Pulling aside the net curtain on the dining-room window, Mrs. Morgan watched Elspeth leave. She was vexed because she really didn’t want the girl to go. At first, she had resented the way Dr. Wallace had insisted she provide Elspeth with a place to stay. She had thought her too sickly and plain ever to be any use around the hotel. But Elspeth had worked hard, and today, going off with these well-dressed English people in their fancy democrat wagon, she looked almost pretty. She had lost that dull, withdrawn look that annoyed Mrs. Morgan. “So that’s all the thanks I get, after all I’ve done for her!” she muttered, letting the net curtain fall back into place.
Only a few days after Elspeth left, two men came to the hotel, and each of them asked about Elspeth. Both times, out of sheer spite, Mrs. Morgan said she had no idea where Elspeth had gone. She didn’t tell either of them that Elspeth had worked there until very recently.
The first man was Scottish, and Mrs. Morgan wondered if he might be the uncle that Elspeth had talked so much about when she was ill. He didn’t seem terribly interested in finding the girl. When Mrs. Morgan said she didn’t know where Elspeth was, he accepted that and left.
The second man was more persistent. An English lad, and in spite of his working clothes, Mrs. Morgan could tell he was a gentleman. The kind of person she liked to have stay in the hotel. She would have been friendlier if he had booked a room, but he said he hadn’t money for that.
“How long did Elspeth stay here?” he asked.
“With all the people who put up here, how do you expect me to remember one girl?”
“”She was ill while she was here—you must remember her. And Dr. Wallace said she worked here.”
“When did he tell you that?” Mrs. Morgan asked.
“Back in May. I had hoped to see him here—I wanted to tell him about the land I’ve got—and now they say he’s gone back up to Headquarters Camp. But, about Elspeth. . . .”
“I know the girl you mean. I just don’t remember how long she stayed here. Maybe a week or two.”
“Did her little brother ever turn up?”
“I don’t know if there was a brother! That girl told a pack of lies, that I do remember.”
“She had a brother, all right. I knew them both. I’ll leave my name. Maybe, if you ever hear anything of Elspeth, you could get in touch with me,” he said, handing her a scrap of paper.
She glanced at the name—Arthur Whitcomb—and then dropped the paper into a drawer in the hall table.
Chapter 13
“The wealth of the land”
JULY, 1903
The three-day journey from Battleford up to the claim was pleasant and uneventful. The warm weather had dried out the marshy places on the trail and the streams were easy to ford. Along the route the government had established stopping places with tents and firewood, and so the Galbraiths spent their nights in relative comfort. But they were still very glad to reach the end of their journey.
All the way from Battleford John Galbraith had talked proudly about the new house. He had bought a load of logs and had hired a man to help him with the building, because he wanted the house built right so that it would withstand the cold winters. The walls were chinked with mud, and under the floor, which was made from smooth boards from the sawmill, was a root cellar. Listening to her husband talk, Molly Galbraith must surely have expected something bigger and grander than the small log cabin with a sod roof. But if she compared it in her mind to their tall, ivy-covered house in Carlisle, with its bay windows and wrought-iron railings and rose garden, she said nothing.
While Mr. Galbraith was helping the twins down from the wagon, Matthew came out of the barn. He stopped short when he saw the girls. “What happened to your hair?” he asked. “Did the Indians get you? I warned you they liked red pigtails!”
Elspeth watched from behind the wagon, feeling awkward about seeing Matthew again. She was thinking about how angry she’d felt on the boat when he bragged he could get a job on a farm, but she could see that he’d spoken the truth. Striding out from the barn in his overalls, cap and boots, he looked more like a man than a boy.
“Elspeth’s here!” Rachel shouted, eager to beat Rebecca with the news. “She’s going to stay with us! And she’s lost Robbie!”
“Lost Robbie!” Matthew repeated. Then, seeing Elspeth standing beside the wagon, he asked, “What on earth are you doing here? I thought you were going to Manitoba.”
“I want to see the house,” Mrs. Galbraith said quickly, trying to divert attention from Elspeth, who was close to tears. “Everything else must wait!”
The house was divided into three rooms—two bedrooms on one side and the kitchen-living room on the other. Because the rooms had next to no furniture, they seemed almost spacious.
“We’ll move you into the kitchen, Matthew,” his father said. “The girls can have the bedroom.”
“Putting up curtains will help,” Molly Galbraith said, looking around. “And maybe you could put up some shelves for the dishes, John. It will be good to unpack our things at last.”
Matthew had a pot of stew simmering on the fire, and they were soon seated around the table.
“This is the first time we’ve all eaten together since we left England,” Molly Galbraith said, smiling at them. “That seems so long ago.”
Looking around at their happy faces, Elspeth thought that it had perhaps been a mistake to come. She ached for her own family—for Mama and Papa and Robbie. Especially for Robbie. That night tears ran down her cheeks, as she lay on the straw mattress next to the twins, listening to their even breathing. Not knowing if Robbie was safe was even harder here, living in the friendly atmosphere of the Galbraith family.
The following day, Mrs. Galbraith unpacked boxes of material, lace, buttons and thread. “We had a draper’s shop in Carlisle,” she explained to Elspeth. “Before we sold it, I packed away some things I thought we might need.”
“It must have been lovely to have all this in your own shop,” Elspeth said, fingering a roll of soft red wool material. “Don’t you miss it?”
“Yes, I do,” Mrs. Galbraith answered with a sigh. “But John’s happier here. He never really enjoyed listening to women decide whether to make their summer dresses from the purple-sprigged muslin or the yellow silk! Though it’s the aunties I miss the most. They lived with us in Carlisle, but they said they were too old to start a new life here. There’s a lot of things to weigh one against the other when you take a step like we did, and you’re left wondering if you did right.”
The girls helped Mrs. Galbraith stitch curtains of crisp white cotton. While Elspeth sewed, she though about Mrs. Galbraith’s words. For her there hadn’t been many choices—only one. After that, everything else followed. Yet she, too, wondered if she’d done right. But she’d find Robbie! He wasn’t in Battleford, so he must have come to the colony with somebody and now that she was here she’d have the chance to look for him.
Before Mrs. Galbraith put away the boxes, she let the girls pick out material for dresses she was going to make over the winter. Elspeth fingered the soft, red material, wondering if she was meant to choose too.
“That would look nice on you, Elspeth,” Mrs. Galbraith said. “With maybe a touch of lace on the collar and cuffs.”
The long summer days were filled with hard work. The girls brought in water from the spring and helped wash the clothes and peg them on the line. They swept the floors—a futile task, Elspeth thought, with people tracking in dirt all the time. They also kept an eye on the two cows grazing on the lush grass behind the barn, and brought them in for milking in the evening. Elspeth mostly let the twins look after the cows because Buttercup was going to have a calf soon, and that reminded her too sharply of Robbie wanting a calf named Jock.
Mr. Galbraith had planted several acres of potatoes and turnips, and also a field of oats for winter fodder for the animals. It was too late in the season to plant wheat, which would be their main money crop, but he was already getting ground read
y for next year. He and Matthew had plowed and harrowed ten acres. The soil was rich enough, but it was full of stones. He set the girls to gather them.
Matthew had made a stone-boat, which consisted of boards nailed to long runners. The girls walked over the plowed ground gathering rocks, and piled them on the stone-boat. When it was full, Matthew harnessed Bessie to it and dragged the stones away, piling them at the edge of the field. The pile of stones grew bigger, but the number of stones in the field never seemed to grow less.
“The raspberries by the bluff are ripe,” Elspeth told Mrs. Galbraith eagerly one morning. “Would you like us to pick some for jam?” The girls much preferred picking strawberries, or raspberries, or the small, tart Saskatoon berries, to gathering stones. They also enjoyed turning over the sweet-smelling, new-mown hay.
Mrs. Galbraith made bonnets for the twins and Elspeth to protect them from the strong sun. She scolded Rachel and Rebecca when they didn’t wear them. “You’ll get sunstroke with your hair so short,” she warned them. “And your faces will be covered with freckles!”
Actually, their hair was growing thick again, but it was true about the freckles. Elspeth, whose bonnet also dangled down her back most of the time, looked brown and healthy. Dr. Wallace would have been pleased to see how well she looked.
As the time for the baby’s birth drew closer, Mrs. Galbraith became more and more worried and depressed. The twins’ birth had been easy. But this time she had already suffered a great deal of sickness. They were farther from the town site than she had expected, and she had no neighbors to call on for help.
One morning, Mr. Galbraith gathered Matthew and the girls together, saying, “I’m going to take your ma down to the town site. I’m hoping Mrs. Lloyd, the minister’s wife, will know of someone Molly can stay with till after the baby’s born. I’ll not be back until at least the day after tomorrow, but you’ve managed the animals on your own before, Matthew. This time you’ll have the girls to help you.”
They all watched Mr. and Mrs. Galbraith drive away in the democrat wagon pulled by Bessie and Daisy.
“No rocks today!” Rachel said, jumping up and down.
“Nor tomorrow, either!” Rebecca added.
“You still have to do your regular jobs,” Matthew told them sternly.
“Bessie’s not here to pull the stone-boat,” Rebecca pointed out. “So are you going to pull it?”
“There’s other things you can do,” Matthew said gruffly.
That was true, but it was hard for them to settle down to their usual tasks. Even Matthew found that. After lunch, he said he was going down to the slough to cut firewood. Rachel wanted to go with him until she remembered how bad the mosquitoes were down there.
“We’ll go pick raspberries,” Elspeth suggested. “But we should fetch water first.”
The afternoon passed quickly. Supper, with fresh raspberries for dessert, tasted good. It was later than usual when Matthew went out to milk Buttercup and Marigold, only to find they had strayed from the patch of grass behind the barn.
“You were supposed to watch them,” Matthew told the twins.
“We couldn’t watch them and pick raspberries,” Rebecca said.
“They’ll be over by the bluff, I expect,” Matthew said. “They seem to think the grass is better over there. Come and help me fetch them, Rachel.”
About fifteen minutes after Matthew and Rachel left, there was a sudden loud knock on the door. The Galbraiths’ house was not near any traveled trail, and with so few people in the area, they never had unexpected visitors. Elspeth and Rebecca stared at one another in surprise and made no move to answer the door. The knock was repeated, loudly, urgently.
Elspeth opened the door cautiously. A man stood leaning against the door frame, sweat beading his pale forehead.
“May I come in?” he asked, stumbling forward into the room before Elspeth could answer. “And can you do something about my horse? Hide it! If they see it, they’ll know I’m here.”
Elspeth looked at the man, taking in his lined face, round glasses, and white cap. It was Mr. Barr! Isaac Moses Barr, the man she had so badly wanted to find. But that had been long ago, while she still had Robbie with her.
“Mr. Barr, sir!” she said. “Whatever brings you here?”
“Can you hide my horse?” he repeated. “They’ll see it.”
Elspeth didn’t wait to ask any of the questions crowding her mind. She fetched a mug of water from the pail by the door, handed it to Mr. Barr, and then told Rebecca to come with her. She went out and led the horse over to the barn, tethering it in Bessie’s empty stall.
“Get some oats and a bucket of water, Rebecca. I’ll take the saddle off and brush the horse down. It’s been ridden hard, poor thing.”
Elspeth had watched Arthur and Sidney working with the horses on the way from Saskatoon, but watching was different from doing it herself. However, Mr. Barr’s horse was either too exhausted or too docile to protest at Elspeth’s lack of skill.
When the girls crossed back from the sod barn to the house they saw, to their astonishment that they were about to have more company. Three riders were galloping over the prairie toward the house from the direction of the town site.
Isaac Barr, who was pacing the floor in his agitation, swung around when they came in and asked, “Did you find somewhere to hide it?”
“There’s no place to hide a horse here, Mr. Barr. I’ve put it in Bessie’s stall. There’s three men coming this way now, but maybe they’ll think the horse is ours.”
“Is there somewhere I can hide?”
“The root cellar,” Rebecca said immediately, struggling to move the two heavy floorboards. Her eyes were dancing with excitement. “”We won’t tell them you’re here.”
Unceremoniously, they shoved Mr. Barr down into the cellar.
“Crawl to the back,” Elspeth advised. “It’s deeper farther in.”
They had just got the boards back in place and moved the table slightly to hide the crack when someone began to pound at the door.
“Remember! Shadow Bairns are quiet,” Elspeth said softly to Rebecca, before opening the door.
“We’re looking for Barr,” one of the men said, pushing his way into the house. “Have you seen anyone ride past here?”
“Barr?” Elspeth repeated. “Would that be the Mr. Barr who started the colony?”
“That’s the man we mean. Though Barabas would be a better name for him than Barr.”
“Not many people come this way,” Elspeth said. “We would surely have seen him if he had.”
“Are you girls alone?”
“My big brother, Matthew, is getting the cows,” Rebecca answered.
“Why would you be wanting Mr. Barr?” Elspeth asked innocently, as if she were in no hurry to get rid of the rough strangers.
“Why would we not be wanting him?” one of them asked with a harsh laugh.
“It’s a little matter of justice,” said another. “We filed for land on the boat, and now it turns out that the railroad is going through that parcel of land. And whose name is it in now? Isaac Barr’s!”
“But surely there’s plenty of land for everyone,” Elspeth said.
“The land the railroad passes though is going to be valuable. Why should he make a profit on land that is rightfully mine?” the man asked angrily.
“We’re wasting time, Fred,” the third man broke in. “We’d better take a look around the place and see that he’s not skulking about, if these children are on their own.”
Elspeth actually felt more comfortable with Mr. Barr than she did with the three ruffians who were looking for him in the name of justice. She could only watch helplessly while two of the men went out to search the barn. The other searched the house. It didn’t take him long, for there appeared to be nowhere to hide in the cabin.
The other men came back, apparently believing that the only horse in the barn belonged there. But Elspeth’s relief was short-lived. From the small front win
dow she could see Matthew and Rachel making their slow way back from the bluff, leading Buttercup and Marigold. Matthew wouldn’t overlook a strange horse in Bessie’s stall, eating Bessie’s oats. Elspeth wondered if it would make the men suspicious if she ran out and intercepted Matthew so she could tell him about Mr. Barr hiding in the root cellar, but she dismissed the idea. Matthew never had much sympathy for Barr.
Matthew stopped mid-stride when he noticed the horses tethered by the door. He said something to Rachel and gave her Buttercup’s rope. He came straight over to the house, and Rachel disappeared from sight, leading the cows toward the barn.
Matthew heard the men out and than said, “We haven’t seen Isaac Barr around here, and that suits me. So you’d better be on your way. You’re losing time.”
“Can you spare us something to eat?” one of the men asked. “If we’re heading down to Battleford, I could do with some supper first.”
“I can give you some bread and corned beef,” Elspeth offered. “But you’d better take it with you. You don’t want to be wasting any more time.”
But it was too late. Elspeth could hear Rachel running toward the house, no doubt eager to share the news that there was a strange horse in Bessie’s stall. If only there was some way to keep her quiet!
The Journey of the Shadow Bairns Page 11