Читать книгу Cattle - Onoto Watanna - Страница 4

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Although this story chiefly concerns Bull Langdon, we must return at this point to the three humble quarter sections aforementioned, which are the scene of part of its action.

To the first of these the name of ranch or farm could only by courtesy be applied. It was known as the "D. D. D.," the "D's" being short for Dan Day Dump, as a neighboring farmer had once called the place, and the name had stuck to it ever since.

It was on the extreme rocky edge of Yankee Valley, an otherwise prosperous section of the "prairie" country, so named because most of its settlers had hailed originally from the U. S. A.

Dan Day himself had come from the States, but he had found a wife in Canada. They had "fetched up" finally at this sorry "stopping-off place," as they called it then, where first they squatted, and later, with the assistance of neighbors, who knew better than to let shiftless newcomers encroach upon the more fertile lands hard by, they had staked their homestead. There Dan Day had put up the rackety shack and lean-to which had provided shelter of sorts for his growing family and stock, and in that rough environment the Day children had grown up like Indians.

Time had taught the homesteader at least one lesson, which was that he would never squeeze a living out of his barren acres. Day, as his neighbors were wont to declare, shaking disapproving heads, was not cut out to be a farmer. Nevertheless, they grudgingly gave him work, putting up with his inept services chiefly because as a community they waged unrelenting warfare against the stern approach of school authorities, who had begun to query whether the size of the Day family did not warrant the imposition upon the municipality of a new rural school.

Time and growth, however, are things the farmer, most of all men, must reckon with, and even as the crops leaped up tall and strong out of the rich black virgin soil, even as the cattle and the stock flourished and increased until they spread over all the wide pasture lands of Alberta, so the Day progeny shot upward, and seemed, hungrily, to clamor for their place in the world.

There were ten of them. A baby—and there was always a baby in that family—of a few months old, a toddler of two, another of three, another of five, twins of seven, a boy of nine, twins of twelve, and Nettie, the eldest. The mother dying when she was fourteen, the girl found herself faced with the desperate problem of fending and caring for the whole wild and hungry brood of her brothers and sisters.

Nettie was of that blonde type seen often in the northern lands. She was a big girl, with milk-white skin and dead gold hair, a slow-moving, slow-thinking girl, simple-minded and totally ignorant of the world that lay beyond the narrow confines of their homestead land.

School had played no part in the life of Nettie Day. She knew vaguely of the existence of books and papers, things she remembered vaguely as having seen, but she had not been able to read them. She believed that the world contained two kinds of folk, the rich and the poor. The rich lived away off somewhere on big ranches, where the cattle were fat and the grain grew high, though some lived also in the cities. Nettie had heard of cities; her father had come from a small town in Oregon. As for the poor folk, with simple resignation Nettie accepted the fact that to them belonged such as themselves, the Days, for whom life was one unceasing struggle against hunger and cold.

Occasionally a neighboring farmer, riding across the range or bringing home stray cattle, would drop in at the Day homestead and share the meager meal shyly set out by Nettie, and as the years went by and the girl began to unfold in the early blossoming of womanhood the visitor might linger a while longer to stare curiously at this maturing product of the D. D. D. Nettie possessed one true and unfailing friend in the man who had brought her and her nine little brothers and sisters into the world; who came periodically to scold, tease and teach; to clean and work, himself, in an effort to bring some semblance of order into the chaotic confusion that reigned in that shack.

Dr. McDermott, in spite of his twenty years in Canada, was still as stubbornly Scotch as on the day he landed; He was admitted to be the busiest man in the country, his practice extending from the prairie to the mountains. He had brought into the world most of the children born in that part of the country ever since he had planted his rough homestead there. There were other families as helpless as the Days and as dependent upon the "Doc" to scold and instruct them, and it was not often that he found time to talk with Nettie. She would decide in advance the questions she meant to ask him when his monthly visit came round, but being so slow and shy, by the time the doctor had finished his dissatisfied inspection of the family affairs, the questions had all escaped her. But always the warm grip of his hand brought something surging up within her that sought utterance and expression.

"Growing! Growing! Growing!" the Scotch doctor would growl, glaring round at the circle of healthy, grimy faces, "like weeds! like weeds!" Latterly, however, like the neighbors, he had begun to look longer at Nettie, and with puckered brows he would change the word "weed" to "flower." He told her she reminded him of a wild flower, and she liked that—it pleased her that her doctor friend had picked her out, as it were, from the weeds, and her bosom swelled with pride when he appeared one day unexpectedly at the shack and took her with him across the country to help care for a sick woman in a shack on the C. P. R. quarter section which had been Dr. McDermott's own original homestead.

That swift running drive over the road allowances in the doctor's democrat always stood out in her memory as one of the few sweet days in her life.

It was early March, but a "Chinook," the warm wind which has its origin in the Japanese current, had melted the flying snow of a March blizzard; it was as though a miracle had been wrought; the Chinook had sunk deep into the earth and thawed the last bit of frost out of the ground. Streams were running along the roads, the sloughs were filling to the top, the cattle no longer nibbled in the neighborhood of the fenced-in hay and straw stacks, but hit down into the upspringing grass, green already in this wonderful land. Eight-horse teams were pulling plow, disc and harrow out into the fields, preparatory for an early seeding. Overhead a great, warm sun sent its benevolent rays abroad, filling sky and earth with a warm glow; the land was bathed in sunlight. Small marvel that someone had fondly named it: "Sunny Alberta, the Land of Promise."

If Nettie was slow of speech and shy, Dr. McDermott was Scotch and brief. There was that, moreover, on his mind at this time, which dismayed and concerned him deeply. It is not strange, therefore, that as he whipped his horses to their top speed—they were upon an errand that he knew was a matter of life or death—he forgot the girl at his side, looking about her in a sort of trance.

All the world seemed good and bonny to Nettie at this time; life was thrilling. The bumping, rickety old democrat was a luxurious coach, the rough trails and road allowances, full of holes and mud slews, a smooth highway over which she was being borne into a scene that spelled romance.

She had never before had so wonderful a chance of seeing the whole country, across to where, on the horizon, the mighty peaks of the Rocky Mountains held their snowy fronts. The hills always stirred something in Nettie that was vaguely yearning, something that thrilled even while it pained. Though prairie born, and prairie raised, she aspired to the hills, not knowing why, except that the hills seemed to her lifted up, up, up, into the clouds themselves. She had a childlike faith that "something good" would come to her out of the hills. That "something good" she recognized with rapture in the young rider from the great Bar Q who one autumn day had spent a never-to-be-forgotten hour at the D. D. D.

For several days long files of the Bar Q cattle had been trailing down from the hill country. They were being driven from the summer range in the foothills to the grain ranches on the prairie where, in the shelter of the long cattle sheds, or loose in the sunlit pastures where stood the great straw and hay stacks, the mothers of the famous herd were especially housed and nurtured during the winter months, in preparation for the spring crop of calves.

This annual fall movement was an exciting event in the lives of the young Days. The children kept count of every head of cattle that passed along the road, and there was great excitement and glee the following spring, when the herd returned to the foothills, with the pretty, white-faced calves "at heel."

Nettie was no less thrilled than her small brothers and sisters by the advent of the Bar Q cattle, and up to the time of her mother's death she, too, had scrambled with them under and over barbed wire fences, and scampered across pasture lands to reach the road in time to see the cattle pour by. After her mother's death, things changed for Nettie. The babies tied her to the house, and the best she could do was to go as far as the edge of the corrals, a baby tucked under either arm, and toddlers clinging to her skirts. Here, standing upon a rail, she would call across to the flying youngsters her admonitions to be careful.

That fall, however, hankering again to see the great herd from the hills as it passed to the lower lands, Nettie scrubbed the faces of her grimy little brood, arrayed them in clean jumpers made from bleached flour sacks, piled them aboard the old hay wagon, to which "Tick," a brother of thirteen, had already harnessed the team of geldings, and taking up the reins in her competent hands, she started for the trail.

Nettie was a big girl, with the softly maturing figure of a young Juno. She looked more than her fifteen years. Her hair was as gold as the Alberta sun, whose warmth, together with her unwonted excitement, brought a flush to either rounded cheek. Her blue eyes, wide and candid, returned the smiles of the riders, who were visibly impressed by the picture she made driving her wagonload of tow-headed children out into the road. The eyes of the young men brightened; wide hats and flowing ties were adjusted, as they rode on in the sunlight, whistling and singing and whirling loose lariats in their hands. More than one of them made a mental note of the necessity of seeking strayed cattle in the near neighborhood of the D. D. D., and when the last of the herd disappeared down the grade, single horseman rode out of the bush and paused alongside the Day wagon.

His broad face was sunburned, freckled, and ruddy, and wore a wide, friendly smile. He looked very straight out of clear eyes, eyes often seen in western Canada where men are ever gazing out over great distances, eyes that seem to hold the spirit of the outdoors and the freshness of unspoiled youth. The way he swept his large hat from his head and held it over the pommel of his saddle had something in it of unconscious grace and native courtliness, and he looked curiously boyish with his thick crop of brown hair ruffled by the slight wind.

Had anyone in the Day wagon seen a roan heifer? "She" had given him a "sight of trouble." Got into the bush half a mile down the grade, and "hanged if she didn't get plumb out o' sight somewhere in the willows."

No one in the Day wagon had seen a roan heifer; and the inquirer, screwing up his face, and scratching the side of his neck, ruminated in puzzled wonder as to the whereabouts of the missing animal, his eyes resting, meanwhile, upon the lifted, glowing face of the girl in the driver's seat.

While random conjecture and suggestion were being offered by each of the boys and girls, the rider sat up suddenly alert and pointing toward some invisible speck, which he declared was "back of the shack there," he touched spurs to the flanks of his broncho and was off toward the house after the elusive lost one. But when the wagon pulled up into the barnyard, and the children and Nettie scrambled down, and crossed the yard to the house, they found the cowpuncher sitting disconsolately on the step, fanning himself with his great hat. Shaking his head at the shouted queries of the Day boys, as to whether he had found her, he replied:

"Nope. Guess she's flewed the coop. Gosh! but I'm hungry. Guess I'd better hop along and catch up with the bunch, before they bolt all o' the grub."

Which remark, needless to say, brought a clamorous invitation to dinner from the young Days, and after the usual protest at the trouble he'd be making, accompanied by a questioning, rather wistful look toward Nettie, who shyly seconded the children's invitation, he "guessed, well, mebbe I will, though don't go to any trouble for me."

Trouble! Nettie flew about the mean room, her cheeks aflame, her eyes shining, her heart singing like a bird's within her, while the children crowded about their guest, on whom, in his buckskin shirt, fur chapps, gauntlets and cowboy hat, their young prairie eyes gazed as upon a hero.

It may, moreover, be recorded that Nettie was by no means the only one through whose veins an exhilarating elixir seemed to be bounding like champagne. Young Cyril Stanley at that moment was violently aware of a thumping organ to the left of his cardiac region.

Love knows not time. It wells up in the human heart like the wave of the ocean that may not be beaten down. Nettie Day, hurrying about the kitchen, preparing a meal for the hungry stranger, and the stranger, with a "kid" on either knee and the others pressed as closely to him as space would allow, displaying his big jackknife, quirt, beaded hatband and ticking watch to the delighted youngsters, looked at each other across the space of that poor and meager room, it seemed, though they could not have expressed it in words, that somehow life had become a poem, a glad dancing song.