Читать книгу Little Man - George Herbert Sallans - Страница 12

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Daddy rode the binder, Harold and George stooked. The binder went round and round the field, cutting an eight-foot swath of wheat at a time. The stooker's job was to stand the sheaves of wheat heads up and together, eight or ten to a stock, so that the sun would complete their drying before the threshing.

The god of the harvest had smiled. To the men the god was wheat, golden, shimmering, endless streams of it, the stuff that men dreamed of and prayed for all year. It was the miraculous age of the West. Men who had grubbed for years broke suddenly from their homelands, followed the tide toward the sunset, tore up the ground and became capitalists in no time.

But wheat was only one symbol of those halcyon days. Expansion, inflation and speculation fever were everywhere. Get-rich-quick Wallingford became a symbol of the times. Real estate dealers were personifying him in the explosive, vulgar, mushroom cities of the prairies. Englishmen were coming in by the shipload, fired by the legends that spread across the Atlantic, the weird folk tales that told of men going to bed paupers and waking up millionaires.

A whole Empire had shaken off the placid pace of the nineteenth century. The United States, suddenly halted in its post-Civil War boom, struck a brief dam in the first decade of the twentieth century and then burst through. Canada, bounding along in full pursuit, reached its full momentum a few years behind. Over Europe the sky was clear save for a few clouds on the horizon, that were not yet dark or ominous.

From the Atlantic to the Pacific the flood tide of immigration was on. The trains ran full and clamorous. As they stopped at the stations people surged from them with a kind of frenzy. Promoters from the East, investors, racketeers, liars, builders, preachers, students, they poured across the welcoming plains. The Indians silently backed away into their reservations and watched with disillusioned eyes the white tide of land miners, loan sharks, boomers, gamblers, workers, clerks—all impatiently, frantically in the wake of the Great God Wheat.

A single railway line at the first went through to the Pacific coast. Two others were to follow it, laden with black engines and red freight cars. As fast as men debouched from sight of it the railroad followed with branch lines north and south, searching out their farms to serve them. Grain companies came with the railroads, rushing up their forests of tall red elevators along the sidings. Contractors, merchants, realtors, lawyers, doctors, politicians all spilled out of the gas-lighted coaches almost before they came to a full stop.

The concert of the big steel scraper, the hammer and the saw was unceasing. Towns sprang up like mirages out of the morning mist. Winnipeg, queen city of the plains, was the clearing house for this mighty surge. Its old trading posts in a decade were surrounded and engulfed in the rush of builders. The city sprawled along the Red and Assiniboine rivers and spilled out to the prairies beyond their banks.

A man came West and paid ten dollars to the land registry office, his full payment for a homestead, another ten dollars for an equal space as pre-emption, three hundred and twenty acres in all. He built his shack and installed his family. The railroad came, planted its townsite on his homestead. The land that had cost him twenty dollars was subdivided and sold for millions, its broad acres underlaid with sewers, its surface paved with streets.

The same story was told everywhere. Over toward the foothills of the Rockies a town sprang out of the long range grass amid the lanky ranches. Oil drillers came to tap the ground, and speculators followed them to set up a fantastic oil boom.

In those roaring cities of the West the real estate man was in every other doorway. Men bought lots for $10,000, went next door, sold them for $12,000, and woke up next morning to scratch their heads in frantic disgust because the same lots were being snapped up at $20,000. Most of them hardly dared go to bed lest a bargain slip by that would make them rich for life.

Contractors raced to jerry-built city halls, rushed out with papers stuffed in their pockets, tore up long lines across open fields, laid sewer and water pipes. Others followed them with lumber, bricks, mortar, and threw houses together into which people moved before the plaster was dry.

Charley Battle's cousin, Hartley Mills, came out from the East. He shipped livestock, sold it, took the proceeds to Regina, raised five thousand dollars to a hundred thousand in a month, chugged madly in a monstrous automobile over the hummocky trails to Charley's home, gave Charley a team of horses, gave Harold and George a horse apiece, Jean a piano, sold Charley two lots seven miles out of Regina, took a promissory note in payment, took the whole excited family half a mile down the road for a ride, discovered he had forgotten to fill the leaking radiator, dipped some water out of a slough with his new hat, rushed them all back to the house, tore off for town again at a mad rate of fifteen miles an hour, heedless of badger holes and sudden death, to telegraph a sale order for a downtown site where a department store would soon be built, and jumped on the train for Vancouver. He left the Battles breathless, the boys filled with a frantic longing to see more of him, to follow where he had gone, and to have clothes that smelled of cigars like he had.

George had a vivid memory of a panting, steaming, back-firing monster, covered with nickel from front to back, with the inevitable dummy buggy whip-holder in the dash, and a horn that sent the Battle horses into a panic.

There was an incident in Morocco about that time between England and Germany. George thought nothing of it, neither did anybody else. It started a tremor through the earth that was to reach the West years later and topple the wheat god's world. King Edward VII had taken the matter out of his ministers' hands, earned the disapproval of some and the applause of others, but the ominous tremor travelled on, and is travelling still.

Wilful and wayward, the first decade of the twentieth century rushed headlong on the wings of time and dreams.

Out on the Pacific coast the stately town of Victoria had grown with a disdainful lack of ballyhoo, preserving its English traditions, more English than England. It looked with quiet composure across the Gulf of Georgia at its more robust, more raucous sister city of Vancouver, that sprawled over the Burrard Peninsula where Captain George Vancouver a century before had sailed. Spanish galleons were offshore and there was an argument. George Vancouver, his guns bared and silent, persuaded the Spanish that they should withdraw in peace.

It was a hazy note in George's mind, gleaned from his history books. All he knew was that out there somewhere, beyond the prairie sunset, lay the western sea, the romance of the ships, the thrumming thrill of the iron horse that climbed the mountains and hauled Hartley Mills out of their lives.

The earth was swift and fecund, George knew also. The snow and the rains came in the prone plains, bathing a land that had been parched and burned in the centuries gone by, till the fertile soil forced its exuberant fruits into the sunlight. Spring came with an explosive and vulgar violence. The billowing oceans of snow receded, and, scarcely were they gone when crocuses and anemones were smiling in their banks of yellow and white, and the hibernating gophers were peeping over the headlands of spring.