IVTHE COYOTE SNAPSA tall Irishman of the gaunt Tipperary breed, Flynn straightened as Carter reined in, and thrust out a mighty paw. "Ye're welcome, ma'am; an' ye've come in season, for the woman's just called to dinner. Just drive on an' unhitch before the door.""Yes, it's a fine stand of wheat."Walking beside them, he replied to Carter's comment: "Too foine. It's a troifle rank to ripen before the frost." A wistful shade clouded his face, extinguished the mercurial twinkle in his eye. "It 'll freeze, shure." The accent on the last syllable was pitiable, for it told of long waiting, hope deferred, labor ill-requited. It was the voice of one who bolsters himself that the stroke of fate may not utterly kill, who slays expectation lest it betray him. Yet in its pessimism dead hope breathed. "Yes, it 'll freeze," Flynn assured the malicious fates.At close range the house was not nearly so picturesque. A motley of implements strewed the yard: ploughs, harrows, rakes, a red-and-green binder, all resting hap-hazard among a litter of chips, half-hewn logs, and other debris. The stables were hidden by huge manure piles. The place lacked every element of the order one sees on an Eastern farm—rioted in the necessary disorder of newness. Flynn's generation were too busy making farms; tidiness would come with the next.Not realizing this, Helen was drawing unfavorable parallels from the pervading squalor, when Mrs. Flynn, who was simply Flynn in petticoats, came bustling out with welcomes. Miss Morrill must come right in! It was that long since she, Mrs. Flynn, had set eyes on a woman's face that she had almost forgotten what they looked like!"An' you that fond av your glass, mother?" Flynn teased."Glass, ye say?" Mrs. Flynn retorted. "Sure an' 'twas yerself that smashed it three months ago. It's the bottom av a milk-pan he's been shaving in ever since, my dear," she added.Flynn winked. "An' let me advise you, Carter. If ivir ye marry, don't have a glass in the house an' ye'll be able to see ye'self in ivery tin."Out at the stable the merriment died from his face, and facing Carter he asked: "Phwat's up between ye and Hines? I was taking dinner with Bender yesterday, an' while we was eating along came Hines."'There's a man,' he says, spaking to Bender av you. 'There's a man! big, impident, strong. Ye're no chicken, Bender, but ye couldn't put that fellow's shoulders to the ground.' I'm not needing to tell you the effect on Bender?" Flynn finished.Carter nodded. He knew the man. Big, burly, brutal, Bender was a natural product of the lumber-camps in which he had lived a life that was little more than a calender of "scraps." Starting in at eighteen on the Mattawa, he had fought his way to the head of its many camps, then passed to the Michigan woods and attained the kingship there. Helivedrather thanlovedto fight. But, though in the northern settlements Carter was the only man who approximated the lumberman's difficult standard in courage and inches, so far fate had denied him cause of quarrel."The coyote!" Flynn exclaimed, when Carter had told of Hines's attempt on Morrill's hay-slough. "An' him sick in bed, poor man. I wouldn't wipe me feet on Hines's dirty rag av a soul. But he's made ye some mischief. 'Ye're a liar, Hines!' Bender growls. 'I can lick him er any other man betwixt this an' the Rockies.'"Hines didn't like the lie, but he gulped it. 'Talk's cheap,' he snarls."'Carter's a good neighbor,' Bender answers. 'But if he gives me a cause—'"'Acause?' Hines cackles, laughing. 'Why, him an' Morrill have grabbed all the best hay in Silver Creek an' defy anny man to touch it. Run your mower into their big slough an' ye'll have cause enough.'"That made Bender hot. 'I'll do it!' he roars, 'this very day.' But," Flynn finished, "he had to run out to the blacksmith's to fix his mower sickle, so he won't get out till to-morrow morning.""If ye need anny help—" he said, tentatively, as Carter pondered with frowning brow. Then, catching the other's eye, he hastily added: "Ye'll pardon me! But Bender's a terr'ble fighter!"His alarm was so palpable that Carter laughed. "Don't bother," he said. "I'm not going to roll, bite, chew, or gouge with Bender.""Look here!" Flynn interposed, with additional alarm. "Ye'll not be after making anny gun-plays? This is Canada, ye'll mind, where they hang folks mighty easy."Carter laughed again. "There won't be any fight. Listen!"And Flynn did listen. As he grasped the other's meaning, his face cleared and his hearty laugh carried to the house where Helen was making the acquaintance of the smaller Flynns. Six in number, bare-legged, and astonishingly regular in gradation, they scampered like mice on her entrance and hid behind the cotton partition that divided bedroom from kitchen. For a while they were quiet, then Helen became aware of a current of stealthy talk underflowing Mrs. Flynn's volubility."Ain't her waist small?""Bet you she wears stays the hull time.""Like them mother puts on to meetin'?""Shore!""Git out; her face ain't red. Mother nearly busts when she hitches her'n.""Ain't that yaller hair pretty?" This sounded like a girl, though it was hard to decide, for all wore a single sexless garment."Bet you it ain't all her'n. Dad says as them city gals is all took to pieces when they go to bed." This was surely a boy, and, unfortunately for him, the remark sailed out on a pause in his mother's comment."James!" she exclaimed, raising shocked hands. "Come right here."He came slowly, suspiciously, then, divining from his parent's look the enormity of his crime, he dived under her arm, shot out-doors, and was lost in the wheat. After him, a cataract of bare limbs, poured the others, all escaping but one small girl whom Helen caught, kissed, and held thereafter in willing bondage until, after dinner, Carter drove round to the door.Though they had rested barely an hour after their forty-mile run, the ponies repeated the morning's performance, to the horror of Mrs. Flynn; then, as though realizing that they had done all that reputation required, they settled down to a steady jog—in which respect, colloquially, they were imitated by their human freight. A little tired, Helen was content to sit and take silent note of the homesteads which now occurred at regular intervals, while Carter was perfecting his plan for the discomfiture of the warlike Bender. Slough, lake, wood-land, farm passed in slow and silent procession. Once he roused to answer her comment as they rattled by some Indian graves that crowned a knoll."To keep the coyotes from robbing the resurrection," he explained the poplar poles that roofed in the graves.He spoke again when the buck-board ran in among a score of curious mud pillars. About thrice the height of a man, inscriptionless, they loomed, weird guardians of that lonely land till he robbed their mystery."Them? Mud chimneys. You see, when a Cree Indian dies his folks burn down the cabin to keep his spirit from returning, and as mud won't burn the chimneys stand. Small-pox cleaned out this village." Then, with innocent gravity, he went on to tell of a stray scientist who had written a monograph on those very chimneys. "'Monoliths' he called 'em. Allowed that they were dedicated to a tribal god, and was used to burn prisoners captured in war. It was a beautiful theory and made a real nice article. Why did I let him? Well, now, 'twould have been a sin to enlighten him, he was that blamed happy poking round them chimneys, and the folks that read his article wouldn't know any better."Chuckling at the remembrance, he relapsed again to his planning, and did not speak again till they had crossed the valley of Silver Creek from which the northern settlement took its name. Then, indicating a black dot far off on the trail, he said:"There comes Molyneux.""Two in the rig," he added, a few minutes later. "A man and a woman. That 'll be Mrs. Leslie."Unaccustomed to the plainsman's vision, which senses rather than sees the difference of size, color, movement that mark cattle from horses, a single rig from a double team, Helen was dubious till, swinging out from behind a poplar bluff, the team bore down upon them. Two persons were in the rig: a man of the blackly handsome type, and a stylish, pretty woman, who, as Carter turned out to drive by, waved him to stop."Monopolist!" she scolded, when the rigs ranged side by side. "Here I'm just dying to meet Miss Morrill and you would have whisked her by. Now do your duty.""Captain Molyneux," she said, introducing her companion in turn. "A neighbor. We just heard this morning that you were coming and I was so glad; and I'm gladder now that I've seen you." Her glance travelled admiringly over Helen's face and figure. "You know there are so few women here, and they—" Her pretty nose tip-tilted. "Well, you'll see them. Soon I shall make my call; carry you off for a few days, if your brother will permit it. But there! I'm keeping you from him. Good-bye. Now you may go, Mr. Carter."A touch of merry defiance in the permission caused Helen to glance up at her companion. Though Mrs. Leslie's glance was almost caressing whenever it touched him, he had stared straight ahead of him while she chatted."You don't like them?" the girl asked. "Why? She likes you."His sternness vanished and he smiled down upon her. "Now, what made you think that?""I didn't think; I felt it.""Funny things, feelings, ain't they? I mind one that took me fishing when I ought to have been keeping school. 'Twas a beautiful day. Indian-summer back East. You know 't: still, silent, broody, warm; first touch of gold in the leafage. I justfeltthat I had to go fishing. But when dad produced a peeled hickory switch that night he told me: 'Son, feelings is treacherous things. This will teach you the difference between thinking and knowing.' It did—for a while.""But you don't like them?" she persisted, refusing to be side-tracked. Then she blushed under his look of grave surprise, realizing that she had broken one of the unwritten canons of frontier etiquette. "I beg your pardon," she said, hastily. "I didn't mean to—"His smile wiped out the offence. Stretching his whip, he said, "There's your house."Helen cried aloud. Nestling under the eaves of green forest, it faced on a lake that lay a scant quarter-mile to the south. North, west, and south, trim clump poplar dotted its rolling land and rose in the fields of grain. Here nature, greatest of landscape-gardeners, had planned her best, setting a watered garden within a fence of forest. Just for a second the house flashed out between two green bluffs, a neat log building, lime-washed in settler style, then it was snatched again from her shining eyes.But Carter had seen a figure standing at the door. "Clear grit!" he mentally ejaculated. "Blamed if he ain't up and dressed to save her feelings." Then, aloud, he gave her necessary warnings. "Now you mustn't expect too much. He's doing fine, but no doubt pulled down a bit since you saw him."Two hours later Carter stepped out from his own cabin. He and Morrill had "homesteaded" halves of the same section, and as he strode south the latter's lamp beamed a yellow welcome through the soft night. Already he had refused an invitation to supper, deeming that the brother and sister would prefer to spend their first evening alone together, and now ignoring the lamp's message, he entered Merrill's stable, saddled the latter's cattle pony in darkness thick as ink, led him out, and rode quietly away.Now of all equines, your northern cross-bred pony is the most cunning. For three black miles Shyster behaved with propriety, then, sensing by the slack line that his rider was preoccupied, he achieved a vicious sideling buck. Well executed, it yet failed of its intent."You little devil!" Carter remonstrated, as he applied correctives in the form of quirt and spurs. "Rest don't suit your complaint. To-morrow you go on the mower.""Hullo!" a voice cried from the darkness ahead. "Who's that cussing?"It was Danvers, an English remittance-man, a typical specimen of the tribe of Ishmael which is maintained in colonial exile on "keep-away" allowances."Are you lost?" Carter asked."Lost? No!" There was an aggrieved note in Danvers' tone. "You fellows seem to think that I oughtn't to be out after dark. There's Jed Hines going about and telling people that I knocked at my own door one night to inquire my way.""Tut, tut," Carter sympathized. "And Jed counted such a truthful man! You'll find it hard to live that down. But where might you be heading for now—if it's any of my darn business?""Morrill's. Heard his sister had arrived. I'm going to drop in and pay my respects.""Humph! that's neighborly. They've had just two hours to exchange the news of three years; they'll shorely be through by this. Keep right on, son. In five-and-twenty minutes this trail will land you at Jed Hines's door.""Oh, get out!" Danvers exclaimed."Sir, to you?" Carter assumed a wonderful stiffness. "I'll give you good-night.""Oh, here!" the youth called after him. "I didn't mean to doubt you."Carter rode on.Ridden by a vivid memory of the jeering Hines, Danvers became desperate. "Oh, Carter! Say, don't get mad! Do tell a fellow! How shall I get there?"Carter reined in. "Where? To Hines's? Keep right along.""N-o! Morrill's?""Oh, let me see. One—two—three—take the third fork to the left and second to the right; that ought to bring you—to your own door," he finished, as he listened to the departing hoof-beats. "That is, if you follow directions, which ain't likely. Anyway," he philosophically concluded, "you ain't agoing to bother that girl much to-night."Spurring Shyster, he galloped on, and in ten minutes caught Murchison, an Englishman of the yeoman class, out at his stables. Receiving a hearty affirmative, rounded out with full-mouthed English "damns," in answer to his question, he declined Murchison's invitation to "put in," and rode on—rode from homestead to homestead, asking always the same question, receiving always the same answer. Remittance-men, Scotch Canadians, Seebach, the solitary German settler, alike listened, laughed, and fell in with the plan as Flynn had done. He covered many miles and the moon caught him on trail before he permitted the last man to carry his cold legs back to bed. It was long past midnight when he unsaddled at Morrill's stable.Softly closing the door on his tired beast, he stood gazing at the house. Far-off in the woods a night-owl hooted, a bittern boomed on the lake shore, the still air pulsed to the howl of a timber-wolf. Though born of the plains, its moods had never palled upon him. Usually he had been stirred. But now he had no ears for the night nor eyes for the lake chased in rippled silver. He listened, listened, as though his strained hearing would drag the girl's soft sleep breathing from the house's jealous embrace. Soon he leaned back against the door musing; and when, having inspected the cabin from one side, the moon sailed over and looked down on the other, he was still there.As the first quivering flushes shot through the grays of dawn Bender came out of his cabin. He intended to be at work on Merrill's big slough at sunrise. But as he rammed home the sickle into its place in the mower-bar a projecting rivet caused it to buckle and break. That spelled another journey to the blacksmith's, and the sun stood at noon before the sickle was in place. Falling to oiling with savage earnestness, that an ancient Briton might have exhibited in greasing his scythe-armed war-chariot, Bender then stuffed bread and meat into his jumper, hitched, and drove off north, looking for all the world like a grisly pirate afloat on a yellow sea.Half an hour's easy jogging would carry him to Merrill's big slough, but on the way he had to pass two smaller ones. The first, which had a hundred-yard belt of six-foot hay ringing its sedgy centre, tempted him sorely, yet he refrained, having in mind a bigger prey. At the next he reined in, and stared at a dozen cut swaths and a mower with feeding horses tied to its wheels.It was Molyneux's mower, and to Bender its presence could only mean that the settlement was rushing the sick man's sloughs. "Invasion of the British!" he yelled. "What 'll Carter say to this? Remember Yorktown!"He was still laughing when a buck-board came rattling up the trail behind him. It was Hines."Cut that slough yet?" he asked."Just going there," Bender answered; then gave the reason of his delay, garnished with furious anathema on the maker of sickles. "But ain't that a joke?" he said, indicating Molyneux's mower.Hines whinnied his satisfaction. "Didn't think it was in the Britisher. But my! won't that gall the long-geared son of a gun of a Yank? Drive on an' I'll follow up an' see you started—mebbe see some of the fun," he added to himself, "if Carter's there."Quarter of an hour brought them to the big slough, which, on this side, was ringed so thickly with willow-scrub that neither could see it till they reined on its edge. Both stared blankly. When Hines went by that morning a mile of solid hay had bowed in sunlit waves before the breeze. Save a strip some twenty yards wide down the centre, it now lay in flat green swaths, while along the strip a dozen feeding teams were tied to as many mowers."A bee, by G—!" Bender swore."Hell!" Hines snarled even in his swearing. "Bilked, by the Almighty!"For a moment they stood, staring from the slough to each other, the lumberman red, angry, foolish, Hines the personification of venomous chagrin. Presently his rage urged him to a great foolishness."You an' your casting!" he sneered. "Scairt, you was—plumb scairt!"Astonishment, the astonishment with which a bull might regard the attack of an impertinent fly, obliterated for one moment all other expression from Bender's face. Then, roaring his furious anger, he sprang from his mower.Realizing his mistake, Hines had already lashed his ponies, but even then they barely jerked the buck-board tail from under the huge, clutching fingers. Foaming with passion, Bender gave chase for a score of yards, then stopped and shook his great fist, pouring out invective."To-morrow," he roared, "I'll come over and cut on you.""What's the matter? You seem all het up?" Carter's quiet voice gave Bender first notice of the buckboard that had come quietly upon him from the grassy prairie. With Carter were Flynn, Seebach, and two others. Not very far away a wagon was bringing others back from dinner."We're all giving Morrill a day's cutting," Carter went on, with a quiet twinkle. "I called at your place this morning with a bid, but you was away. We're right glad to see you. Who told you?"Gradually a grin wiped out Bender's choler. "You're damn smart," he rumbled. "Well—where shall I begin?"VJENNYThus did the bolt which Hines forged for Carter prove a boomerang and recoil upon himself. For next morning Bender started his mower on a particularly fine slough which Hines had left to the last because of its wetness. Moreover, Hines had ten tons of cut hay bleaching near by in the sun and dare not try to rake it.It was oppressively hot the morning that Bender hitched to rake the stolen slough; fleecy thunder-heads were slowly heaving up from behind the swart spruce forest."'Twon't be worth cow-feed if it ain't raked to-day," the giant remarked, as he overlooked his enemy's hay. Then his satisfaction gave place to sudden anger—a rake was at work on Hines's hay less than a quarter-mile away."Hain't seen me, I reckon," Bender growled. Leaving his own rake, he crouched in a gully, skulked along the low land, gained a willow thicket, and sprang out just as the rake came clicking by."Now I've got you!" he roared. Then his hands dropped. He stood staring at a thin slip of a girl, who returned his gaze with dull, tired eyes. It was Jenny Hines, Jed's only child."Well," Bender growled, "what d' you reckon you're doing?""Raking." Her voice was listless as her look. Just eleven when her mother died, her small shoulders had borne the weight of Jed's housekeeping. Heavy choring had robbed her youth, and left her, at eighteen, nothing but a faded shadow of a possible prettiness.Bender coughed, shuffled. "Where's your dad?""Up at the house. He allowed you wouldn't tech me. But," she added, dully, "I'd liefer you killed me than not."Bender's anger had already passed. Rough pity now took its place. His furious strength prevented him from realizing the killing drudgery, the lugging of heavy water-buckets, the milking, feeding of pigs, the hard labor which had killed her spirit and left this utter hopelessness; but he knew by experience that a young horse should not be put to a heavy draw, and here was a violation of the precept. Bender was puzzled. Had he come on a neighbor maltreating a horse, a curse backed by his heavy fist would have righted the wrong; but this frail creature's humanity placed her wrongs outside his rough remedial practice.He whistled, swore softly, and, failing to invoke inspiration by these characteristic methods, he said, kindly: "Well, for onct Jed tol' the truth. Must have strained him some. Go ahead, I ain't agoing to bother you."Having finished raking his own hay, he fell to work with the fork, stabbing huge bunches, throwing them right and left, striving to work off the pain at his heart. But pity grew with exertion, and, pausing midway of the morning, he saw that she also was plying a weary fork."You need a rest," he growled five minutes later. "Sit down."She glanced up at the ominous sky. "Can't. Rain's coming right on."Lifting her bodily, he placed her in a nest of hay. "Now you stay right there. I'm running this."Picking up her fork, he put forth all his magnificent strength while she sat listlessly watching. It seemed as though nothing could banish her chronic weariness, her ineffable lassitude. Once, indeed, she remarked, "My, but you're strong!" but voice and words lacked animation. She added the remarkable climax, "Pa says you are a devil.""Yes?" he questioned. "An' you bet he's right, gal. Keep a right smart distance from men like me.""Oh, I don't know," she slowly answered. "I'd liefer be a devil. Angels is tiresome. Pa's always talking about them. He's a heap religious—in spells."Pausing in his forking, Bender stared down on the small heretic. Vestigial traces of religious belief occupied a lower strata of his savage soul. Crude they were, anthropomorphic, barely higher than superstitions, yet they were there, and chief among them was an idea that has appealed to the most cultured of men—that woman is incomplete, nay, lost, without religion."Shore, child!" he protested. "Little gals shouldn't talk so. That ain't the way to get to heaven.""D' you allow to go there?" she demanded, with disconcerting suddenness.Bender grimaced, laughed at the ludicrousness of the question. "Don't allow as I'd be comfortable. Anyway, lumbermen go to t'other place. But that don't alter your case. Gals all go to heaven.""Well!" For the first time she displayed some animation. "I ain't! Pa's talked me sick of it. I allow it's them golden streets he's after. He'd coin 'em into dollars."Seeing that Hines had not hesitated in minting this, his flesh and blood, Bender thought it very likely, and feeling his inability to cope with such reasonable heresies he attacked the hay instead. Having small skill in women—the few of his intimate experience being as free of feminine complexities as they were of virtue—he was sorely puzzled. Looking backward, he remembered his own pious mother. Hines's wife had died whispering of religion's consolations; yet here was the daughter turning a determined back on the source of the mother's comfort. It was unnatural to his scheme of things, contrary to the law of his vestigial piety. He would try again! But when, the hay finished, he came back to her, he quailed before her pale hopelessness; it called God in question.Limbering up her rake, he watched her drive away, a small, thin figure, woful speck of life under a vast gray sky. For twisting cloud masses had blotted out the sun, a chill wind snatched the tops from the hay-cocks as fast as Bender coiled them, blots of water splashed the dust before he finished his task.Black care rode home with him; and as that night the thunder split over his cabin, he saw Jenny's eyes mirrored on the wet, black pane, and it was borne dimly upon him that something besides overwork was responsible for their haunting.Bender had a friend, a man of his own ilk, with whom he had hit camp and log-drive for these last ten years. At birth it is supposable that the friend inherited a name, but in the camps he was known only as the "Cougar." A silent man, broad, deep-lunged, fierce-eyed, nature had laid his lines for great height, then bent him in a perpetual crouch. He always seemed gathering for a spring, which, combined with tigerish courage, had gained him his name. Inseparable, if Bender appeared on the Mattawa for the spring drive, it was known that the Cougar might be shortly expected. If the Cougar stole into a Rocky Mountain camp, a bunk was immediately reserved for his big affinity. Only a bottle of whiskey and two days' delay on the Cougar's part had prevented them from settling up the same section. However, though five miles lay between their respective homesteads, never a Sunday passed without one man riding over to see the other, and it was returning from such a visit that Bender next fell in with Jenny Hines.It was night and late, but as Bender rode by the forks where Hines's private road joined on to the Lone Tree trail, a new moon gave sufficient light for him to see a whitish object lying in the grass. He judged it a grain-sack till a convulsion shook it and a sob rose to his ears."Good land, girl!" he ejaculated, when, a moment later, Jenny's pale face turned up to his, "what are you doing here?""He's turned me out.""Who?""Jed." The absence of the parental title spoke volumes—of love killed by slow starvation, cold sternness, of youth enslaved to authority without mitigation of fatherly tenderness.Without understanding, Bender felt. "What for?" he demanded.Crowding against his stirrup, she remained silent, and the touch of her body against his leg, the mute appeal of the contact, sent a flame of righteous passion through Bender's big body. Indecision had never been among his faults. Stooping, he raised her to the saddle before him, and as she settled in against his broad breast a wave of tenderness flowed after the flame."No, no!" she begged, when he turned in on Jed's trail. "I won't go back!" And he felt her violently trembling as he soothed and coaxed. She tried to slip from his arms as they approached the cabin, and her terror filled him with such anger that his kick almost stove in the door."It's me!" he roared, answering Hines's challenge. "Bender! I came on your gal lying out on the prairies. Open an' take her in!"In response the window raised an inch; the moonlight glinted on a rifle-barrel. "Kick the door ag'in!" Jed's voice snarled, "an' I'll bore you. Git! the pair of ye!""Come, come, Jed." For her sake Bender mastered his anger. "Come, this ain't right. Let her in an' we'll call it by-gones.""No, no!" the girl protested.Though she had whispered, Jed heard, and her protest touched off his furious wolfish passion. "Git! Won't you git!" he screeched, following the command with a stream of screamed imprecations, vile abuse.If alone Bender would have beaten in the door, but there was no mistaking Hines's deadly intent. Warned by the click of a cocking hammer, he swung Jenny in front again, galloped out of range; then, uncertain what to do, he gave his beast its head, and half an hour later brought up at his own door."There, sis," he said, as he lit his lamp, "make yourself happy while I stable Billy. Then I'll cook up some grub, an' while we're eating we can talk over things."She smiled wanly yet gratefully. But when he returned she was rocking back and forth and moaning."Don't take on so," he comforted. "To-night I'll sleep in the stable; at daybreak we'll hit south for Mother Flynn's." But the moans followed in quick succession, beaded sweat started on her brow, and as she swung forward he saw that which, two hours before, had turned Jed Hines into a foaming beast."Oh, my God!" The exclamation burst from him. "You pore little thing! you pore little child! Only a baby yourself!"Stooping, he lifted her into his bed, tucked her in, then stood, doubtful, troubled, looking down upon her. Two-thirds of the settlers in Silver Creek were of Scotch descent; were deeply dyed with the granite hardness, harsh malignancy, fervid bigotry which have caused the history of their race to be written in characters of blood. Fiercely moral, dogmatically religious, she could expect no mercy at their hands. Hard-featured women, whose angular unloveliness had efficiently safeguarded their own virtue, would hate her the more because her fault had been beyond their compass. Looking forward, Bender saw the poor little body a passive centre for a whorl of spite, jealousy, virulent spleen, and the rough heart of him was mightily troubled. In all Silver Creek, Mrs. Flynn was the only woman to whom he felt he might safely turn. But Flynn's farm lay eighteen miles to the south—too far; the child was in imminent labor. What should he do?"Jenny," he said, "any women folk been to your house lately?"When she answered that they had been without a visitor for three months, Bender nodded his satisfaction. "Lie still, child," he said. "I'll be back right smart."He was not gone long—just long enough to drive over to and back from Carter's. "I'm not trusting any of the women hereabouts," he told Carter. "Though it ain't generally known, the Cougar was married once. The same Indians that did up Custer cleaned up his wife and family. An' as he always lived a thousand miles from a doctor, he knows all about sech things. So if you'll drive like all hell for him, I'll tend to the little gal."And Carter drove. In one hour he brought the Cougar, but even in that short time a wonderful transformation was wrought in that rough cabin under Bender's sympathetic eyes. From the travail of the suffering girl was born a woman—but not a mother. For of the essence of life Jenny had not sufficient to endow the child of her labor. The spark flickered down in herself, sank, till the Cougar, roughest yet gentlest of nurses, sweated with apprehension."It's death or a doctor," he told Carter, hiding his emotion under a surly growl. "Now show what them ponies are good for."And that night those small fiends did "show what they were good for";—made a record that stood for many a year. Roused from his beauty-sleep, Flynn caught the whir of hot wheels and wondered who was sick. It was yet black night when Carter called Father Francis, the silent mission priest, from his bed. By lantern-light they two, layman and priest, spelled each other with pick and shovel in the mission acre, and when the last spadeful dropped on the small grave, Carter flew on. At cock-crow he pulled into Lone Tree, sixty miles in six hours, without counting the stop at the mission."I doubt I've killed you," he murmured, as the ponies stood before the doctor's door, "but it just had to be done."The doctor himself answered the knock. A heavy man, grizzled, gray-eyed, sun and wind had burned his face to leather, for his days and nights were spent on trail, pursuing a practice that was only limited by the endurance of horse-flesh. From the ranges incurably vicious broncos were sent to his stables, devils in brute form. He used seven teams; yet the toughest wore out in a year. Day or night, winter or summer, a hundred in the shade or sixty below, he might be seen pounding them along the trails. Even now he had just come in from the Pipe Stone, sixty miles southwest, but he instantly routed out his man."Hitch the buckskins, Bill," he said, "and let him run yours round to the stables, Carter. He'll turn 'em out prancing by the time we're back."It took Bill, the doctor, and Carter to get the buckskins clear of town, but once out the doctor handed the lines to Carter. "Now let 'em run." Then he fell asleep.He woke as they passed the mission, exchanged words with the priest, and dozed again till Carter reined in at Bender's door. Then, shedding sleep as a dog shakes off water, he entered, clear-eyed, into the battle with death.It was night when he came out to Bender and Carter, sprawled on the hay in the stable."She'll live," he answered the lumberman's look, "but she must have woman's nursing. Who's to be? Mrs. Flynn?" He shook his head. "A good woman, but—she has her sex's weakness—damned long-tongued."Bender looked troubled. "There ain't a soul knows it—yet."The doctor nodded. "Yes, yes, but I doubt whether you can keep it, boys.""I think," Carter said, slowly, "that if it was rightly put Miss Morrill might—""That sweet-faced girl?" The doctor's gray eyes lit with approval, and the cloud swept back from Bender's rugged face."If she only would!" the giant stammered, "I'd—" He cast about for a fitting recompense, and finding none worth, finished, "There ain't a damn thing I wouldn't do for her."The doctor took doubt by the ears. "Well, hitch and let's see."Realizing that the girl would probably have her fair share of the prejudice, he opened his case very gently an hour later. But he might have saved his diplomacy."Of course!" she exclaimed, as soon as she grasped the facts. "Poor little thing! I'll go right over with Mr. Bender."And remember," the doctor said, finishing his instructions, "she needs mothering more than medicine."So, satisfied, he and Carter hit the back trail, but not till he had examined Morrill with stethoscope and tapping finger. "Must have some excuse for my trip," he said, "and you'll have to serve. So don't be scared if you happen to hear that you have had another hemorrhage. Good! Good!" he exclaimed at every tap, but once on trail he shook his head. "May go in a month; can't last six. Be prepared."A fiery sunset was staining the western sky when, on his way back from Lone Tree, Carter stopped at Bender's door. The glow tinged the furious cloud that rose from the Cougar's pipe."Doing well," he laconically answered. "Never saw a gal pull round better from a fainting spell."Nodding comprehension, Carter mentioned a doubt that had nettled him on the trail. "Jed? Do you think he'll—"Sudden ferocity flamed up in the Cougar's face. "I tended to him this morning," he said, slowly, ominously. "He's persuaded as he mistook the girl's symptoms. Anyway, he ain't agoing to foul his own nest so long as no one knows.""Wants her back, I suppose?"The Cougar nodded. "She's worth more to him than his best ox-team. But he ain't agoing to get her. Don't go! Miss Morrill's inside an' wants to run over home for some things. Fine gal that." The Cougar's set fierceness of face almost thawed as he delivered his opinion.Driving homeward, Helen opened the subject just where the Cougar had left it. "She won't go back to her father," she said, "and I don't blame her. But she can't stay here."However, Jenny's future was already provided. "You needn't to worry," Carter said. "The doctor's fixed things. He and his wife have neither chick nor child of their own; they'll take her in."The girl exclaimed her surprised gladness. To her, indeed, the entire incident was a revelation. Here three rough frontiersmen had banded successfully together to protect a wronged child and keep her within their rough social pale. Through all they had exhibited a tact and delicacy not always found in finer social stratas, and the lesson went far in modifying certain caste ideas—would have gone farther could she have known the fulness of their delicacy.Only once was the cause of Jenny's illness ever hinted at among the three; that when Carter and Bender lay waiting for the doctor in the stable."You don't happen to have made a guess at the man?" Carter had asked."She hain't mentioned him," the giant answered, a little stiffly.But he thawed when Carter answered: "You'll pardon me. I was just wondering if a rope might help her case."Bender had shaken his head. "Las' year, you'll remember, one of Molyneux's remittance-men uster drive her out while Jed had her hired out to Leslie's. But he's gone back to England."Also Helen had learned to look beneath Bender's scarred surface. Every day, while Jenny lay in his shanty, he would slip in between loads of hay to see her. At first the presence of so much femininity embarrassed him. One petticoat hanging on the wall while another floats over the floor is enough to upset any bachelor. Only when sitting with Jenny did he find his tongue; then, giant of the camps, he prattled like a school-boy, freeing thoughts and feelings that had been imprisoned through all his savage years. It was singularly strange, too, to see how Jenny reciprocated his feelings. She liked Helen, but all of her petting could not bring the smile that came for Bender, in whom she sensed a kindred shy simplicity.Helen was to get yet one other light from these unpromising surfaces, a light bright as those of Scripture which are said to shine as lamps to the feet. A few days after Jenny's departure Bender rode up to the door where Carter sat talking with Morrill."Got any stock to sell?" he inquired. "Cows in calf?""Going in for butter-making?" Carter inquired, grinning."Nope!" The giant laughed. "'Tain't for myself I'm asking. I'm a lumberman born an' bred; the camps draw me like salt-licks pull the deer. I'd never have time to look after them. Farming's play with me. On'y I was thinking as it wouldn't be so bad if that little gal had a head or two of her own growing inter money. You kin let 'em run with your band summers, an' I'll put up winter hay for them an' the increase. How are you, miss?" He nodded as Helen came to the door.It was her first experience in such free giving, and she was astonished to see how devoid his manner was of philanthropic consciousness. Plainly he regarded the whole affair as very ordinary business. Carter's answer accentuated the novel impression—"What's the matter with me contributing them heifers?""Da—beg pardon, miss." Bender blushed. "No you don't. This is my funeral. But I'm no hawg. Now if you wanter throw in a couple of calves—"Thus, without deed, oath, or mortgage, but with a certainty that none of these forms could afford, did little Jenny Hines become a young lady of property. The matter disposed of, Bender called Carter off to the stable, where, after many mysterious fumblings, he produced from a package a gorgeous silk kerchief of rainbow hues."You'll give Miss Morrill this?"But Carter balked, grinning. "Lordy, man; do your own courting.""Say!" the giant ejaculated, shocked. "You don't reckon she'd take it that way?"Carter judiciously considered the question, and after mature deliberation replied: "I've seen breach-of-promise suits swing on less. But I reckon you're safe enough—if you explain your motive."The giant sighed his relief. "Did you ever give a gal anything, Carter?""Did I? Enough to stock a farm if 'twas collected.""How'd you go about it?""Why, jes' give it to her. You're bigger'n she is; kain't hurt you.""Oh, Lordy, I don't know." Bender sighed again. "It's surprising what them small things kin do to you. Say, there's a good feller. You take it in?"But Carter sternly refused, and five minutes later Bender might have been seen, stern and rigid from the desperate nature of his enterprise, sitting on one of Helen's soap-boxes. In the hour he talked with Morrill, he never once relaxed a death-grip on his hat. His eye never once strayed towards Helen, and it was late that evening when she found the kerchief under his box.It speaks well for her that she did not laugh at its gorgeous colors; and her smile as she scribbled a little note of thanks that was delivered by Carter was far too tender for ridicule. Truly she was learning.
IV
THE COYOTE SNAPS
A tall Irishman of the gaunt Tipperary breed, Flynn straightened as Carter reined in, and thrust out a mighty paw. "Ye're welcome, ma'am; an' ye've come in season, for the woman's just called to dinner. Just drive on an' unhitch before the door."
"Yes, it's a fine stand of wheat."
Walking beside them, he replied to Carter's comment: "Too foine. It's a troifle rank to ripen before the frost." A wistful shade clouded his face, extinguished the mercurial twinkle in his eye. "It 'll freeze, shure." The accent on the last syllable was pitiable, for it told of long waiting, hope deferred, labor ill-requited. It was the voice of one who bolsters himself that the stroke of fate may not utterly kill, who slays expectation lest it betray him. Yet in its pessimism dead hope breathed. "Yes, it 'll freeze," Flynn assured the malicious fates.
At close range the house was not nearly so picturesque. A motley of implements strewed the yard: ploughs, harrows, rakes, a red-and-green binder, all resting hap-hazard among a litter of chips, half-hewn logs, and other debris. The stables were hidden by huge manure piles. The place lacked every element of the order one sees on an Eastern farm—rioted in the necessary disorder of newness. Flynn's generation were too busy making farms; tidiness would come with the next.
Not realizing this, Helen was drawing unfavorable parallels from the pervading squalor, when Mrs. Flynn, who was simply Flynn in petticoats, came bustling out with welcomes. Miss Morrill must come right in! It was that long since she, Mrs. Flynn, had set eyes on a woman's face that she had almost forgotten what they looked like!
"An' you that fond av your glass, mother?" Flynn teased.
"Glass, ye say?" Mrs. Flynn retorted. "Sure an' 'twas yerself that smashed it three months ago. It's the bottom av a milk-pan he's been shaving in ever since, my dear," she added.
Flynn winked. "An' let me advise you, Carter. If ivir ye marry, don't have a glass in the house an' ye'll be able to see ye'self in ivery tin."
Out at the stable the merriment died from his face, and facing Carter he asked: "Phwat's up between ye and Hines? I was taking dinner with Bender yesterday, an' while we was eating along came Hines.
"'There's a man,' he says, spaking to Bender av you. 'There's a man! big, impident, strong. Ye're no chicken, Bender, but ye couldn't put that fellow's shoulders to the ground.' I'm not needing to tell you the effect on Bender?" Flynn finished.
Carter nodded. He knew the man. Big, burly, brutal, Bender was a natural product of the lumber-camps in which he had lived a life that was little more than a calender of "scraps." Starting in at eighteen on the Mattawa, he had fought his way to the head of its many camps, then passed to the Michigan woods and attained the kingship there. Helivedrather thanlovedto fight. But, though in the northern settlements Carter was the only man who approximated the lumberman's difficult standard in courage and inches, so far fate had denied him cause of quarrel.
"The coyote!" Flynn exclaimed, when Carter had told of Hines's attempt on Morrill's hay-slough. "An' him sick in bed, poor man. I wouldn't wipe me feet on Hines's dirty rag av a soul. But he's made ye some mischief. 'Ye're a liar, Hines!' Bender growls. 'I can lick him er any other man betwixt this an' the Rockies.'
"Hines didn't like the lie, but he gulped it. 'Talk's cheap,' he snarls.
"'Carter's a good neighbor,' Bender answers. 'But if he gives me a cause—'
"'Acause?' Hines cackles, laughing. 'Why, him an' Morrill have grabbed all the best hay in Silver Creek an' defy anny man to touch it. Run your mower into their big slough an' ye'll have cause enough.'
"That made Bender hot. 'I'll do it!' he roars, 'this very day.' But," Flynn finished, "he had to run out to the blacksmith's to fix his mower sickle, so he won't get out till to-morrow morning."
"If ye need anny help—" he said, tentatively, as Carter pondered with frowning brow. Then, catching the other's eye, he hastily added: "Ye'll pardon me! But Bender's a terr'ble fighter!"
His alarm was so palpable that Carter laughed. "Don't bother," he said. "I'm not going to roll, bite, chew, or gouge with Bender."
"Look here!" Flynn interposed, with additional alarm. "Ye'll not be after making anny gun-plays? This is Canada, ye'll mind, where they hang folks mighty easy."
Carter laughed again. "There won't be any fight. Listen!"
And Flynn did listen. As he grasped the other's meaning, his face cleared and his hearty laugh carried to the house where Helen was making the acquaintance of the smaller Flynns. Six in number, bare-legged, and astonishingly regular in gradation, they scampered like mice on her entrance and hid behind the cotton partition that divided bedroom from kitchen. For a while they were quiet, then Helen became aware of a current of stealthy talk underflowing Mrs. Flynn's volubility.
"Ain't her waist small?"
"Bet you she wears stays the hull time."
"Like them mother puts on to meetin'?"
"Shore!"
"Git out; her face ain't red. Mother nearly busts when she hitches her'n."
"Ain't that yaller hair pretty?" This sounded like a girl, though it was hard to decide, for all wore a single sexless garment.
"Bet you it ain't all her'n. Dad says as them city gals is all took to pieces when they go to bed." This was surely a boy, and, unfortunately for him, the remark sailed out on a pause in his mother's comment.
"James!" she exclaimed, raising shocked hands. "Come right here."
He came slowly, suspiciously, then, divining from his parent's look the enormity of his crime, he dived under her arm, shot out-doors, and was lost in the wheat. After him, a cataract of bare limbs, poured the others, all escaping but one small girl whom Helen caught, kissed, and held thereafter in willing bondage until, after dinner, Carter drove round to the door.
Though they had rested barely an hour after their forty-mile run, the ponies repeated the morning's performance, to the horror of Mrs. Flynn; then, as though realizing that they had done all that reputation required, they settled down to a steady jog—in which respect, colloquially, they were imitated by their human freight. A little tired, Helen was content to sit and take silent note of the homesteads which now occurred at regular intervals, while Carter was perfecting his plan for the discomfiture of the warlike Bender. Slough, lake, wood-land, farm passed in slow and silent procession. Once he roused to answer her comment as they rattled by some Indian graves that crowned a knoll.
"To keep the coyotes from robbing the resurrection," he explained the poplar poles that roofed in the graves.
He spoke again when the buck-board ran in among a score of curious mud pillars. About thrice the height of a man, inscriptionless, they loomed, weird guardians of that lonely land till he robbed their mystery.
"Them? Mud chimneys. You see, when a Cree Indian dies his folks burn down the cabin to keep his spirit from returning, and as mud won't burn the chimneys stand. Small-pox cleaned out this village." Then, with innocent gravity, he went on to tell of a stray scientist who had written a monograph on those very chimneys. "'Monoliths' he called 'em. Allowed that they were dedicated to a tribal god, and was used to burn prisoners captured in war. It was a beautiful theory and made a real nice article. Why did I let him? Well, now, 'twould have been a sin to enlighten him, he was that blamed happy poking round them chimneys, and the folks that read his article wouldn't know any better."
Chuckling at the remembrance, he relapsed again to his planning, and did not speak again till they had crossed the valley of Silver Creek from which the northern settlement took its name. Then, indicating a black dot far off on the trail, he said:
"There comes Molyneux."
"Two in the rig," he added, a few minutes later. "A man and a woman. That 'll be Mrs. Leslie."
Unaccustomed to the plainsman's vision, which senses rather than sees the difference of size, color, movement that mark cattle from horses, a single rig from a double team, Helen was dubious till, swinging out from behind a poplar bluff, the team bore down upon them. Two persons were in the rig: a man of the blackly handsome type, and a stylish, pretty woman, who, as Carter turned out to drive by, waved him to stop.
"Monopolist!" she scolded, when the rigs ranged side by side. "Here I'm just dying to meet Miss Morrill and you would have whisked her by. Now do your duty."
"Captain Molyneux," she said, introducing her companion in turn. "A neighbor. We just heard this morning that you were coming and I was so glad; and I'm gladder now that I've seen you." Her glance travelled admiringly over Helen's face and figure. "You know there are so few women here, and they—" Her pretty nose tip-tilted. "Well, you'll see them. Soon I shall make my call; carry you off for a few days, if your brother will permit it. But there! I'm keeping you from him. Good-bye. Now you may go, Mr. Carter."
A touch of merry defiance in the permission caused Helen to glance up at her companion. Though Mrs. Leslie's glance was almost caressing whenever it touched him, he had stared straight ahead of him while she chatted.
"You don't like them?" the girl asked. "Why? She likes you."
His sternness vanished and he smiled down upon her. "Now, what made you think that?"
"I didn't think; I felt it."
"Funny things, feelings, ain't they? I mind one that took me fishing when I ought to have been keeping school. 'Twas a beautiful day. Indian-summer back East. You know 't: still, silent, broody, warm; first touch of gold in the leafage. I justfeltthat I had to go fishing. But when dad produced a peeled hickory switch that night he told me: 'Son, feelings is treacherous things. This will teach you the difference between thinking and knowing.' It did—for a while."
"But you don't like them?" she persisted, refusing to be side-tracked. Then she blushed under his look of grave surprise, realizing that she had broken one of the unwritten canons of frontier etiquette. "I beg your pardon," she said, hastily. "I didn't mean to—"
His smile wiped out the offence. Stretching his whip, he said, "There's your house."
Helen cried aloud. Nestling under the eaves of green forest, it faced on a lake that lay a scant quarter-mile to the south. North, west, and south, trim clump poplar dotted its rolling land and rose in the fields of grain. Here nature, greatest of landscape-gardeners, had planned her best, setting a watered garden within a fence of forest. Just for a second the house flashed out between two green bluffs, a neat log building, lime-washed in settler style, then it was snatched again from her shining eyes.
But Carter had seen a figure standing at the door. "Clear grit!" he mentally ejaculated. "Blamed if he ain't up and dressed to save her feelings." Then, aloud, he gave her necessary warnings. "Now you mustn't expect too much. He's doing fine, but no doubt pulled down a bit since you saw him."
Two hours later Carter stepped out from his own cabin. He and Morrill had "homesteaded" halves of the same section, and as he strode south the latter's lamp beamed a yellow welcome through the soft night. Already he had refused an invitation to supper, deeming that the brother and sister would prefer to spend their first evening alone together, and now ignoring the lamp's message, he entered Merrill's stable, saddled the latter's cattle pony in darkness thick as ink, led him out, and rode quietly away.
Now of all equines, your northern cross-bred pony is the most cunning. For three black miles Shyster behaved with propriety, then, sensing by the slack line that his rider was preoccupied, he achieved a vicious sideling buck. Well executed, it yet failed of its intent.
"You little devil!" Carter remonstrated, as he applied correctives in the form of quirt and spurs. "Rest don't suit your complaint. To-morrow you go on the mower."
"Hullo!" a voice cried from the darkness ahead. "Who's that cussing?"
It was Danvers, an English remittance-man, a typical specimen of the tribe of Ishmael which is maintained in colonial exile on "keep-away" allowances.
"Are you lost?" Carter asked.
"Lost? No!" There was an aggrieved note in Danvers' tone. "You fellows seem to think that I oughtn't to be out after dark. There's Jed Hines going about and telling people that I knocked at my own door one night to inquire my way."
"Tut, tut," Carter sympathized. "And Jed counted such a truthful man! You'll find it hard to live that down. But where might you be heading for now—if it's any of my darn business?"
"Morrill's. Heard his sister had arrived. I'm going to drop in and pay my respects."
"Humph! that's neighborly. They've had just two hours to exchange the news of three years; they'll shorely be through by this. Keep right on, son. In five-and-twenty minutes this trail will land you at Jed Hines's door."
"Oh, get out!" Danvers exclaimed.
"Sir, to you?" Carter assumed a wonderful stiffness. "I'll give you good-night."
"Oh, here!" the youth called after him. "I didn't mean to doubt you."
Carter rode on.
Ridden by a vivid memory of the jeering Hines, Danvers became desperate. "Oh, Carter! Say, don't get mad! Do tell a fellow! How shall I get there?"
Carter reined in. "Where? To Hines's? Keep right along."
"N-o! Morrill's?"
"Oh, let me see. One—two—three—take the third fork to the left and second to the right; that ought to bring you—to your own door," he finished, as he listened to the departing hoof-beats. "That is, if you follow directions, which ain't likely. Anyway," he philosophically concluded, "you ain't agoing to bother that girl much to-night."
Spurring Shyster, he galloped on, and in ten minutes caught Murchison, an Englishman of the yeoman class, out at his stables. Receiving a hearty affirmative, rounded out with full-mouthed English "damns," in answer to his question, he declined Murchison's invitation to "put in," and rode on—rode from homestead to homestead, asking always the same question, receiving always the same answer. Remittance-men, Scotch Canadians, Seebach, the solitary German settler, alike listened, laughed, and fell in with the plan as Flynn had done. He covered many miles and the moon caught him on trail before he permitted the last man to carry his cold legs back to bed. It was long past midnight when he unsaddled at Morrill's stable.
Softly closing the door on his tired beast, he stood gazing at the house. Far-off in the woods a night-owl hooted, a bittern boomed on the lake shore, the still air pulsed to the howl of a timber-wolf. Though born of the plains, its moods had never palled upon him. Usually he had been stirred. But now he had no ears for the night nor eyes for the lake chased in rippled silver. He listened, listened, as though his strained hearing would drag the girl's soft sleep breathing from the house's jealous embrace. Soon he leaned back against the door musing; and when, having inspected the cabin from one side, the moon sailed over and looked down on the other, he was still there.
As the first quivering flushes shot through the grays of dawn Bender came out of his cabin. He intended to be at work on Merrill's big slough at sunrise. But as he rammed home the sickle into its place in the mower-bar a projecting rivet caused it to buckle and break. That spelled another journey to the blacksmith's, and the sun stood at noon before the sickle was in place. Falling to oiling with savage earnestness, that an ancient Briton might have exhibited in greasing his scythe-armed war-chariot, Bender then stuffed bread and meat into his jumper, hitched, and drove off north, looking for all the world like a grisly pirate afloat on a yellow sea.
Half an hour's easy jogging would carry him to Merrill's big slough, but on the way he had to pass two smaller ones. The first, which had a hundred-yard belt of six-foot hay ringing its sedgy centre, tempted him sorely, yet he refrained, having in mind a bigger prey. At the next he reined in, and stared at a dozen cut swaths and a mower with feeding horses tied to its wheels.
It was Molyneux's mower, and to Bender its presence could only mean that the settlement was rushing the sick man's sloughs. "Invasion of the British!" he yelled. "What 'll Carter say to this? Remember Yorktown!"
He was still laughing when a buck-board came rattling up the trail behind him. It was Hines.
"Cut that slough yet?" he asked.
"Just going there," Bender answered; then gave the reason of his delay, garnished with furious anathema on the maker of sickles. "But ain't that a joke?" he said, indicating Molyneux's mower.
Hines whinnied his satisfaction. "Didn't think it was in the Britisher. But my! won't that gall the long-geared son of a gun of a Yank? Drive on an' I'll follow up an' see you started—mebbe see some of the fun," he added to himself, "if Carter's there."
Quarter of an hour brought them to the big slough, which, on this side, was ringed so thickly with willow-scrub that neither could see it till they reined on its edge. Both stared blankly. When Hines went by that morning a mile of solid hay had bowed in sunlit waves before the breeze. Save a strip some twenty yards wide down the centre, it now lay in flat green swaths, while along the strip a dozen feeding teams were tied to as many mowers.
"A bee, by G—!" Bender swore.
"Hell!" Hines snarled even in his swearing. "Bilked, by the Almighty!"
For a moment they stood, staring from the slough to each other, the lumberman red, angry, foolish, Hines the personification of venomous chagrin. Presently his rage urged him to a great foolishness.
"You an' your casting!" he sneered. "Scairt, you was—plumb scairt!"
Astonishment, the astonishment with which a bull might regard the attack of an impertinent fly, obliterated for one moment all other expression from Bender's face. Then, roaring his furious anger, he sprang from his mower.
Realizing his mistake, Hines had already lashed his ponies, but even then they barely jerked the buck-board tail from under the huge, clutching fingers. Foaming with passion, Bender gave chase for a score of yards, then stopped and shook his great fist, pouring out invective.
"To-morrow," he roared, "I'll come over and cut on you."
"What's the matter? You seem all het up?" Carter's quiet voice gave Bender first notice of the buckboard that had come quietly upon him from the grassy prairie. With Carter were Flynn, Seebach, and two others. Not very far away a wagon was bringing others back from dinner.
"We're all giving Morrill a day's cutting," Carter went on, with a quiet twinkle. "I called at your place this morning with a bid, but you was away. We're right glad to see you. Who told you?"
Gradually a grin wiped out Bender's choler. "You're damn smart," he rumbled. "Well—where shall I begin?"
V
JENNY
Thus did the bolt which Hines forged for Carter prove a boomerang and recoil upon himself. For next morning Bender started his mower on a particularly fine slough which Hines had left to the last because of its wetness. Moreover, Hines had ten tons of cut hay bleaching near by in the sun and dare not try to rake it.
It was oppressively hot the morning that Bender hitched to rake the stolen slough; fleecy thunder-heads were slowly heaving up from behind the swart spruce forest.
"'Twon't be worth cow-feed if it ain't raked to-day," the giant remarked, as he overlooked his enemy's hay. Then his satisfaction gave place to sudden anger—a rake was at work on Hines's hay less than a quarter-mile away.
"Hain't seen me, I reckon," Bender growled. Leaving his own rake, he crouched in a gully, skulked along the low land, gained a willow thicket, and sprang out just as the rake came clicking by.
"Now I've got you!" he roared. Then his hands dropped. He stood staring at a thin slip of a girl, who returned his gaze with dull, tired eyes. It was Jenny Hines, Jed's only child.
"Well," Bender growled, "what d' you reckon you're doing?"
"Raking." Her voice was listless as her look. Just eleven when her mother died, her small shoulders had borne the weight of Jed's housekeeping. Heavy choring had robbed her youth, and left her, at eighteen, nothing but a faded shadow of a possible prettiness.
Bender coughed, shuffled. "Where's your dad?"
"Up at the house. He allowed you wouldn't tech me. But," she added, dully, "I'd liefer you killed me than not."
Bender's anger had already passed. Rough pity now took its place. His furious strength prevented him from realizing the killing drudgery, the lugging of heavy water-buckets, the milking, feeding of pigs, the hard labor which had killed her spirit and left this utter hopelessness; but he knew by experience that a young horse should not be put to a heavy draw, and here was a violation of the precept. Bender was puzzled. Had he come on a neighbor maltreating a horse, a curse backed by his heavy fist would have righted the wrong; but this frail creature's humanity placed her wrongs outside his rough remedial practice.
He whistled, swore softly, and, failing to invoke inspiration by these characteristic methods, he said, kindly: "Well, for onct Jed tol' the truth. Must have strained him some. Go ahead, I ain't agoing to bother you."
Having finished raking his own hay, he fell to work with the fork, stabbing huge bunches, throwing them right and left, striving to work off the pain at his heart. But pity grew with exertion, and, pausing midway of the morning, he saw that she also was plying a weary fork.
"You need a rest," he growled five minutes later. "Sit down."
She glanced up at the ominous sky. "Can't. Rain's coming right on."
Lifting her bodily, he placed her in a nest of hay. "Now you stay right there. I'm running this."
Picking up her fork, he put forth all his magnificent strength while she sat listlessly watching. It seemed as though nothing could banish her chronic weariness, her ineffable lassitude. Once, indeed, she remarked, "My, but you're strong!" but voice and words lacked animation. She added the remarkable climax, "Pa says you are a devil."
"Yes?" he questioned. "An' you bet he's right, gal. Keep a right smart distance from men like me."
"Oh, I don't know," she slowly answered. "I'd liefer be a devil. Angels is tiresome. Pa's always talking about them. He's a heap religious—in spells."
Pausing in his forking, Bender stared down on the small heretic. Vestigial traces of religious belief occupied a lower strata of his savage soul. Crude they were, anthropomorphic, barely higher than superstitions, yet they were there, and chief among them was an idea that has appealed to the most cultured of men—that woman is incomplete, nay, lost, without religion.
"Shore, child!" he protested. "Little gals shouldn't talk so. That ain't the way to get to heaven."
"D' you allow to go there?" she demanded, with disconcerting suddenness.
Bender grimaced, laughed at the ludicrousness of the question. "Don't allow as I'd be comfortable. Anyway, lumbermen go to t'other place. But that don't alter your case. Gals all go to heaven."
"Well!" For the first time she displayed some animation. "I ain't! Pa's talked me sick of it. I allow it's them golden streets he's after. He'd coin 'em into dollars."
Seeing that Hines had not hesitated in minting this, his flesh and blood, Bender thought it very likely, and feeling his inability to cope with such reasonable heresies he attacked the hay instead. Having small skill in women—the few of his intimate experience being as free of feminine complexities as they were of virtue—he was sorely puzzled. Looking backward, he remembered his own pious mother. Hines's wife had died whispering of religion's consolations; yet here was the daughter turning a determined back on the source of the mother's comfort. It was unnatural to his scheme of things, contrary to the law of his vestigial piety. He would try again! But when, the hay finished, he came back to her, he quailed before her pale hopelessness; it called God in question.
Limbering up her rake, he watched her drive away, a small, thin figure, woful speck of life under a vast gray sky. For twisting cloud masses had blotted out the sun, a chill wind snatched the tops from the hay-cocks as fast as Bender coiled them, blots of water splashed the dust before he finished his task.
Black care rode home with him; and as that night the thunder split over his cabin, he saw Jenny's eyes mirrored on the wet, black pane, and it was borne dimly upon him that something besides overwork was responsible for their haunting.
Bender had a friend, a man of his own ilk, with whom he had hit camp and log-drive for these last ten years. At birth it is supposable that the friend inherited a name, but in the camps he was known only as the "Cougar." A silent man, broad, deep-lunged, fierce-eyed, nature had laid his lines for great height, then bent him in a perpetual crouch. He always seemed gathering for a spring, which, combined with tigerish courage, had gained him his name. Inseparable, if Bender appeared on the Mattawa for the spring drive, it was known that the Cougar might be shortly expected. If the Cougar stole into a Rocky Mountain camp, a bunk was immediately reserved for his big affinity. Only a bottle of whiskey and two days' delay on the Cougar's part had prevented them from settling up the same section. However, though five miles lay between their respective homesteads, never a Sunday passed without one man riding over to see the other, and it was returning from such a visit that Bender next fell in with Jenny Hines.
It was night and late, but as Bender rode by the forks where Hines's private road joined on to the Lone Tree trail, a new moon gave sufficient light for him to see a whitish object lying in the grass. He judged it a grain-sack till a convulsion shook it and a sob rose to his ears.
"Good land, girl!" he ejaculated, when, a moment later, Jenny's pale face turned up to his, "what are you doing here?"
"He's turned me out."
"Who?"
"Jed." The absence of the parental title spoke volumes—of love killed by slow starvation, cold sternness, of youth enslaved to authority without mitigation of fatherly tenderness.
Without understanding, Bender felt. "What for?" he demanded.
Crowding against his stirrup, she remained silent, and the touch of her body against his leg, the mute appeal of the contact, sent a flame of righteous passion through Bender's big body. Indecision had never been among his faults. Stooping, he raised her to the saddle before him, and as she settled in against his broad breast a wave of tenderness flowed after the flame.
"No, no!" she begged, when he turned in on Jed's trail. "I won't go back!" And he felt her violently trembling as he soothed and coaxed. She tried to slip from his arms as they approached the cabin, and her terror filled him with such anger that his kick almost stove in the door.
"It's me!" he roared, answering Hines's challenge. "Bender! I came on your gal lying out on the prairies. Open an' take her in!"
In response the window raised an inch; the moonlight glinted on a rifle-barrel. "Kick the door ag'in!" Jed's voice snarled, "an' I'll bore you. Git! the pair of ye!"
"Come, come, Jed." For her sake Bender mastered his anger. "Come, this ain't right. Let her in an' we'll call it by-gones."
"No, no!" the girl protested.
Though she had whispered, Jed heard, and her protest touched off his furious wolfish passion. "Git! Won't you git!" he screeched, following the command with a stream of screamed imprecations, vile abuse.
If alone Bender would have beaten in the door, but there was no mistaking Hines's deadly intent. Warned by the click of a cocking hammer, he swung Jenny in front again, galloped out of range; then, uncertain what to do, he gave his beast its head, and half an hour later brought up at his own door.
"There, sis," he said, as he lit his lamp, "make yourself happy while I stable Billy. Then I'll cook up some grub, an' while we're eating we can talk over things."
She smiled wanly yet gratefully. But when he returned she was rocking back and forth and moaning.
"Don't take on so," he comforted. "To-night I'll sleep in the stable; at daybreak we'll hit south for Mother Flynn's." But the moans followed in quick succession, beaded sweat started on her brow, and as she swung forward he saw that which, two hours before, had turned Jed Hines into a foaming beast.
"Oh, my God!" The exclamation burst from him. "You pore little thing! you pore little child! Only a baby yourself!"
Stooping, he lifted her into his bed, tucked her in, then stood, doubtful, troubled, looking down upon her. Two-thirds of the settlers in Silver Creek were of Scotch descent; were deeply dyed with the granite hardness, harsh malignancy, fervid bigotry which have caused the history of their race to be written in characters of blood. Fiercely moral, dogmatically religious, she could expect no mercy at their hands. Hard-featured women, whose angular unloveliness had efficiently safeguarded their own virtue, would hate her the more because her fault had been beyond their compass. Looking forward, Bender saw the poor little body a passive centre for a whorl of spite, jealousy, virulent spleen, and the rough heart of him was mightily troubled. In all Silver Creek, Mrs. Flynn was the only woman to whom he felt he might safely turn. But Flynn's farm lay eighteen miles to the south—too far; the child was in imminent labor. What should he do?
"Jenny," he said, "any women folk been to your house lately?"
When she answered that they had been without a visitor for three months, Bender nodded his satisfaction. "Lie still, child," he said. "I'll be back right smart."
He was not gone long—just long enough to drive over to and back from Carter's. "I'm not trusting any of the women hereabouts," he told Carter. "Though it ain't generally known, the Cougar was married once. The same Indians that did up Custer cleaned up his wife and family. An' as he always lived a thousand miles from a doctor, he knows all about sech things. So if you'll drive like all hell for him, I'll tend to the little gal."
And Carter drove. In one hour he brought the Cougar, but even in that short time a wonderful transformation was wrought in that rough cabin under Bender's sympathetic eyes. From the travail of the suffering girl was born a woman—but not a mother. For of the essence of life Jenny had not sufficient to endow the child of her labor. The spark flickered down in herself, sank, till the Cougar, roughest yet gentlest of nurses, sweated with apprehension.
"It's death or a doctor," he told Carter, hiding his emotion under a surly growl. "Now show what them ponies are good for."
And that night those small fiends did "show what they were good for";—made a record that stood for many a year. Roused from his beauty-sleep, Flynn caught the whir of hot wheels and wondered who was sick. It was yet black night when Carter called Father Francis, the silent mission priest, from his bed. By lantern-light they two, layman and priest, spelled each other with pick and shovel in the mission acre, and when the last spadeful dropped on the small grave, Carter flew on. At cock-crow he pulled into Lone Tree, sixty miles in six hours, without counting the stop at the mission.
"I doubt I've killed you," he murmured, as the ponies stood before the doctor's door, "but it just had to be done."
The doctor himself answered the knock. A heavy man, grizzled, gray-eyed, sun and wind had burned his face to leather, for his days and nights were spent on trail, pursuing a practice that was only limited by the endurance of horse-flesh. From the ranges incurably vicious broncos were sent to his stables, devils in brute form. He used seven teams; yet the toughest wore out in a year. Day or night, winter or summer, a hundred in the shade or sixty below, he might be seen pounding them along the trails. Even now he had just come in from the Pipe Stone, sixty miles southwest, but he instantly routed out his man.
"Hitch the buckskins, Bill," he said, "and let him run yours round to the stables, Carter. He'll turn 'em out prancing by the time we're back."
It took Bill, the doctor, and Carter to get the buckskins clear of town, but once out the doctor handed the lines to Carter. "Now let 'em run." Then he fell asleep.
He woke as they passed the mission, exchanged words with the priest, and dozed again till Carter reined in at Bender's door. Then, shedding sleep as a dog shakes off water, he entered, clear-eyed, into the battle with death.
It was night when he came out to Bender and Carter, sprawled on the hay in the stable.
"She'll live," he answered the lumberman's look, "but she must have woman's nursing. Who's to be? Mrs. Flynn?" He shook his head. "A good woman, but—she has her sex's weakness—damned long-tongued."
Bender looked troubled. "There ain't a soul knows it—yet."
The doctor nodded. "Yes, yes, but I doubt whether you can keep it, boys."
"I think," Carter said, slowly, "that if it was rightly put Miss Morrill might—"
"That sweet-faced girl?" The doctor's gray eyes lit with approval, and the cloud swept back from Bender's rugged face.
"If she only would!" the giant stammered, "I'd—" He cast about for a fitting recompense, and finding none worth, finished, "There ain't a damn thing I wouldn't do for her."
The doctor took doubt by the ears. "Well, hitch and let's see."
Realizing that the girl would probably have her fair share of the prejudice, he opened his case very gently an hour later. But he might have saved his diplomacy.
"Of course!" she exclaimed, as soon as she grasped the facts. "Poor little thing! I'll go right over with Mr. Bender.
"And remember," the doctor said, finishing his instructions, "she needs mothering more than medicine."
So, satisfied, he and Carter hit the back trail, but not till he had examined Morrill with stethoscope and tapping finger. "Must have some excuse for my trip," he said, "and you'll have to serve. So don't be scared if you happen to hear that you have had another hemorrhage. Good! Good!" he exclaimed at every tap, but once on trail he shook his head. "May go in a month; can't last six. Be prepared."
A fiery sunset was staining the western sky when, on his way back from Lone Tree, Carter stopped at Bender's door. The glow tinged the furious cloud that rose from the Cougar's pipe.
"Doing well," he laconically answered. "Never saw a gal pull round better from a fainting spell."
Nodding comprehension, Carter mentioned a doubt that had nettled him on the trail. "Jed? Do you think he'll—"
Sudden ferocity flamed up in the Cougar's face. "I tended to him this morning," he said, slowly, ominously. "He's persuaded as he mistook the girl's symptoms. Anyway, he ain't agoing to foul his own nest so long as no one knows."
"Wants her back, I suppose?"
The Cougar nodded. "She's worth more to him than his best ox-team. But he ain't agoing to get her. Don't go! Miss Morrill's inside an' wants to run over home for some things. Fine gal that." The Cougar's set fierceness of face almost thawed as he delivered his opinion.
Driving homeward, Helen opened the subject just where the Cougar had left it. "She won't go back to her father," she said, "and I don't blame her. But she can't stay here."
However, Jenny's future was already provided. "You needn't to worry," Carter said. "The doctor's fixed things. He and his wife have neither chick nor child of their own; they'll take her in."
The girl exclaimed her surprised gladness. To her, indeed, the entire incident was a revelation. Here three rough frontiersmen had banded successfully together to protect a wronged child and keep her within their rough social pale. Through all they had exhibited a tact and delicacy not always found in finer social stratas, and the lesson went far in modifying certain caste ideas—would have gone farther could she have known the fulness of their delicacy.
Only once was the cause of Jenny's illness ever hinted at among the three; that when Carter and Bender lay waiting for the doctor in the stable.
"You don't happen to have made a guess at the man?" Carter had asked.
"She hain't mentioned him," the giant answered, a little stiffly.
But he thawed when Carter answered: "You'll pardon me. I was just wondering if a rope might help her case."
Bender had shaken his head. "Las' year, you'll remember, one of Molyneux's remittance-men uster drive her out while Jed had her hired out to Leslie's. But he's gone back to England."
Also Helen had learned to look beneath Bender's scarred surface. Every day, while Jenny lay in his shanty, he would slip in between loads of hay to see her. At first the presence of so much femininity embarrassed him. One petticoat hanging on the wall while another floats over the floor is enough to upset any bachelor. Only when sitting with Jenny did he find his tongue; then, giant of the camps, he prattled like a school-boy, freeing thoughts and feelings that had been imprisoned through all his savage years. It was singularly strange, too, to see how Jenny reciprocated his feelings. She liked Helen, but all of her petting could not bring the smile that came for Bender, in whom she sensed a kindred shy simplicity.
Helen was to get yet one other light from these unpromising surfaces, a light bright as those of Scripture which are said to shine as lamps to the feet. A few days after Jenny's departure Bender rode up to the door where Carter sat talking with Morrill.
"Got any stock to sell?" he inquired. "Cows in calf?"
"Going in for butter-making?" Carter inquired, grinning.
"Nope!" The giant laughed. "'Tain't for myself I'm asking. I'm a lumberman born an' bred; the camps draw me like salt-licks pull the deer. I'd never have time to look after them. Farming's play with me. On'y I was thinking as it wouldn't be so bad if that little gal had a head or two of her own growing inter money. You kin let 'em run with your band summers, an' I'll put up winter hay for them an' the increase. How are you, miss?" He nodded as Helen came to the door.
It was her first experience in such free giving, and she was astonished to see how devoid his manner was of philanthropic consciousness. Plainly he regarded the whole affair as very ordinary business. Carter's answer accentuated the novel impression—"What's the matter with me contributing them heifers?"
"Da—beg pardon, miss." Bender blushed. "No you don't. This is my funeral. But I'm no hawg. Now if you wanter throw in a couple of calves—"
Thus, without deed, oath, or mortgage, but with a certainty that none of these forms could afford, did little Jenny Hines become a young lady of property. The matter disposed of, Bender called Carter off to the stable, where, after many mysterious fumblings, he produced from a package a gorgeous silk kerchief of rainbow hues.
"You'll give Miss Morrill this?"
But Carter balked, grinning. "Lordy, man; do your own courting."
"Say!" the giant ejaculated, shocked. "You don't reckon she'd take it that way?"
Carter judiciously considered the question, and after mature deliberation replied: "I've seen breach-of-promise suits swing on less. But I reckon you're safe enough—if you explain your motive."
The giant sighed his relief. "Did you ever give a gal anything, Carter?"
"Did I? Enough to stock a farm if 'twas collected."
"How'd you go about it?"
"Why, jes' give it to her. You're bigger'n she is; kain't hurt you."
"Oh, Lordy, I don't know." Bender sighed again. "It's surprising what them small things kin do to you. Say, there's a good feller. You take it in?"
But Carter sternly refused, and five minutes later Bender might have been seen, stern and rigid from the desperate nature of his enterprise, sitting on one of Helen's soap-boxes. In the hour he talked with Morrill, he never once relaxed a death-grip on his hat. His eye never once strayed towards Helen, and it was late that evening when she found the kerchief under his box.
It speaks well for her that she did not laugh at its gorgeous colors; and her smile as she scribbled a little note of thanks that was delivered by Carter was far too tender for ridicule. Truly she was learning.