Robert J. C. Stead

“ I awakened with a consciousness that the shack was very, very cold. Under the blankets I was warm enough, but the breath with which I filled my lungs was the breath of the Arctic. The cabin was in inky darkness. Outside, the whine of the gale had risen to a roar, and the frail timbers of the little shanty creaked and trembled under its fury. I thought of Jack, and wondered. The telephone—best of all God's good gifts through the inventive mind of man to those who live in the isolation of vast distances—was as yet not in general use on the prairies. ”

“ It was Sunday before we heard or saw anything more of Spoof. A hot summer wind was chasing little scurries of dust and billowing our oat field like a lake of turquoise green when suddenly his tall form loomed up on the rough trail which already wriggled across the prairie from Fourteen to Two. He had discarded coat and waist-coat; in a khaki-colored shirt and corduroy breeches and leggings and an Indian helmet which he had dug up from somewhere he was a picturesque and striking figure as he strode into the grateful shade of the shanty. ”

“ Jake took a fresh chew of tobacco and looked out over the greenish-brown prairie. It certainly was a picture to kindle the imagination. Almost as level as a floor, one could have seen a jack-rabbit jump anywhere within a mile. The little gully was quite lost in the vista; you would not dream of its existence until you came right upon it. In no direction was there a sign of life, but far on the horizon a whiff of smoke hung like a fading pennant in the still sky. ”

“ Early the next afternoon we hitched Buck and Bright to the wagon and wended our slow way south-westward, Jack and I taking turns in the exclamatory exercises by means of which the oxen were kept in motion. The prairie now was very brown and bare, and only the more hardy gophers remained about to whistle saucily at our carry-all lumbering by. The dazzling sunshine seemed to have lost its force, and there was a presage of coming winter in the air. We dropped into silence save for the noises of our locomotion.
"The world seems to have died," said Jean after a long period of thoughtfulness. ”

“ What a wonderful place for a few miles of prairie; say for every second section of prairie, like the railway lands in the West! Then came the prairies—a hundred treeless miles at a stretch; sky and grass without limit, a horizon broken only by a settler's shack at great intervals, into the farther West where even the settler's shack failed from view, and one was alone with God and the world. Here was a land where the very posts to mark our checker-board survey had to be shipped in from untold distances. ”

“ When Jean would bring my lunch at four in the afternoon we would sit on the grass in the shade of the wagon at the end of the field and daydream for a moment or two with feathery, fleecy, high-flying clouds of heaven as a background for our fancies. Sometimes great, billowy, boisterous, low-lying masses loomed up in our horizon, level along the bottom like islands floating in a sea of space ”

“ Every hour of sunshine—and no country gives its sunshine more lavishly—was money to the settler, and the settler's life from April to November was a torrent of high-geared energy. I had been too busy even to make love properly to Jean, and when it has been said that a young man is too busy for that all other figures of speech fail. Perhaps that was why my love-making, indifferently done, taking second place to plowing and sowing, reaping and threshing, had ended so disasterously. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Buck and Bright were bawling before they heard my hand on the stable door. An ox with an empty stomach has an uncanny ear for the food purveyor. A half-inch fuzz of new untrodden snow was good evidence that Jack was keeping hours even worse than mine. As I opened the door the oxen turned their big, reproving eyes upon me, while even the cow tossed her head from side to side in peevish protest.
"It's all right, old chaps," I assured them. "Blessed is he whose wants are few and easily satisfied," as I threw them each a forkful of hay. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But it's a dangerous thing to have no past to steady you, to humble you, to inspire. It's just as dangerous to live too much in the future, as we do here, as to live too much in the past, as perhaps we do in England."
"That's why we need some of you people from the Old Land to mix with ours," said Jean. "We need something to link our future with our past—to give us balance, poise."
"Poise is the word, I think," Spoof commented. "New countries have energy, ambition, enthusiasm, courage, optimism—all wonderful qualities—but they are likely to need poise. ”

“ 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 is wonderful how much philosophizing one can accomplish between washing the porridge pot and peeling the potatoes when there is nothing else to be done. Just as the long summer evenings of this great West are already giving the world a race of athletes, so must the long, sombre winter days and nights, with their limitless opportunities for reflection and introspection, breed for the world a new brand of thinking, uncramped by convention and untamed by precedent. That is, if the "advantages" of city life do not crowd in so rapidly that they relieve us of the necessity of thinking. ”

“ With a gentle crunching sound the runners started scraping through the snow; then, as the speed increased, the sound rose to a whine which mingled with the rush of air in our ears and the spray of snow in our faces. Jean's heels were just above the snow surface, and when, as happened once or twice, they dropped too low, they showered us with flying icy crystals. Then, just at the dip, one heel drove in much too deep—too deep to be accidental—the sled trembled, turned sideways, and went over. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He was a young man good to look at; straight and lean, but not too spare; with white teeth that flashed behind lips always ready to spring to a smile beneath a sandy mustache that had more in it of promise than of realization. His hands were small and finely formed, with long, delicate fingers, and he gave his nails a degree of attention not often found among those so close to the realities of life as were we pioneers.
"Have you tried playing to them?" said Jack, harking back to the oxen. "They are said to be very responsive to music." ”

“ 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 had treasured that moment as a bit of wonderful memory, as a glimpse of wonderful promise, but I had not presumed upon it; I had concluded that two months' loneliness had been too much for Jean's reserve, and that she had done something it hardly would be fair to talk about. . . . Doubtless Jack, when he found I had missed him, would be back shortly.
I took my wraps off and sat down beside the stove. The warmth was very pleasant after the buffeting of the snow, and Jean looked very lovely and tempting in the soft glow of the lamp on the table. ”

“ You pay me a thousand times! You have given back to me a purpose in life—an excuse for being alive! Ah, Miss Lane, you do not know—yet—how empty a life can be. But you are an artist, and some day you will dip your brush in pain—perhaps in sorrow and regret—and after that you will paint. It is the law."
Jean told me these things that Sunday afternoon, and asked me if I knew what he meant. I did not; but I knew the artist had given Jean an instant's glimpse into life, and it was none the easier for me to suggest the loneliness of a homestead "somewhere west of Manitoba." ”

“ 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. ”

“ The gulf of loneliness into which I fell on the night of Marjorie's marriage was but the shallow waters of an ocean of despair in which I floundered through the dreary days that followed. I now had occasion to realize that loneliness is not a matter of space or distances, of the many or of the few, but a matter of one's adjustment toward his surroundings. In all the months of my life on Fourteen the devils of loneliness had never wormed into my vitals ”

“ I said. "You're a real shot." I felt I owed him that much for that wallop with the tent peg.
He was nothing loath to take up the rifle, and I began to realize how big a courtesy it was to offer us the first shot. He drew the gun to his shoulder, craned his neck down along the stock, steadied the barrel an instant, and fired. The coyote leaped in the air, fell on his back, kicking and pawing in the wolf willow. We drove over to him, but already his lips had curled back in a death-snarl from his gleaming teeth.
Jake drove on in silence while we meditated upon his amazing marksmanship. ”

“ Sneezit was on the road to independence! The drab curtain of oppression which had hung about the Sneezits since the beginning of their race he had torn in two, and through the rent his grizzled face beheld a world of hope and promise, a world in which he was as good as his neighbour!
As soon after our return from harvesting as our duties permitted it we paid another visit to Mrs. Alton. Sandy saw us afar off and swept down upon us like a tornado. ”

“ The more intelligent the audience, the more may be left to the imagination. You are an intelligent audience, Frank."
Through my absurd concern for, I hardly knew what, her adorable tantalization seethed in me like an electric current. And so selfish am I—and all men—that it was some minutes before I realized that Jean had received a knock-out blow; that she had humiliated herself to this man Spoof; that she had placed her womanhood at his feet, and he had spurned it. Just what it was for me to lose Jean, just that same must it be for Jean to lose Spoof. ”

“ As I came up from the stream I met Jean going down, wearing a blanket, Indian fashion, for lack of a bathrobe. A week on a dusty trail had made the presence of snow water, as deep as one wanted it, a peculiar luxury.
"Gee, but it's good to be alive!" she exclaimed, swinging her arms, to the peril of her costume. "Does one always feel like this on the prairies?"
"Always mildly intoxicated, so Jake says, but those are not his words. That's why Westerners are more optimistic—and more reckless—than Easterners. Always an atmosphere jag under their belts." ”

“ And so we sat in silence and in suffering, with no sound about us except the ticking of the clock and the thumping of our own hearts, until at length Jean arose to rebuild the fire. I took it as my cue to leave.
"Well, what is to be done about it?" I said, trying to speak in a matter-of-fact way, although I could not keep the tremble out of my voice. "We must clear up the situation some way."
"Yes. We will explain, so far as it can be explained, to Jack and Marjorie. We must not interfere with their marriage or their happiness. And Spoof must not know." ”