Читать книгу Neighbours - Robert James Campbell Stead - Страница 7

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When daylight came we had breakfast and started on our journey again in rather sheepish silence. The strain lasted for perhaps half an hour; then Jake gave a great guffaw, smothering his face in his hands.

"Yep, some of 'em is awful green," he quoted again, proving for himself a good memory as well as a sense of satire. "Jupiter!" and there was another outburst of hilarity. "Sittin' Crow!" and more guffaws. "To-night we'll be in the haunts of Roostin' Turkey! Giddap! You danged old buckskin, it's good fer you I emptied the magazine!"

Under my seat I found a tent peg. Stealthily I raised it in the air, and joyously I walloped Jake on something solid beneath his slouch felt hat. He rubbed his head ruefully, but without taking offence.

"Well, that's over," he said at length, heaving a great sigh, as though he had just been relieved of some big responsibility. "It's all in a life-time. Giddap, you piebald flyin' ants!" and Jake made a strange clucking noise in his throat which encouraged the buckskins into a temporary lope.

The day was much the same as the one before, except that we were now well out on "the bald-headed." Once in a while, at great distances, we could see a homesteader's shack, a little isolated sentinel-box of the vanguard of settlement. Once we were intercepted by another team and democrat, much like our own, which cut across our trail. The driver asked if we could spare any water. We gave him half of what was in our keg, and he extended his plug of chewing tobacco all round. We chatted a few minutes, and then with mutual friendly shouts and waving of our arms we were off again.

During the afternoon, Jake's mind having apparently cleared of all other matters, he began to sing. It was some little time before we detected the origin of the strange sound; different times I looked down at our wheels, or glanced about to see if someone were approaching. But the volume of sound grew as Jake developed his theme, and presently there was no doubt that he was singing. We soon discovered that Jake had two songs, "Sweet Marie" and "Clementine", and he used both words and music interchangeably. As we were able to analyze it more closely we found his rendering ran something like this:

"As I clasp your hand in mine, Sweet Marie-e-e,

"A feelin' so divine comes to me, comes to me-e. Giddap, you danged buckskin, fallin' over your feet. Goin' to sleep? Cluck, cluck!

"Lived a miner, a forty-nin-er,

"An' his daughter, Clementine."

But we were to discover that singing was not Jake's only forte. He had the most amazing eyes. They were always half asleep, and in the heat of the day they seemed more than half asleep, but he saw things long before they hove into our vision, and, I have no doubt, he saw many things that we did not see at all. In the middle of the afternoon he suddenly broke off with "Lived a min-er," and brought his horses to a stop.

"Like to try a shot at that coyote?" he said to Jack.

"What coyote?" asked Jack, looking hurriedly in all directions.

"Over there," indicating a section of the horizon with a sweep of his arm.

"Can't place him," Jack confessed.

"Beside that little mound of dirt—badger-hole, I reckon; there's a tuft of grass in front of him; he's lookin' straight at us, wonderin' who the hell——"

"Oh, I got him, I got him!" Jack shouted in a loud whisper, and began to get out of the wagon, but Jake's arm restrained him.

"Don't do that. He'll run the moment you get out. Take him from here."

He slipped the rifle over Jack's arm. "She's loaded," he said, with a grin. "Set 'er fer two hundred yards."

Jack aimed long and carefully, and even as he aimed the coyote turned his broadside deliberately, as though to give him a better target. Then he fired, and a whiff of dust puffed up three hundred yards away. The coyote, however, had taken notice; perhaps the bullet didn't pass so far above him, at that. He stretched himself like a tawny ribbon and bolted with amazing speed into the wilderness. Jack sent two more wild shots into space.

"Toler'ble safe," was Jake's comment as he laid the rifle away. "Toler'ble safe."

Half an hour later he pulled up again. "How about you?" he said, turning to me.

I could see nothing until, following the line of his arm and finger, I at length detected an object behind a little whitish willow bush, appropriately called the wolf willow. Even then I could see only a pair of sharp ears and the triangular outline of a head; there was nothing else visible.

"You better take him, Jake," 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. Any comment on our part would have been superfluous, a fact which no doubt our driver understood. But his thought was evidently running along some course similar to ours, although skirting into wider fields.

"If ever there's a big war," he remarked at length, "an' I reckon there will be some day, the chaps from these prairies will sure give 'em hell."

It was a strange speech for Jake. Jake, short and fat-waisted, guiltless of coat or waist-coat, his coarse blue shirt flying open at the neck, little streams of tobacco juice meandering down his stubby chin, his slouch hat pulled low on his head and his brown, tangled hair tufted out about the ears; most of all, his pudgy feet, which would not reach the floor of the wagon box—surely here was as unmilitary looking an individual as one could picture. And yet, his amazing keenness of eyesight, his quick, accurate, uncanny marksmanship, and his calm assurance in which there was no word of boasting, but a mere statement of fact, that if ever there were a big war the boys from the prairies would "give 'em hell!"

We camped that night by a stream of which Jake knew, because there was little water on the prairies, even at the first of May. Next day we drove all day, and later into the evening than usual; it was quite dark when we stopped.

"This is the place," Jake said, "but you can't see it to-night. Have a good sleep and we'll size 'er up in the mornin'."

We tried to eat breakfast without concern, but we were hurried and nervous, and eager to see how our judgment would tally with Jake's. On the road he had tried to explain to us the system of survey, and we had a general idea of it in our heads. Now he took a township map from his pocket and showed us in detail where we were.

"This is us," he said, pointing with a thick, stubby finger, "right on the north-west quarter o' Fourteen. Immedjut west of us is a road allowance, runnin' north an' south. Immedjut west of that again is section Fifteen, which is railroad land, an' can't be took up free. But immedjut north-west, cornerin' right against this quarter, 'cept fer the road allowance, is the south-east quarter of Twenty-two, which is open. Now these two quarters, north-west Fourteen an' south-east Twenty-two, is as good as any land that lays out o' doors, an' better than most. There's a bit of a gully here—you'll see it in a minute—runs down from the north-east an' cuts off to the south-west, an' runs right between these two quarters. There's springs in that gully somewhere, an' runnin' water practical the year round, an' shelter fer stock an' all that kind o' thing, an' you get the benefit of it all, an' it don't take two acres off'n your land. It's a plumb Paradise an' you can't beat it nowhere."

"How far is it to a railroad?" Jack asked.

"Plumb down that road allowance, thirty-two miles, straight as the crow flies, when it ain't Sittin'," he threw in with a little snicker.

"Thirty-two miles!" Jack exclaimed. "Pretty well in the wilderness, isn't it?"

"Wilderness nothin'! This is suburban prop'rty. This is close in. I take some of 'em back sixty an' seventy an' eighty miles. Thirty-two miles is jus' right, an' I'll tell you why. When a new railroad comes its likely to come about thirty miles from the other; that's about a sensible distance apart. An' here you are, in the middle of the right-of-way, an' may be cuttin' your homestead into town lots; ten lots to an acre an' two hundred dollars a lot. Can you beat it? The Lord sure has been good to you, fer no special reason that I can notice. 'Tain't your good looks"—we were badly sun-blistered, in spite of the axle-grease—"an' 'tain't your good sense, excep' in selectin' me as your financial advisor, so to speak. I reckon it's all account o' those girls—sisters, you said."

Jake threw a querying stress on the word sisters, but it was against all nature to be offended at him. Had we resented his remark he would have laughed our seriousness out of court. But we decided to see some of the adjoining sections.

Sixteen appealed to Jack. We could have taken the west half, and so, working together, we would have had a mile furrow. The gully also touched sixteen, and would have given us the same advantages as Jake claimed for the sections he had recommended. However, we found him very fixed in his preference for Fourteen and Twenty-two, and finally we accepted his arguments, and set out to make a more detailed survey of the land. The gully angled between the two quarters, taking scarce an acre off either of them. A jolly stream, brown with the grass of its banks, gurgled along its bed.

I knelt down to try the water; there was the taste of snow, but there was also the harder, sharper note of spring water mingled with it.

"Runnin' water like that is worth a thousand dollars on any man's farm," Jake declared. "An' come up this way. Wait till I show you somethin'."

The "something" proved to be a widening in the valley, where was a considerable growth of small willows and poplars. "Fence posts and fire wood," said Jake, "an' on railroad land too, that won't be sold fer years. You'll have 'em all cut down before then. That timber's worth another thousand, or half that, anyway."

I thought of the great pine back on the old farm in Ontario, and the "timber" looked to me like gads and switches. None of it was tall enough to reach out of the little valley and show a green tip to the bald surface of the prairies. But we were not in Ontario now; we were in a land where even a three-inch tree was not to be despised.

"An' here's somethin' more," he said, setting an example for us by walking stealthily on his pudgy legs through the clumps of willows. At the other end of the wooded space we found a little pond opening out, and a score of wild ducks drowsing placidly on its smooth surface. The bright colorings of the drakes, the beautiful archings of their necks, and their graceful movements on the water held us for a moment in silent admiration.

"An Englishman," Jake remarked, when we had turned back, "would take this farm fer the duck pond alone. They're the dangdest people ever was fer wantin' to kill somethin'. He don' care if his farm is all sand or wallows, 's long as there's somethin' to shoot, the Englishman don't. But fer a Yankee it mus' be every acre wheat land. He don' care fer nothin' but the long green." Jake paused as though to think over these national characteristics.

"I dunno which is the worst," he said at length. "I reckon us Canadjuns is about right, with a little o' both."

"It has been said that a Canadian is half Englishman and half Yankee," I remarked. "What do you make of it?"

"Nothin' to it," was Jake's emphatic answer. "When a Canadjun is enjoyin' an argyment with a Yankee he's all English, an' when he's pullin' off a deal with an Englishman he's all Yankee, an'——"

"He gets the sixty pounds," said Jack.

Jake braced himself on his short, stout legs, and made a gesture that might have been interpreted as a belligerent attitude. He ended it by flapping his arms in imitation of flying, and emitting a series of caws.

Jack was duly suppressed. "Let's get to business," he said. "Explain this soil. Will it grow anything, and if so, what?"

"Let's find a badger-hole," said Jake, and we had little trouble in locating one. "Now look at this. This hole goes down five, six, seven feet, maybe more, in the ground. Look what his nibs has kicked out. Fine, loamy, sandy soil, not too light an' not too sticky, all the way down. That goes plumb to Kingdom Come. Course, the top is a little darker, on account o' the grass roots, but it's all soil. None o' yer down-east three inches-o'-muck-an'-a-rock-bottom to that."

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.

"I have it figgered out like this," Jake continued, "an' my figgers is right; this land is worth more than any gold mine between hell an' Whoop-up. When you take the gold out o' a mine you ain't got nothin' left, but you can take gold out o' this mine next year, an' the year after, an' the year after, fer ever an' ever, an' there's still as much there as when you started—if you farm it right."

Our inspection satisfied us in every particular. Jake explained, as we already knew, that we would have to build separate shacks on the two quarters, to comply with the law about sleeping on the land claimed. "But you can build one stable in the gully fer the live stock," he added; "the Gov'ment don' care where they sleep, jus' so's the homesteader himself is sufficiently oncomfort'ble."

We smiled over his interpretation of regulations which, as we knew, were necessary to prevent the wholesale blanketing of the free lands by people who had no intention of living on them.

"Now we better pick a second an' a third choice, jus' in case some one slips in ahead o' us on this," said Jake, and we spent the afternoon driving about and making fresh locations. Much of the land was already taken up, Jake told us, and although there were as yet no signs of settlement we would see a great change by fall.

Jack spoke of the disadvantage of the alternate sections of railroad land, which were not given away free, but which had to be bought. "They are an obstacle to close settlement," he said, "and I guess loneliness is about the worst thing there is to contend with on these prairies."

"Perhaps," said Jake, "but they're an advantage, too. They give the homesteader a lot of free pasture an' hay land, fer instance. An' in a few years, when you have had some good crops an' caught the bug fer big farmin', you'll be mighty glad o' the chance to buy Fifteen or Twenty-three."

We camped on Fourteen that night, and Jack and I were filled with plans for our shacks and our stable. The shacks would be up on the prairie level, on opposite sides of the gully, in full view of each other, and about a hundred yards apart. The stable would be in the gully, close to the road allowance, sheltered from the winds, and convenient to water. The crossing of the stream was passable, but would stand improvement.

Early in the morning we started back, and after three full days in the democrat we found ourselves one evening swinging up the now strangely familiar streets of Regina. The raw prairie city of 1904 already almost seemed like home. We were like travelers returning from strange lands to scenes of old recollections. We had been away just seven days, but in that time we had swung far out into the universe; we had drunk of the air of God's new creation; we had been strangely conscious of the company of our souls. We arranged with Jake to meet him in the morning, when he would go with us to the land office while we registered our claims, and at the hotel we found a note from the girls giving us their new address. We located them without trouble; I fancy they had not known that seven days could be so long. They had no room for us, so we had to go back to the hotel, but first we sat with them late into the night, recounting our adventures and picturing to them the place that was to be our home; kindling in them, if we could, some fire of the joy of ownership which was already leaping in our breasts.

In the morning we went with Jake to the land office; Fourteen and Twenty-two in the township where we had decided to locate were still open, and we had no difficulty in filing our claims. We returned to the stable with Jake.

"What's the damage?" Jack demanded.

Jake expectorated profusely, spread his feet, and scratched his head. "Seven times seven is forty-nine; fifty dollars fer locatin' makes ninety-nine; I guess she's ninety-nine, boys; gosh darn it, we might have made it a hundred."

"My word!" said Jack. "Isn't that a bit thick?"

There was a merry twinkle in the guide's half-closed eyes. "An' two girls to go out there with you? Whad'ye expec' fer your money? But I was forgettin' about Sittin' Crow. I'll throw off four dollars fer Sittin' Crow. It was worth it."

But we paid him the ninety-nine and Jack threw in another. "We'll make it the even hundred," he said. "Come out and see us when you get a chance; we may have a bite of fried coyote for you."

"Oh, I'll be along, I'll be along," said Jake. "I'll blow out there often."

We shook hands with Jake and turned away with a strange feeling of cutting ourselves adrift. We had not known how quickly an attachment may grow—on the prairies.