' her first name's Bella, so it's half true, which is a pretty good average in this country. Wait 'til you see us, a-chariotin' behind the flyin' ants over to Fourteen an' Twenty-two! I'm figgerin' on organizin' a school distric' right away."
We gave Jake our blessing and watched him ride off in his wobbly democrat with its spring seat up-tilted to larboard and his fat figure settling down like a sack with a hat on it. But Jake was evidently in good spirits, for before he had gone beyond ear-shot we heard him singing,
"O my darling, O my darling,O my darling, Clementine,"
"O my darling, O my darling,O my darling, Clementine,"
and we knew that all was well with him, at least for the present.
Sitting on the grassy knoll, digesting our lunch by the aid of the straws which each of us was unconsciously chewing, we watched Jake until he was a speck in the distance.
"What do you make of it?" said I at last.
"I'm not saying," was Jack's cautious rejoinder. "Either he's married, or he isn't." Jack had not forgotten the incident of Sittin' Crow.
But we had occasion to be thankful we had fallen in with Jake, for he had been able to direct us to a farmer within a day's drive who hired both us and our oxen for the harvest, or until the beginning of threshing. His name was Keefer; a short, thick-set man of fifty-five, with a stubby whisker turning an iron grey. He received us in his stable yard, hatless and coatless, and with his thumbs hooked under his leather suspenders in the confident manner of one who is accustomed to rely on himself and is not likely to be disappointed.
"I'm a glutton for work," he said, when he had hired us, "and I expect my men to feed hearty at the same trough. I wouldn't put your bulls on a binder on a bet; there's too much side-play to their gait, but I can use 'em discing the summerfallow. You'll have to sleep in the granary, but we all eat together at the house. I'm starting two binders in the morning; I'll expect you to keep up to them, and I'll know by to-morrow night what you're made of."
Keefer was as good as his word. He called us at half past four, while the night was still hanging grey about the buildings, and the stronger stars looked down, cold and steely, through a temperature which had dropped dangerously close to the freezing point. He had an hour's work for us about the stables, and at six we went in to breakfast.
The table was set in the kitchen; Mrs. Keefer and her sixteen-year-old daughter Nellie must have been about almost as early as were we. The breakfast was of oatmeal porridge with milk—the belief that every prosperous farm abounds in cream, is, alas, a delusion;—following the porridge came salt pork and potatoes, with good bread and butter, both the latter the products of the housewifely skill of Mrs. Keefer and her daughter. The table was of boards, covered with oilcloth; Mr. Keefer sat at one end, with a husky chap he called George, his permanent hired man, at his right, and his fourteen-year-old son, Harry, at his left. Jack and I sat opposite, and Mrs. Keefer occupied the seat at the other end of the table from her husband. Nellie did not sit down, but waited on the company until the first table had finished. Apparently there were younger children upstairs, as we heard her admonishing them for their failure to get up; evidently she would eat with them.
"It's early for harvest," Keefer volunteered to us, when he had finished his porridge and was half way through a plate of potatoes and pork. "I didn't figure on it so soon, but the last few days have been hot, and my barley field has come along a-whoopin'. It gives me a chance to try out the binders—and the new hired men."
Keefer smiled as he spoke, but he had a way with him that made us aware that anyone who failed to come up to his standard as a workman would get short shrift around his establishment.
By seven o'clock two binders, each drawn by four magnificent horses, were in the barley field. Keefer drove one team and George the other, and when each had made two rounds we started stooking. I saw Keefer watching us as we started, evidently taking note whether we would follow the binders or go in the opposite direction, and when we did the latter he nodded, as much as to say. "They'll do," and drove on. Although we could not claim to be experienced farm hands we had lived close enough to farm life in the East to be something better than greenhorns, and our summer on the prairie had made us as hard as nails.
We needed both our strength and our fortitude before sundown that night. The barley crop was heavy, and a trifle over-ripe, and the sharp-pointed awns which this cereal throws off had a way of seeking out our vulnerable points that was almost devilish. They crawled under our shirts and into our hair and most particularly through our socks just above the boot-tops. The thermometer during the day hung close to the hundred mark, and as the afternoon wore on we gave way to the temptation to drink heavily from the water keg. It was a forty-acre field, which Keefer was bent upon cutting in one day, not because he needed to but because he had laid that down as a standard for a day's work with two binders. But the horses felt the drag of the first day of harvest as much as we did, and as the field grew smaller they lost more and more time at the corners.
By evening the red rays of the setting sun, hitting squarely in our faces, revealed in Jack's eye a glint of the light of battle such as I had seen there only once or twice, and I knew that nothing short of utter exhaustion would prevent him finishing like a thoroughbred. My own muscles were numb, and now seemed to be working quite mechanically; my clothing was saturated through and through, but I had a strange feeling that the limitations of the human body were suspended and that I could go on permanently, like a machine.
The field grew smaller and smaller, and the shouting of Keefer and George at the tired horses grew more and more insistent, but just as it was almost too dark to see Keefer came down the last stretch with his knives flashing clear on both sides of the remaining ribbon of barley.
"Now," Jack shouted in my ear, "for all that's in you!" And drawing from unsuspected reserves of energy which we had stored about us somewhere we went down the field at a run, setting up the remaining sheaves at a terrific pace. Just as Keefer reached the end of his swath we overtook him, and Jack, seizing the sheaf that was still in the binder, tore it from the knotter and flung it to me where I stood beside a stook waiting to receive it.
Then Keefer did a gracious thing. He climbed down from his binder seat and shook hands with us.
"Boys," he said, "I didn't believe it was in you." Which was a very high compliment from Mr. Keefer.
We worked for Mr. Keefer until the last sheaf of his six hundred acre crop was in stook. Not all of the time were we speeded up as on that first day in the barley field; we had seasons of comparative calm, particularly while waiting for the wheat to ripen, but whatever advances of leisure our employer may have made us during that period were more than repaid when, in the last week of August, two hundred acres of wheat came in with a rush, and a moon in its second quarter threatened frost every night. Keefer brought up four more horses from a ranch which he owned somewhere nearby, and by relaying his teams he was able to keep his binders going during the noon hour. This did not make it any easier for his stookers, but we were now thoroughly hardened to the work, and we had learned, as well, that even in such a simple operation as stooking there may be acquired a knack which saves many a step and many an ounce of effort. We no longer tried to keep four rounds behind the binders; we could look on with equanimity while they obtained a lead of a half day's cutting, and then we worked along the windrows of sheaves, at right angles to the standing grain, instead of parallel with it. This saved a great amount of walking, and we found that what had been a terribly hard day's work at first could now be done without leading us to the brink of exhaustion.
During that last week in August Mr. Keefer hung a thermometer on a clothes-line post in the yard, and notwithstanding his long days in the field he would get out of bed two or three times in the night, and particularly just before dawn, to study the temperature.
"Full moon Friday night," he said to us on Tuesday. "I want this wheat in stook before we sleep Friday."
"Do you think the moon has anything to do with the temperature?" I asked him, not in an argumentative mood, but because I wanted to know.
"Can't say," he answered. "I'm not an astronomer, or whatever it is that could give scientific reasons, but I know we always reckon that if we get by the full moon at the end of August or the beginning of September without frost we're safe for another fortnight. It's like the chicken from an egg; I can't explain it, but there it is."
"But is there really much danger of frost, anyway?"
"Not as bad as it used to be, and it will disappear altogether as more land comes under cultivation, but at present it has to be reckoned with. When the whole profit or loss on the year's operations hangs on a few degrees of temperature, do you wonder that I get up in the night to look at the thermometer?"
Perhaps it was this little insight which Keefer gave us into his anxiety and the reason for it that keyed us up to the effort we were to make during the next three days. I have always held that any man who is worth his pay works for something more than his pay, and certainly for the next seventy-two hours pay was the last thing in our minds. We had to beat the frost-fiend that was crouching somewhere in the low mists of a moonlit night, waiting to sweep down and ruin this vast, defenceless field of wheat that stood nodding complacently in the harvest sun, all unconscious of the enemy that threatened it. That was before the days of the general use of the tractor, and the horses could not work day and night, or I am sure we should have followed them, stooking by the white light of the moon that filled the heavens with a brilliance almost like that of the day.
In the middle of the afternoon Nellie Keefer would drive out with a horse and buggy and bring us a lunch of sandwiches and tea, and the few minutes during which we would sit in the shade of a stook piled high for that purpose while Nellie helped us from her basket and filled and refilled our cups were occasions to be remembered. She was a rather winsome girl, was Nellie; quite without the idealism which made Jean one girl in a million, but possessed of a sturdy and practical ability and a very adequate supply of self-confidence.
"Nellie's a chip off the old block," her mother had said one day when the girl had wrestled a refractory mustang into submission. We had stood by and watched the fight, keeping out of it at Nellie's express command. We were left to infer that, in Mrs. Keefer's figure of speech, Mr. Keefer was the old block.
Well, we won. It was stark moonlight on Friday night, possibly ten o'clock or later, when the binder blades at last ran free at the end of the last remaining ribbon of yellow wheat. For a day and a half, by superhuman efforts, we had been overtaking the lead which we had allowed the binders for the sake of efficiency in stooking, and once again when the packers clattered idly above the last half sheaf Jack yanked it from the knotter and flung it to me where I stood waiting to receive it. Then we trudged homeward, tired but victorious.
And it didn't freeze, after all. By eleven o'clock a cloud loomed up in the west, and a wind began to lash the oat field. By twelve the rays of the moon struggled but faintly through a curtain of mist. At dawn the thermometer still showed two degrees above freezing.
When we had finished with Mr. Keefer he paid us off and told us where we would be sure to get a job threshing. We shook hands all round, and I think I shook hands with Nellie twice, and I remember she said something about calling in if ever I passed that way, and even suggested that she and Harry might drive over to Fourteen next summer and pay us a visit, for I had told her, of course, of Jean and Marjorie. Oh, well, these things happen. . . . .
We found Mr. Alec Thomson with his body half inside the boiler of his threshing engine. As we came up his position reminded me of Jake's figure about a hound after garbage. He was so engaged in his work, and making so much of a clatter, that he didn't hear our approach, and it was not until Jack banged the boiler with a hammer which had been lying nearby that he jumped from his position as though he had been shot in his remaining exposure.
"Good morning, Mr. Thomson," we said when we could get our faces straight. "We came to join your gang."
"You'll join a bigger gang than mine if you give me another scare like that," said Mr. Thomson, looking us over. "Where are you from?"
"Been working for Keefer," we explained.
"Get fired?"
"No."
"Through?"
"Through to the last sheaf."
Mr. Thomson's eyes showed a growing interest. "All right," he said, after a moment. "Any man that can finish a season with Keefer is good enough for me. Put the bulls in the stable and give me a hand with this expander."
Thomson was a bachelor who did a little farming while he was putting in his residence duties on a homestead, but his principal industry and interest in life was in his threshing machine. He must have it perfect to the last bolt and belt-lace, although his shack was a musty affair that gave me the creeps after Marjorie's immaculate cleanliness and even after our own housekeeping performances in Keefer's granary. We stayed with him for a number of days at a nominal rate of wages, helping with the repairs to his engine and separator while waiting for the wheat to harden in the stook.
When at last we were ready for the field Thomson's homestead presented a scene of great animation. He had gathered a gang of men and horses about him; had hired a cook and stocked the cook-car, and had laid in a supply of oil and repairs. Thomson was his own engineer, and it had been decided that I should be fireman, while Jack drove the oxen on a bundle team. After the first day or two I found the work not so hard as stooking although the hours were even longer. I would be in the field at four o'clock in the morning firing up that old straw-burner in order to have enough steam to whistle at six, and I was the last to leave the outfit at night.
Thompson had impressed me with my duties at the start. "Keep one eye on the steam gauge and the other on the water glass, and both on the lookout for fire," he said, "and that's about all you need to know."
I soon found there was more than that to know about firing a straw-burner, but these were the essentials. At times when the straw was still damp after rain I had my troubles, and some mornings, until I could raise enough steam to use the forced draft, Sally, as I called our engine, would be as cantankerous as any kitchen stove when the wind swirls over the roof the wrong way. But I soon learned how to take her moods, and before the season was half gone I began to feel a strange sort of affection for this great, greasy lump of metal as the drone of its exhaust played a monotonous lullabye in my ears and the whiff of steam and tallow lent an additional tang to the edge of my fireman's appetite. The goddess of steam began in some subtle way to draw me into her embrace, and I came to understand how it is that once a steam engineer, always a steam engineer.
"None of those temperamental things for me," said Thompson one day when the first gasoline tractor I had ever seen went slowly coughing by. "Sally may be a bit mussy and old fashioned, but she has a hell of a punch in her elbow." Just then a damp sheaf from the bottom of a stook went in crosswise, and the automatic governor valve flew open. Sally snorted in indignation and the force of her exhaust drew my fire up into the flues as she threw double her normal horse-power into her driving-rod.
"Humph!" said Alec, patting the throttle lever affectionately. "I'd like to see one of those coughin' critters chew on a cud like that!"
So the threshing season wore on. We ate in a cook-car, slept in a "caboose," and worked from dawn until dark. Sometimes, to finish a "set" we would burn a straw pile and work by its light after the stars were out in the heavens. Although the work was hard and dirty it was the sort of dirt that is neither offensive nor unhealthful, and there was a certain reckless good-fellowship among the gang that made the time pass pleasantly enough. There were fights on a couple of occasions, when some one brought liquor out from town; one of the men had an arm broken under a belt, and all of us had a scare one day when the field we were working in caught fire from a spark from the engine, but these were mere incidents in a routine of hard work from dawn until dark, and afterwards. At nights the prairie was lit up with the orange-red glow of burning straw piles, their fan-shaped reflections thrust high in the heavens, while the jingle of trace-chains, the rumble of wagons, and the plaintive steam whistles which came through the gloaming from other outfits than our own brought a strange sense of the worthiness of work well done. Tired and prodigiously hungry we would attack the cook-car, and then presently crawl to our bunks and to sleep.
It was the middle of October, and there was a crisp tang in the air night and morning, before we again hit the trail for Fourteen and Twenty-two. During all this time we had had no word from our homes, as there was no one to carry mail in or out, and it was with anxious and eager hearts that we hurried Buck and Bright along the homeward winding trail.
On the second day, as we were bowling along at the two-and-a-half mile an hour clip which Buck and Bright considered the limit of furious driving Jack drew my attention to a speck on the horizon ahead of us. It grew rapidly, and although there was no mirage this time to bring our visitor down from heaven, we soon were able to discern the scarlet uniform of the Mounted Police. It came along at the smart trot to which the police horse is educated, and in half an hour Harold Brook drew up beside us.
"Hello, Lane and Hall!" the policeman greeted us. "Getting back from your harvest excursion?"
So it was evident he knew we had been away, and why. But Jack, whether he thought of this or not, answered him cordially.
"We're on the home stretch," he admitted, "and old Fourteen and Twenty-two will look pretty good to us, after cook-cars and cabooses."
The lightest kind of a smile flickered about Brook's lips. "And so it should," he agreed, "with two fine girls such as adorn your respective homesteads. I was in the district last night."
"Were the girls well?" I forced myself to say, partly because I felt my silence was beginning to shout, and partly because of a real anxiety about them.
"I believe so. I didn't see them, myself; came in by the south and landed first with your neighbour, Spoof. Capital chap; I stayed over night with him, and smoked up nearly all of his English tobacco. At breakfast I finished his last jar of marmalade, so if Spoof is flying a flag of distress when you reach home you will know the cause of it. Imagine an Englishman without marmalade—breakfast without marmalade! My dear fellow, I'm English myself, and I—I assure you it isn't done."
"But the girls?——" I persisted.
"Oh, yes. Spoof has been keeping a neighbourly eye on them. I meant to call on you, of course, but when Spoof told me you were away I stayed with him. He assured me that everyone is fit at Fourteen and Twenty-two."
This was good news, and a weight off our minds. Besides, it was evidence that in the twinges of my jealousy toward Brook I fell somewhat short of doing him justice. Brook was a decent fellow, and was playing the game.
"Just a suggestion," said the policeman, after a moment. "This is your first autumn on the prairies, and you can't be too careful about fire. These warm days and frosty nights are the most dangerous time of the year. I found Spoof had no fire guards, so I showed him how to make them, and I took the liberty of hinting that he go over to Fourteen and Twenty-two and see that the buildings are properly protected."
We thanked Brook, and he saluted and rode away, his red tunic slowly fading out of view in the cloud of dust which his horse kicked up from the bone-dry trail.
"Very decent chap, Brook," said Jack, after a while, and I said "Yes."
It was with a strange pounding of the heart that we at last discerned the outlines of the shacks of our little settlement. Mrs. Alton's came first into view, then Spoof's, then, together, the buildings on Fourteen and Twenty-two. A gust of homesickness swept up and took sudden possession of me, and I realized for the first time how much I had become attached to the little square on the thousand-mile fabric of the prairies which I had already learned to think of as home. Gaunt and bare they may be, but the prairies have a way of winding themselves about the heart with bands that are stronger than steel.
If we had been anxious, we were eager, too; eager with the news of our successful season's work; with anticipation of the bright faces which would greet the roll of crisp new bank bills that Jack carried in an inside vest pocket; eager to display the load of provisions and supplies which had been bought with part of our earnings.
We must have been fully a mile from the houses when we discerned the first evidences of life. A little figure darted out of the shack on Twenty-two to the edge of the gully; then for a few minutes sank from sight; then reappeared on our side of the stream and rushed into the shack on Fourteen. Almost instantly two figures appeared at the door; paused for a moment, then swooped like wild things down the trail toward us. And we stood up on the top of the wagon and waved our hats and yelled like mad, until even Spoof down on section Two must have heard us. And old Buck and Bright, their phlegmatic souls at last awakened by that strange power that lies at the root of all creation and which is friendship and love and all the shadings of affection which lie between — or perhaps it was by the smell of the haystack at their own stables—joined in the spirit of the occasion and broke forth in a most surprising gallop, their hoofs click-clacking and their trace-chains lashing the whiffle-trees as they ran.
Soon we came up, and there were the girls, wonderful, lithe, sunburned, radiant, hatless, golden hair streaming in the golden light at the end of day, arms extended, white teeth gleaming, measureless, ineffable, in the beauty and wonder of their young womanhood! We sprang from the wagon and—I don't know how it happened—Jean ran straight into my arms. Not Marjorie—I didn't see what became of her—I didn't stop to look;—Jean ran straight into my arms! I held her there, held her with the strength of ten weeks' harvesting in my muscles and of all my young hot boyhood in my veins; held her and kissed her and would not let her go. . . For the first time since we had been little children together, playing by the dam where the water-wheel across the river tossed its dancing diamonds in the air, I held her and kissed her and would not let her go.
Across the fields of crisp and brittle grass we trudged together, disregarding the trail and the measureless swoon of that sunset world as we swept homeward on the flood-tide of our happiness. Her firm little arm pressed tight against mine and our limbs swung together in the rhythm of our stride. And when I looked down in her face I saw a light that was not altogether the glint of the setting sun.
But in that most poetic moment of her life Jean forgot to be poetic. Once more she slipped her arm about me.
"Gee, it's good to have you home again," she said.
And in what should have been my supreme hour I found myself wondering whether Jean's passion was love or just plain loneliness.
That was a busy night on Fourteen. The girls confessed that they had been on the lookout for us since the first of the month. They had even borrowed Spoof's field glass so that they could sweep the horizon to the eastward far beyond Mrs. Alton's.
"He's the strangest sort of chap, is Spoof," said Jean. "Will you believe me, he hasn't been inside this house since you left? Used to walk over from time to time, and see that the pigs and the cow were living in harmony, and that the fuel had not given out, but was always in a rush home again. Never saw such a man for work; quite different from what he used to be."
Jack looked his sister over with an eye that did not reserve all its approval for Marjorie. "We thought you would have been an accomplished banjo-ist by now," he said.
"Not a lesson—not a single lesson in all this time," Jean grumbled. "And now I suppose he'll be over to-morrow to indulge us with the pent-up leisure of two months!"
Jean's naiveté was little greater than mine. We had been brought up with a sound training in the rudiments of behavior but with little knowledge of its social complexities. My feeling in the matter was a mixed sense of surprise that our neighbour, usually so friendly, had held aloof at a time when he was particularly needed, and of annoyance that Jean should be so obviously put out about it.
But we soon got on to other matters. The girls had dug the potatoes and the garden vegetables, and it was with the honest pride of work well done that they took us into the cellar to view our winter supplies. There is a very real satisfaction in growing one's own food; it gives one a sense of independence, a feeling that the butcher and baker and grocer have no mortgage on one's bodily needs. I think it was that feeling, threaded through with a very homey kind of content, that welled within us as we viewed the heaps of potatoes and turnips and cabbage and carrots and beets and parsnips that filled our cellar to the roof. Jack and I, not to be outdone, felt that now was the moment to show, in concrete form, something of what our harvest labors had meant. We had seized an opportunity while the threshing outfit was shut down on account of rain to drive to the nearest town and lay in a stock of provisions, which Alec Thomson had decently enough allowed us to buy on his account as he, being a contractor, got a better price than the individual consumer. So now we had to carry in the boxes of dried fruits and of canned goods, the sack of sugar, the three sacks of flour, the packages of tea and coffee, the sides of bacon:—Oh, we were going to live well this winter! Then there were the new boots which we had bought all round, and stockings, and an end of cloth which we were sure would come in handy for some useful purpose, and yarn for knitting. We were a happy party.
The girls had a strange treat in reserve for us. It was Jean who told us of it, although, as it seemed to me, her manner suggested a certain lack of frankness very unlike Jean. It seemed that a few days before our return a jack rabbit had loped up within easy distance of the shanty door, where he perked himself on his hind legs, taking observations. Marjorie took the gun down from the wall, aimed it with great deliberation, and fired.
Jean declared that the rabbit was not hit, but that he died of fright. Be that as it may, he furnished the filling for a very deep and tempting rabbit pie.
"And only to think," said Jean, her bright eyes dancing, "it would scarcely have kept any longer. We were managing to freeze it a little at nights, but it would thaw out during the day."
"I don't know but it is a little over-kept as it is," Marjorie admitted, "but we're going to eat it to-night." And so we sat about our little table, with the great rabbit pie in the middle, and great helpings of potatoes and onions on our plates, and flakey white bread and yellow home-made butter within reach, and the light beating down from an oil lamp on the wall, and would not have changed places with any one on earth.
The next day revealed changes in the neighbourhood which we had not had time to notice or discuss in the evening. A number of settlers had come in. The girls had not seen any of them, but could give almost as accurate descriptions as though they had. It seems Spoof had come over to Fourteen every Sunday afternoon during our absence, and, for all the shyness against which Jean had protested, he had managed to regale the girls with the gossip of the community, for our two little shacks were really becoming the centre of a neighbourhood. From Spoof they learned that the Browns had landed from England with three children and hardly anything else, and had built a shack on the south-west quarter of Four. Mr. Brown had been a game-keeper in England. His wife was a wistful little body who seemed likely to have plenty to wist over before her children were raised on the living that a game-keeper would wring from the soil. On the north-west of Eighteen, just four miles west of us, a Scottish shipbuilder named Smith had located. He appeared to be unmarried. Three miles north of us, on Thirty-four, a Swede named Hanson had built a shanty twelve feet square in which he was housed with his wife and six children, and on Thirty-six a Russian had dug himself a sort of cave in the bank of the gully. He, too, had a wife and numerous offspring, but the exact number had not yet been ascertained.
"Ay tank thar bane plenty," Ole Hansen had said, when discussing the subject with Spoof. And as Ole regarded his own six hopefuls as "yust a nice commence," the imagination was rather stirred by the possibilities of what the cave on Thirty-six might disclose to the census taker.
"How do you say his name?" Spoof had inquired.
"Yah don' say it. Yah sneeze it," Ole explained.
"Sneezit—that'll do," said Spoof. And so, quite without his knowledge or consent, our Russian neighbour was supplied with an English name; a name which may some day—who knows?—be borne with pride by one of our best families.
Then there was Burke, an American from Iowa, a man with a lust for labor and for doing things on a big scale. He and his wife had landed on section Twenty about the middle of August, and, ignoring the tradition that it is useless to break prairie sod in the fall, had already turned over a broad strip from end to end of their quarter section. Burke it was who introduced mules into the settlement. From what the girls were able to gather from Spoof mules called for an even more extended vocabulary than did oxen.
"And you want us to believe that Spoof told you all these things without ever coming into the house?" I challenged.
"Never a foot over the doorstep," said Jean. "That is, hardly ever. It's a big country; why be so particular for a foot or two?"
"Oh, I'm not; not at all. I'm merely checking up what you said last night."
"In my intoxication over your return! How could you, Frank?" And with that I had to be satisfied.
"But the best is yet!" Marjorie exclaimed. "Guess who's married?"
"Jake!" we answered together.
"Oh, somebody told. Yes, Jake. He and his wife are settled on Sixteen. They've a little shack up, and Jake is farming the community, as he calls it. 'Acquaintances,' he says, 'are about all I'll be able to cultivate this year.' He spends most of his time at Spoof's, but I don't notice that Spoof's work goes along any quicker on that account. They called on us a couple of times—Jake and his wife, I mean; they have the advantage over the other settlers of having a light wagon and a team of ponies, which make it easy for them to get about. Mrs. Jake impresses one as being angular and competent, with perhaps more heart in her than her appearance would suggest. They say it was an agency match."
At that point we took up the story with Jake's account of his courtship and wedding, censored, of course, to suit the audience.
"That's mostly lies," said Marjorie, in her matter-of-fact way. "He advertised for her all right, but he went to Minneapolis to meet her, and it was only when he promised to go on a homestead that she consented to come. She told me that much; said she'd had enough of the town, and wanted to get away from everything and everybody. She has a touch of humor, too; said, 'I guess that's what I did, all right, when I came out on the bald-headed with Jake.'"
"But the telegram! He had her telegram."
"He must have faked that. He knew he would meet you boys before he went back, and he had a story made up to show himself in the best light possible."
"How about Mrs. Alton?" I asked.
"She doesn't come out. We've gone over a couple of times, and she receives us with great friendliness, but when we ask her to return our visit she always makes out that she can't leave the boy. Of course she could bring him with her, so that is only an excuse. For some reason she wants to stick close to her homestead."
"We must get Spoof after her," said Jack. "He'll drag her out. Now that we have real society in our community a beautiful young widow must not be allowed to 'waste her sweetness on the desert air.'"
We spent a whole day conjecturing about the new arrivals, and marvelling over the strange assortment of humanity out of which it was the business of fate and our lucky stars—no one else seemed to trouble about the matter—to lay in these prairies the foundations of an enduring civilization. Then we settled down to what little work remained to be done. We found our oat crops harvested, and for that we had to thank Spoof and Jake, who had taken that bit of neighbourly service into their own hands. We made the stable snug, banked up the shacks with earth, and lined them inside with brown paper which we had brought from town for that purpose. We cut firewood in our little park by the pond, being careful to destroy nothing but trees which were already dead or were too crowded for growth.
Before we had completed these jobs Spoof paid us another visit. We saw his tall figure looming up across the brown grass one afternoon early in November. The sun was bright, but swung far to the south, and even its brilliance could not drive a certain chilly nip out of the afternoon air. Spoof walked as one who keeps up his circulation by vigorous exercise. He shook hands with a warm, firm grip. He was brown and rugged, and the prairie winds were leaving their mark on his fine English complexion. In the warmth of his grip, in the sparkle of his eye, in the leisurely confidence of his conversation, there was something about the fellow that was decidedly likable.
"Thought I'd just drop in on you, strangers," he commented. "Have a good autumn's work? I hope you did. I ventured to inquire a few times while you were away, just in case the young ladies might need some help—a man around the place, don't you know? I found them most disconcertingly competent. About the only service I was able to do was to shoot a rabbit for them; one of those big white fellows. Jolly good eating, I should say——"
"How long ago was that?" Jack interrupted, sharply.
"Oh, not so long; in fact, they spoke of saving him for your home-coming."
"Aha! And again, Aha! Come along, you conspirator!"
We seized Spoof by the arms and marched him into the house. Marjorie and Jean were there; although we had two houses the girls were nearly always together in the one on Fourteen. Jean declared that Marjorie was much the better housekeeper of the two, and she came there for lessons.
We thrust the somewhat bewildered Spoof into their presence.
"We have discovered your duplicity," said Jack, sternly, addressing the girls. "We now know the secret of Marjorie's marksmanship."
"Oh, by Jove!" Spoof exclaimed. "I seem to have messed things up. I'm afraid you will think me an awful rotter, Miss Hall. Really"—turning to Jack—"really, it wasn't I that shot the bally hare at all——"
"You're only getting in deeper," said Jack. "'Fess up, and stay for supper."
Spoof did both, and a jolly night we had, playing euchre after the supper dishes were cleared away. But before he left he recalled that an errand of mercy lay at the bottom of his visit.
"I dropped into Brown's the other day," he said. "Mrs. Brown is a bit fed up. Staring out of the window, and all that kind of thing. Poor old Brown is quite useless; worse than I am, if that is possible, but his wife has quality in her that will count, if she doesn't go under first. She needs you two girls over there now and again, just to put a bit of sunshine in her soul."
"This is a land of sunshine," I said, quite inappropriately.
"Of physical sunshine, yes. But the heart withers up on that alone. You natural born pioneers don't understand. You are the second or third generation at the business, all of you. You glory in the wilderness, you revel in it, you subdue it. The lust of these things is born in you. But she—she is a game-keeper's wife. You can't possibly understand. The memory of it all; the hedges and lanes and rose-gardens and the—thesecurityof England; the memory of these is tearing her very heart out."
"They know where we live."
"They have not been introduced."
"Nonsense!"
"I know it's nonsense," Spoof continued. "I've learned that much. They haven't. Do you think they would be guilty of such an unpardonable thing as to call on you first? You can't understand, but over in England we have a saying, 'It isn't done.' When an Englishman says 'It isn't done;' the argument is ended. After that has been said the thing really isn't done, and everybody understands that it can't possibly be done. Now just hitch up the oxen to-morrow and slip over to section Four and jolly her out of the dumps."
"Well, suppose we do," Jack agreed. "But how about you keeping up your end of the social service? Why wish it all on to us?"
"I don't follow you. I have already been to the Brown's——"
"But not to Mrs. Alton's, so far as we can learn. Mrs. Brown may have no monopoly of loneliness."
Perhaps it was only imagination, but it seemed to me that Spoof's face, usually so frank and open, suddenly became a mask. But he came back quickly and easily.
"I could hardly do that, don't you know? It would not be quite the thing."
"Why not?" said Jean, as ingenious as ever.
"Why, it would hardly be the thing—it's not in accord——"
"You mean it isn't done," I supplied.
"Exactly; or, at least, it's not supposed to be."
"You were flattering yourself a minute ago," said I, with show of severity, "that you had learned that on the prairies one doesn't wait for an introduction. You have some other things to learn. One is that on the prairies there is no such saying as, 'It isn't done.'"
"My word!" said Spoof. "Isn't that rather dangerous? But of course I know I'm a greenhorn yet, even though I am beginning to ripen in spots. That reminds me, I've had another letter from the Governor. He wants me to shoot him a young chinook."
"A chinook!"
"Yes. When I wrote him a recent treatise entitled 'An Incident in a Hay Field, or, How about a Cheque for a Hundred Pounds'—you will remember the time—I covered the ragged edge of my purpose with a dissertation upon the prairie climate. I told him that it consisted of a melange of everything from Naples at its best to Norway at its worst—from sleepy kittens purring in the sun to wild she-tigers raging through the jungle. From climate I moved to grass by easy stages, and from grass to hay, and from hay to our little conflagration, and from that to the matter of one hundred pounds. On the way I explained that this part of the country is not really in the chinook belt, although occasionally one came down this far. So now I am commissioned to shoot for the Governor a young chinook. He thinks the skin would look a bit of all right on the library floor, don't you know?"
"And of course you will shoot one?"
"A request from one's immediate paternal ancestor, accompanied by a draft for a hundred pounds, is not to be lightly disregarded. We may have another fire some day, and the price of wagons may go still higher."
"Let me think," said Jack, and for a few moments we remained silent to give his mind elbow-room.
"I have it!" he suddenly exclaimed. "Has your Governor ever seen a badger?"
"Not likely, except possibly at the Zoo."
"We must take that chance. You must shoot a badger, Spoof, which we will formally christen a chinook, and send it to your Governor in time for Christmas."
"I think it's just wicked to do that," said Jean, whose sympathies were always with the under dog. "No doubt Mr.—Mr. Spoof, senior, is a delightful old gentleman, and it isn't fair. Fancy some one from America visiting him and Mr. Spoof goes showing off the chinook which his son shot on the banks of the Saskatchewan. 'Chinook nothing!' says the visitor. 'That's a badger, as common as rabbits, almost, and I would describe your son as another prairie animal, smaller than a badger, with two stripes down its back.'"
"Oh, listen to Miss Prim!" Marjorie interrupted. "Who would think she had a letter from her mother asking if she was canning any buffalo beans?"
It was not until Spoof's tall form had dissolved out of view in the starlight that it occurred to me how skilfully he had changed the conversation from the subject of Mrs. Alton. It was something to think about.