Читать книгу Cattle - Onoto Watanna - Страница 6

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More than a year had passed since that day in March when Nettie, the doctor and Cyril Stanley had driven along the trail to the cabin on the C. P. R. quarter. Slowly but surely, the place had changed. The sturdy log house that had grown into being represented the efficient labor of young Cyril Stanley's hands. He had built it in the "lay-off time" he had taken that summer. Slowly the holes for the fence posts were going into the ground around the entire quarter. Soon the "home" would be ready for the radiant Nettie, and in a few more months Cyril would leave the Bar Q, with savings enough to give him and Nettie a fair start in life.

Things had moved also upon the quarter section of C. P. R. land where lived in defiant solitude the woman who had resented and fought the help forced upon her by the gruff Scotch doctor and Nettie Day.

Her name, it seemed, was Angella Loring, but some wag had named her "Mr." Loring, because of her clipped hair and her workingman's attire, and this name had stuck, though Nettie Day called her "Angel."

Her appearance in Yankee Valley had caused the usual sensation always created by a strange newcomer. There had been the usual wagging of heads and tongues, and tapping of foreheads. The woman was a "bug," the farm people of Yankee Valley had decided. At all events, she was the kind of "bug" they found it prudent to keep at a safe distance. She had met all overtures of friendship with hostility and contempt. She was on her own land; she desired no commerce with her neighbors; and needed no help. It was nobody's business but her own why she chose to dress and live as she did. That was the substance of her replies to those who ventured to call upon her, and when some jocular fellows, intent on being smart, pressed their company upon her, she demonstrated her ability to shoot straight—at their feet, so that for a time a joke ran around the country about the number of young "bucks" who limped, and for a time the jeering taunt, "Mr. Loring'll git you if you don't watch out," was often heard. Thus she became a sort of bugaboo in the popular imagination, but as time passed the country grew accustomed to its woman hermit and gave her the wide berth she asked for.

She broke her own land and put in her own crop, inadequately it is true, but with a certain persistence and intensity which at first amused, then slowly won the grudging respect and wonder of her neighbors. She had few implements, and those the antiquated affairs used by Dr. McDermott when first he had homesteaded in Alberta. Her horses were poor, scrub stock, palmed off upon her by Bull Langdon, who sent them down with the proposition that she could have the four head in exchange for her services on the Bar Q cook car over the harvesting period on his grain ranch. Cooks were rare and precious in those years when not even a Chinaman was to be had for love or money. The woman hermit considered the terms for a moment, and then, to the surprise of the grinning "hand" who had brought both the horses and the proposition, she accepted it.

She understood horses well enough, but not the kind used in Alberta for farming purposes. Her acquaintance had been with the English saddle horses. How should she know the type of draught horse necessary for the plow, the disc, the harrow and the seeder? So she harnessed up the poor stock advanced her by the Bull, obtained her seed by application to the Municipality, and her crop went in. Cutworms ate it to the ground before it had shown fairly above the soil.

Grimly and without altering her air of inimical aloofness, she went to the Bar Q ranch, and over the harvest period cooked for thirty or forty men. Throughout that time she dealt with the crew in absolute silence, cooking and dishing up the "grub" and passing it out to them without a word. She had never been known to address a voluntary sentence or question to a soul on the place, with the single exception of the half-breed Jake, who did her chores and wiped the dishes for her. When Mrs. Langdon made overtures of friendship to her, she curtly told her that she would "quit" if she were "interfered" with; she was in charge of the cook car and was to be let alone.

In the fall she broke more land, and in winter she shut herself in her shack, and no one, save Dr. McDermott who persisted in calling upon her on his monthly rounds, saw her again till the spring, when she put in a larger crop than the year before.

However, time allays even if it does not satisfy the hungriest curiosity, and in a country like Alberta, even in the present day, we do not scrutinize too closely the history or the past of the stranger in our midst. Alberta is, in a way, a land of sanctuary, and upon its rough bosom the derelicts of the world, the fugitive, the hunted, the sick and the dying have sought asylum and cure. The advent of a newcomer, however suspicious or strange, causes only a seven days' wonder and stir. Human nature is, of course, the same the world over, and in the wake of curiosity, surmise, invention, slander reach forth their filthy fingers to bespatter the lives of those we do not know. Fortunately, however, curiosity is an evanescent quality in the ranching country, partly for reasons of time and distance. We cannot shout our gossip of a neighbor across hundreds of miles of territory, and he who toils upon the land from sunrise until sunset has no leisure to hustle from door to door with evil tales.

Nevertheless, there was one man in Alberta who knew something of the history of this strange woman's past, even if he did not understand why she had sought this strange isolation from her fellowmen.

She had failed to recognize in the country doctor who stubbornly forced his society upon her, the stable lad who twenty-five years before her father had sent away to college in Glasgow.

Dr. McDermott was one of Alberta's pioneer workers. When settlers followed upon the heels of the missionary and the C. P. R., and planted their homesteads on the big raw land, Dr. McDermott was there to care for and scold and direct them. He had attended his patients all over the country, traveling in those days by any and all kinds of primitive vehicle, on horseback, by ox wagon, by dog sled, and often on foot, before the roads were staked, when there were no lines of barbed wire fencing to mark the trail, and when a blizzard meant possible blindness and death. He had gone to remote places to bring babies into the world, not only gave medical aid to the mother but looked after the whole household. He knew Alberta as a child knows his mother—knew that this "last of the big lands," as they called it, was for those only who were capable of seizing life with strong, eager hands. It was no place for the weakling, or the feeble of heart, for Alberta was the Land of Romance, the Land of Heartbreak, cruel and tender, remorseless and kind.

Free and independent by nature, it seemed incredible that the doctor should have come of a race of servitors, men who for several generations had served a single family, as groom and servant, and always he experienced a deep sense of gratitude to the man who had picked him out from amongst the humble McDermotts and given him the opportunity for an education. He had worked with the purpose of justifying by his achievements his master's faith in his abilities, and it had been a proud day for Angus McDermott when, cleared of all encumbrances, free of mortgages and taxes paid to date, his land broken and his rugged cabin planted upon it, he had deeded the beloved quarter section back to the man who had paid for his education.

Now after the passage of the years, the daughter of his former master had come to that bit of Alberta soil, seeking in her turn to wrest a living from the land, fighting a desperate fight with poverty, disease and the blows and buffets of the wild new land which "makes or breaks" a man.

As he rode along the rough roads, chirping absently to the old geldings that plugged slowly along, the doctor's mind persistently traveled back to a sunny day in June in the old land. He was a barefooted boy in a large stable yard. A little girl was there—a very little girl, with thick, brown, curly hair, crushed under a Derby hat, and she was leaning over from her seat on her pony's back to coax—to command favors of the stable boy. She wished to ride Spitfire. Angus was not to tell "Pop," which was her inelegant term for the Earl of Loring. He was to bring the animal around to the far end of the south garden that evening, and she would be there under the bushes. He was not to forget, mind! He'd be sorry if he did.

He did not forget. He kept the tryst with the daughter of the earl, but he brought not the forbidden horse. He well recalled the furious, passionate little figure that crawled from out the bush and assailed him with bitter reproach and blows. Mechanically, Dr. McDermott's hand went up to the cheek where her crop had flashed, and he was moved afresh by the memory of the child's wild imploring voice, begging forgiveness, the touch of the small impetuous hand upon his hurt face, and the soft smudge of her tear—drenched face against his own.

Twenty-five years ago! He rode on and on through the Alberta sunshine, his wide Stetson tilted above a rugged face, whose chief charm lay in the sturdy honesty of its expression.