Читать книгу His Royal Nibs - Onoto Watanna - Страница 6

Table of Contents

At this time, P. D. McPherson held the title of Champion Chess Player of Western Canada. He was, however, by no means proud or satisfied with this honourable title to chess fame.

Western Canada! One could count on the fingers of one hand the number of real players in the whole of the west. P. D. had played with them all. He considered it child’s play to have beaten them. P. D. had issued a challenge not merely to the eastern holders of the title, but across the line, where went his bid to contest the world’s title with the Yankee holders of the same.

P. D. dreamed and brooded over the day when he would win in an international tournament that would include the chess players of all the nations of the world. Meanwhile, it behooved him to keep in practice, so that his skill and craft should abate by not a jot or a tittle.

He had taught his young son and daughter this noble game. Though good players, they had inherited neither their parent’s craft nor passion for it. Indeed, they had reason to fear and dislike chess as a veritable enemy. Many a ranch or barn dance, many a gymkhana, rodeo, stampede and Indian race; many a trip to Calgary or Banff had been wiped off Hilda’s pleasure slate, as punishment for a careless move or inattention when the ancient game was in progress. Many a night the bitter-hearted Sandy had departed early, supperless, to bed, because of a boyish trick of wriggling while his father debated in long-drawn-out study and thought the desirability of such and such a move.

Hilda and Sandy loved their father; yet his departure upon a scouting expedition on the trail of a prospective chess player filled them always with a sense of unholy elation and ecstatic freedom.

P. D.’s good or bad humour upon his return to the ranch depended entirely upon the success or failure of his quest. If success crowned his pursuit, and his cravings were satisfied, P. D. returned, beaming with good will upon the world in general and the inhabitants of O Bar O in particular. On the other hand, should such excursions have proven fruitless, the old monomaniac came back to his ranch in uncertain and irascible humour. All hands upon the place then found it expedient and wise to give him a wide berth, while his unfortunate son and daughter were reduced to desperate extremities to escape his especial notice and wrath.

It should not be inferred from the foregoing that P. D. necessarily neglected his ranching interests. Chess was a periodic malady with him. The ranch was a permanent institution. O Bar O was the show-place of the foothills and a matter of pride to the country. The smoothest of beef, grass-fed steers, topped the market each year, when they went forth from the ranch not merely to the local stockyards, but to Kansas City, Montreal, St. Louis, and Chicago, in the latter place to compete with success with the corn-feds of the U. S. A.

At the fairs, over the country, O Bar O stock carried a majority of the ribbons, and “Torchy,” a slim, black streak of lightning and fire, brought undying fame to its owner by going over the bar of the annual horse-show of Calgary, with Hilda upon his back, the highest peak ever attained by a horse in Canada.

A berth at O Bar O was coveted by all the riders and cowpunchers of the country. The fame of the fine old ranch had crossed the line, in fact, and had brought to the ranch some of the best of the bronco busters and riders. The outfit could not, in fact, be beaten. The food was of the best; the bunkhouses modern and clean; the work done in season and in a rational number of hours per day; the wages were fair; first-class stock to care for; a square foreman, and a bully boss. What more could a man wish upon a cattle ranch? Pride permeated to every man-Jack upon the place. Each sought to stand well in the eyes of P. D., and his praise was a coveted thing, while his anger was something to escape, and unlikely to be forgotten.

P. D.’s praise took the form of a resounding, smashing clap upon the shoulder, a prized assignment, and a bonus at the end of the month. His anger took the form of an ungodly and most extraordinary string of blistering and original curses, words being cut in half to slip curses midway between as the torrent poured from the wrathful P. D.

It may be mentioned in passing that P. D.’s son and his daughter had inherited and were developing a quaint vocabulary of typical O Bar O “cusses,” much to their father’s amazement and indignation. Indeed, the first time P. D.’s attention was directed toward this talent of his daughter—her voice was raised in shrill damning speech toward a squawking hen who desired to sit upon a nest of eggs destined for the house—the old fellow stopped midway in his strut across the barnyard, overcome with dismay and anger. Every “hand” within sight and sound was bawled to the presence of the irate parent, and upon them he poured the vials of his wrath.

“Where in hot hell did my daughter learn such language? You blocketty, blinketty, gosh darned, sons of cooks and dish-washers have got to cut out all this damned, cursed, hellish language when my daughter’s around. D’you hear me?”

And to the foreman!

“Orders to your men, sir, no more damned cursing upon the place! I’ll have you and your men know that this is O Bar O and not a G— D— swearing camp for a blasted lot of bohunks.”

This, then, was the outfit to which the seemingly guileless Englishman had become attached.

P. D., his bushy eyebrows twitching over bright old eyes, confirmed the judgment of the foreman, that “a bite of entertainment won’t come amiss at O Bar O” in the shape of the English tenderfoot.

“Put him through the ropes, damn it. Get all the fun you want out of him. Work the blasted hide off him. Make him sweat like hell to earn his salt. Go as far as you like, but—” and here P. D.’s bushy eyebrows drew together in an ominous frown, “give the man a damned square deal. This is O Bar O, and we’ll have no G— D— reflections upon the place.”

So the Englishman was “put through the ropes.” Despite his greenness and seeming innocence, it is possible that he was wider awake than any of the men who were working their wits to make his days and nights exciting and uproarious. He played up to his part with seeming ingenuousness and high good humour. If the hands of O Bar O regarded him as a clown, a mountebank, a greenhorn, he played greener and funnier than they had bargained for.

He was given steers to milk. He was assigned the job of “housemaid, nurse, chambermaid, and waitress” to the house barn stock. He fed the pigs, and he did the chores of cook-car and bunkhouse. All the small and mean jobs of the ranch were assigned to the newcomer. He was constantly despatched upon foolish and piffling errands. For an indefinite period, he was relegated to the woodpile of the cook-house. This was a job that the average cowman scorned. The cowpuncher and ranch rider consider any work not concerned with horse or cattle a reflection upon their qualities as riders. Cheerio, however, acquired a genuine fondness for that woodpile. He would chop away with undiminished cheer and vigour, whistling as he worked, and at the end of the day, he would sit on a log and contentedly smoke his pipe, as he surveyed the fruit of his labours with palpable pride and even vanity.

“Boastin’ of how many logs he’d split. Proud as a whole hen. Hell! you can’t feaze a chap like that. He’d grin if you put’m to breakin’ stones.”

Thus Bully Bill to Holy Smoke, assistant foreman at the O Bar O. “Ho” as he was known for short, scowled at that reference to breaking stones, for Ho knew what that meant in another country across the line. Out of the side of his mouth he shot:

“Why don’t cha set ’im choppin’ real logs if he’s stuck on the job. Stick ’im in the timber and see if he’ll whistle over his job then.”

So “into the timber” went Cheerio, with strict orders to cut down ten fifty-feet tall trees per day. He looked squarely into the face of the assistant foreman, and said: “Righto,” and took the small hand axe handed him by the solemn-faced Hootmon, whose tongue was in his cheek, and who doubled over in silent mirth as soon as Cheerio’s back was turned. But neither Mootmon, nor Ho, nor Bully Bill, nor, for that matter, old P. D. or his son and daughter, laughed when at the end of the day Cheerio returned with twelve trees to his credit for the day’s work. It was, in fact, a matter of considerable wonder and speculation as to the method employed by the Englishman to achieve those twelve immense trees through the medium of that small hand axe. Cheerio went on whistling, kept his own counsel, and was starting off the next morning upon a similar errand when Bully Bill harkened to another suggestion of his assistant, and beckoned him to the corrals.

There was a wary-eyed, ominously still, maverick tied to a post, and him Cheerio was ordered to mount. He said:

“Hello, old man—waiting for me, what?” smiled at the boy holding his head, and swung up into the saddle.

“Now,” said Bully Bill. “You lookut here. You ride that bronc to hell and back again, and break ’er cowboy if you have to break your own head and hide and heart in doing it.”

Then someone untied the halter rope, and the race was on. He was tossed over and over again clear over the head of the wild maverick, and over and over again he remounted, to be thrown again by the wildly kicking bronco. Bruised and sore, with a cut lip and black eye, he pursued, caught, and again and again mounted, again and again was thrown, to mount once again, and to stick finally like glue to the horse’s back, while the hooting, yelling ring of men surrounding the corrals—Hilda and Sandy upon the railings—yelled themselves hoarse with derisive comments and directions, and then went wild with amazed delight, when, still upon the back of a subdued and shivering young outlaw, Cheerio swept around the corrals. He arose in his stirrups now, himself cheering lustily, and waving that newly-acquired O Bar O hat like a boy. Even Hilda begrudged him not the well-earned cheers, though she stifled back her own with her hand upon her mouth, when she found that he had observed her, and with eyes kindling with pride, rode by.

He was thumped upon the back, hailed as “a hellufafellow,” and enjoyed the pronounced favour and patronage of Bully Bill himself, who brought forth his grimy plug of chewing tobacco, and offered a “chaw” of it to the Englishman. Cheerio bit into it with relish, nor showed any sign of the nauseating effects of a weed he preferred in his pipe rather than his mouth.

As a matter of fact, like most Englishmen of his class, Cheerio was an excellent rider, though his riding had not been of the sort peculiar to cowboydom. However, it did not take him long to learn “the hang of the thing.” He dropped his posting for the easy, cowboy lope, and he discovered that, while one clung with his knees when on an English saddle, such an action had painful and exhausting results with a stock saddle. There really was something to Bully Bill’s simple formula:

“Hell! There ain’t nothin’ to this here ridin’. All you got to do is throw your leg over his back and—stick!”

His English training, however, stood him in good stead. More than the foreman at O Bar O noted and appreciated the fact that the newcomer was as intimate with horses as if they were human brethren.

From this time on, his progress at the ranch was swift, considering the daily handicaps the men still continued to slip in his way. His courage and grit won him at least the grudging respect of the men, though, try as he might, to “pal” with the O Bar O “hands,” his overtures were met with suspicion.

There is about certain Englishmen, an atmosphere of superiority that gives offence to men of the newer lands. The “hands” of the O Bar O realized instinctively that this man belonged to another class and caste than their own. No one in the outfit was in a mood to be what he would have considered “patronized.” It was all very well to have a whale of a good time “guying,” “stringing,” and making the tenderfoot hop. That was part of the game, but when it came down to “pal-ing” with a “guy,” who patronized the Ghost River for a daily bath, wielded a matutinal razor, and had regard for the cleanliness of his underwear as well as his overwear, that was a different proposition. Undaunted by continual rebuffs, however, Cheerio pertinaciously and doggedly continued to cultivate his “mates” of the bunkhouse, and at the end of the second month he felt that he could call at least four of the men his friends.

Pink-eyed Jake vehemently and belligerently proclaimed him a “damfinefellow.” This was after Cheerio had knocked him out in a bout, in private, after enduring public bulldogging and browbeating. Hootmon made no bones about expressing his conviction that Cheerio was a “mon”! Neither he nor Cheerio revealed the fact that the better part of Cheerio’s first month’s wages was in the coat pocket of the Scotchman. The latter had a sick wife and a new baby in Calgary. Jim Hull was unlikely to forget certain painful nights, when all hands in the bunkhouse snored in blissful indifference to his groans, while Cheerio had arisen in his “pink piejammies” and rubbed “painkiller” on the rheumatic left limb.

The foreman by this time had discovered that despite his stammering tongue and singular ways, this lean and slight young Englishman could “stand the gaff” of twenty-four hours at a stretch in the saddle, nor “batted an eyelash” after a forty mile trip and back to Broken Nose Lake, after a “bunch” of yearling steers, without a moment off his horse, or a speck of grub till late at night.

His love of nature, his enthusiasm over sunsets and sunrises, the poetry he insisted upon inditing to the moon and the star-spotted skies, to the jagged outline of those misty mountains, towering against the sun-favoured sky, the pen pictures he drew of the men and the silhouette shadows of ranch buildings and bush; the wild flowers he carried into the bunkhouse and cherished with water and sun; these and other “soft” actions, which had at first brought upon him the amused contempt of the men, slowly won at last their rough respect and approval.

Came long evenings, when under the mellow beams of the Alberta night sun, the wide-spreading hills and meadows seemed touched by a golden spell, and a brooding silence reigned on all sides, then the low murmur of Cheerio, half humming, half reciting the songs he had written of home and friends across the sea, tightened something in the throats of the toughest of the men and brought recollections of their own far-off homes, so that with suspended pipes they strained forward the better to catch each half-whispered word of the Englishman.