The Homesteaders

by Stead, Robert J C

  "They'll be all well at home, I hope?" said Mr. Guthrie at length, feeling that the custom of the community had been sufficiently honoured.

  "Yes, all that's there," said Harris.

  "All that's there? I didn't know any of your folks were away. Perhaps Mrs. Harris is down East? I'm sure a summer amid the orchards of her old home would be a delight to her, and, of course, Mr. Harris, you are able to gratify yourself in these little matters now. Things are not what they were in the early days, Jack, when I preached in Tom Morrison's log-house, and you led the bass at the services. I'll warrant that voice of yours could sing yet if you gave it a chance."

  Harris received these remarks with a mixture of feelings. The minister's reference to his financial standing carried with it a certain gratification, but it consorted poorly with his recent conversations with his wife and with his present mission.

  "And Beulah?" continued the minister, conscious that his first shot had gone wild. "She's a fine young woman now. I see her in church occasionally. In fact, I was speaking with Mrs. Burton, the choir leader, a day or so ago, and Beulah's name was mentioned between us."

  "It was about Beulah I came to see you," said Harris, with averted eyes. Then in a few words he gave his version of what he knew and what he suspected.

  "I fear I can add nothing to your information," said Mr. Guthrie. "They haven't been here, and, as you say, if Beulah contemplated marriage I think she would have called on me. Travers, too, I knew a little, and thought him a decent chap. But we must find the girl and talk this over quietly with her. Is there any place in town she would be likely to go to? What about Mrs. Goode's boarding-house? I will just call up on the telephone. I can make inquiry without the necessity of any explanations."

  Inquiry at the house of Mrs. Goode brought a strong ray of light out of the darkness. Beulah had been there during the morning, and had explained that she was leaving on the west-bound train, which even now was thrumming at the station. On learning this, without a word, Harris sprang into the buggy, while Allan brought a sharp cut of the whip across the spirited horses. They reached the railway station half a minute too late; the train was already pulling out, and as Harris's eyes followed it in anger and vexation they plainly saw Jim Travers swing lithely on to the rear platform.

  With an oath the farmer reached for his rifle, but Allan wrenched it from his hands before any onlookers noted the action. "Don't be a fool," he whispered, and started the horses homeward.

  CHAPTER X

  INTO THE FARTHER WEST

  For the first time in his life Harris surrendered his purpose to the judgment of his son, and as they drove homeward along the dusty trail in the heat of the day the consciousness came home to him that Allan was right. To have used his gun would, of course, have been madness; he had never seriously intended doing anything so rash, although for one impetuous moment his passion had made him irresponsible. And, as he thought it all over, he concluded that nothing was to be gained by pursuit of the runaways. There was only one west-bound train in the day; he could not give chase until the morrow, and they would be able to lead him by twenty-four hours as long as he cared to keep up the pursuit. True, he might telegraph ahead to the police, but that meant publicity, and would probably be ineffectual in the end. She had gone of her own free will, and although his heart hurt even under his anger, now that she had gone she might stay. She had left a good home, a fond father, and a share in the family estate for a—hired man—and she might now make the best of her bargain. Harris assured himself, with absolute sincerity, that he had done his duty in the matter, and that in exchange for all his kindness his daughter had treated him very badly indeed.

  During the drive homeward his thoughts persistently turned to the share his wife had had in Beulah's departure, and his feeling toward Mary grew more and more hostile. Not that he altogether disbelieved her when she professed ignorance of the young couple's intention; he could not go so far as to think that she had lied to him, but he was inwardly convinced that she had at least an inkling of their plans, and that, so far from attempting to dissuade them, she was really in sympathy with their wild escapade. Harris was very fond of his wife, who had shared with him all the hardships of pioneer life, and who, he admitted, had been a faithful and devoted helpmeet, and her desertion of him in the present crisis was therefore all the less to be excused or condoned. He resolved, however, that there should be no open breach between them; he would neither scold nor question her, but would impress her with his displeasure by adopting a cold, matter-of-fact, speak-when-your spoken-to attitude toward her.

  Under the circumstances it was not remarkable that Harris's work began to loom larger than ever in his life. The space left vacant by his daughter he filled with extra energy driving the great ploughs through the mellow summer-fallow. A new tank-man was engaged, and the rumble of the engine was heard up and down the fields from early morning until dark. From his wife he held aloof, speaking with strained courtesy when speech was necessary. She, in turn, schooled for years in self-effacement, hid her sorrow in her heart, and went about her work with a resignation which he mistook for cheerfulness, and which confirmed him in his opinion that she knew more of Beulah's intentions than she had cared to admit. Only with Allan his relations remained unchanged; indeed, the attachment between the two grew deeper than ever. The young man avoided any reference to Beulah; what he felt in his own heart he kept to himself, but the father shrewdly guessed that he laid the whole blame on Travers.

  So the summer wore on; the black bosom of the fallow field widened day by day, and the smell of growing wheat filled the dew-laden evening air. The picnic season, the time of athletic competitions, baseball matches, and rural sociability, rolled by, but Harris scarcely knew of its passing. He had long ago ceased to take any personal interest in the frivolities of the neighbourhood; he saw in picnics and baseball games only an unprofitable misuse of time, and when he thought of them at all it was to congratulate himself that Allan was not led away by any such foolishness. Finding no great happiness in his own home, he had fallen into the way of walking over to Riles's on Sunday afternoons, and the two spent many hours in discussion of their proposed land-seeking expedition.

  Meanwhile Mary plodded along with her housework, toiling doggedly from five in the morning until half-past nine or ten at night. Beulah's departure had left all the labours of the home upon her hands; her husband had made no suggestion of securing help, and she had not asked any. The new man made no offer to milk any of the cows; a dozen hours in the field was day enough for him, and whatever time was over he spent smoking cigarettes in the shelter of the barn. Allan occasionally did help with the milking, and more frequently with turning the separator, but it was so late when he stopped his work in the field she was sorry for him, and tried to have the milk cleared away before he arrived on the scene. One or two postcards she had had from Beulah, but they brought no great information. They came in the open mail; her husband was welcome to read them if he chose, but as he had sought his own company exclusively since Beulah's departure she made no attempt to force them upon him.

  At last one morning came a letter, a big fat letter, left in by a neighbour passing by, as the custom was for any settler going to town to bring out the mail for those who lived along his route. She tore the envelope open nervously and devoured its contents with hungry eyes.

  "My DEAR MOTHER,

  "Here I am, in the shadow of the Rockies. That may sound poetical, but it's a literal fact. It is still early in the evening, but the sun has disappeared behind the great masses to the west, and the valley which my window overlooks is filling up with blackness. The Arthurses are pure gold, and I have told them everything. They don't blame anyone, not even father. How is he? Slaving as usual, I suppose.

  "Well, I must tell you about my trip. When I left the house that night I had no idea where I was going, but the simplest thing seemed to be to go first to Plainville. The North Star led that way, and it seemed a good guide to follow. As I w
alked the lights came out in the Arctic sky—a great bow of them, swelling and fading in their delicate tints. I watched them and plodded along, trying not to think very much about anything.

  "You've no idea how heavy that suit-case got, but I took my time, as there was nothing to gain by reaching town before daylight. When I got there it struck me it might be a good plan to have some breakfast, so I walked round to Goode's boarding-house. Mrs. Goode was bustling about, and received me with open arms. 'Well, my Land! if it ain't Beulah Harris!' she exclaimed—she always called me Beulah—'Goodness, child, what are you doing about this early in the morning? But there, I needn't ask, knowin' what a worker your father is. I'll be bound he drove you in before sunrise to lose no time with his ploughin'. Well, that's what makes the mare go. I wish my man had some of it—he's snorin' up on the second floor at this minute like to lift the shingles. I often say to myself, 'For the little he does and the lot he eats the Lord knows what keeps him so thin.' It's a grievance of Mrs. Goode's that her husband won't fatten up; she thinks it's a reflection on her cooking. 'And with your suit-case! You'll be taking the train? West, is it, or East? But you'll be hungry, child. Take off your things there while I see to my buns—I always give the boarders hot buns for breakfast—' you know how she rattles on. But she's a good soul, if a bit conceited over her looking, and wouldn't take a cent for my keep either. Of course she didn't wait for me to answer her questions, and she really suggested the plan which I took. After breakfast I went over to the station, and asked what the fare was to Arthurs' station; I found I had enough money for the trip, and I bought a ticket without further ado.

  "I won't try to tell you all about my trip—it would take a book. But what a country it is! Of course I had learned in school that there was about two feet of map between the Red River and the Rockies, but there's only one way to know how big it is, and that's to travel it. If you've got any imagination at all a trip over these enormous prairies must set it stirring. For the most part there's no settlement; not a house, nor stack, nor any sign of life. Pretty much like Manitoba was, I guess, when you first saw it, but bigger, and grander, and more suggestive of the future. You see, Manitoba has made good, for all the doubters, and this bigger West will do the same, on a bigger scale. As we rolled along through that unbroken prairie, with here and there a great herd of horses or cattle in the distance, I felt at last that I was really beginning to live. Not that I was doing anything grander than running away from home, but still that feeling came over me—the feeling that here was a country where things were going to happen, and that I was going to play some part in their happening.

  "Well, if I ramble on like this it'll be a real book after all. Calgary is the big cow-town of the West, just beginning to aspire to higher—or lower (there's a real question there)—civilization, and mixing schaps and silks on its streets in a strange struggle between the past and the future. But my stay there was short, as I was able to catch my branch train with little delay, and that night saw me at Arthurs' nearest station. The homestead rush is on here in earnest; the trains are crowded, mostly with Americans, and the hotels are simply spilling over. They're a motley crowd, these homesteaders. Down with us, you know, the settlers were looking for homes, and a chance to make a living, but up here they're out for money—the long green, they call it. Their idea is to prove up and sell their lands, when they will either buy more or leave the country. But the great point is that they are after money rather than homes. They belong to a class which has been rushing for a generation ahead of a wave of high land values—I heard a man say that in the train, and I made a note of it—they're rovers by birth and training, with no great home instinct! To them one place is as good as another—provided always there's money to be made there—and one flag is almost as good as another. Of course this will right itself in time; the first flood of land-seekers are soil-miners, but the second are home-builders—the man said that too; you see I'm picking things up; I want to know about something besides the weather—and when that second flood comes this country won't know itself.

  "But to come back to the hotel; that's what I did when I had taken a good walk about the little town, and admired myself almost homesick looking at fine horses tied to hitching-posts and fine men swaggering about in the abandon of cow-boy costumes. One thing I have learned already, and the discovery shocked me a little at first; the cow-boy considers himself better clay than the farmer—the 'sod-buster' he calls him—and treats him with good-humoured contempt. I wanted to ask someone about Arthurs, and I didn't like to inquire in the hotel. There was a lot of drinking going on there. But near the door were two young men talking, and I overheard one of them mention Arthurs' name. Pulling myself together, I asked him if he could tell me where Arthurs lived.

  "'Yes, miss,' he answered, lifting a big hat and showing when he spoke a clean set of teeth. 'It's twenty-five miles up the river. Were you expecting him to meet you?'

  "I explained that I had intended to drop in on them by surprise, but

  I had had no idea they lived so far from town.

  "'Oh, that's not far,' he said. 'Can you ride?'

  "Everybody here rides horseback. It's the standard means of locomotion. And the women ride astride. I was a bit shocked at first, but you soon get used to it. But twenty-five miles is different from a romp round the pasture-field, so I said I was afraid not.

  "'Arthurs is coming down with the buck-board,' remarked the other man. 'I passed him on the trail as I came in.'

  "Sure enough, a little later Arthurs himself drew up at the hotel. I wouldn't have known him, but one of the young men pointed him out, and it would have done you good to see how he received me.

  "'And you are Jack and Mary's daughter,' he said, taking both my hands in his, and holding me at arm's length for a moment. Then, before I knew it, he had drawn me up and kissed me. But I didn't care. All of a sudden it seemed to me that I had found a real father. It seems hard to say it, but that is how I felt.

  "Well, he just couldn't keep away from me all evening. He showered me with questions about you and father, which I answered as well as I could, but I soon found I couldn't keep my secret, so I just up and told him all. He was very grave, but not cross. 'You need time to think things over, and to get a right perspective,' he said, 'and our home will be yours until you do.'

  "We drove home the next day, up a wonderful river valley, deep into the heart of the foothills, with the blue mountains always beckoning and receding before us. Mrs. Arthurs was as surprised and delighted as he had been, and I won't try to tell you all the things she said to me. She cried a little, too, and I'm afraid I came near helping her a bit. You know the Arthurs lost their little girl before they left Manitoba, and they have had no other children. They both seemed just hungry.

  "There's nothing so very fine about their home, except the spirit that's inside it. I can't describe it, but it's there—a certain leisurely way of doing things, a sense that they have made work their servant instead of their master. And still they're certainly not lazy, and they've accomplished more than we have. When they left Manitoba in the early days, discouraged with successive frosts, they came right out here into the foothills with their few head of stock. Now their cattle are numbered in thousands, and they have about a township of land. And still they seem to live for the pure happiness they find in life, and only to think of their property as a secondary consideration.

  "Now I really must close. Mrs. Arthurs sends a note, and I'm quite sure it's an invitation. Oh, mother, what could be lovelier! Now don't say you can't. Father has plenty of money; let him hire a housekeeper for a while. The change will do him good.

  "Love to you, dearest, and to Allan, if he still thinks of me.

  "BEULAH.

  "P.S.—I forgot to mention that Jim Travers left Plainville on the same train as I did. He could hardly believe his eyes when he saw me there. I told him I was going West on a visit, but I don't know how much he guessed. Said he was going West himself to take up land, but he
wanted to call on some friends first, and he got off a few stations from Plainville. Between you and me, I believe he changed his plan so that the incident—our being on the train together, you know—could not be misunderstood if the neighbours got to know of it. It would be just like Jim to do that."

  With Beulah's letter was a short but earnest note from Lilian Arthurs, assuring the mother of her daughter's welfare, and pressing an invitation to spend the autumn in the glorious scenery and weather of the foothill country. Mary Harris read both letters over again, with frequent rubbing of her glasses. Love for her daughter, desire to see her old friend once more, and growing dissatisfaction with conditions at home, all combined to give weight to the invitation so earnestly extended. "If I only could!" she said to herself. "If I only could! But it would cost so much."

  The dinner was late that day, and Harris was in worse humour than usual. He had just broken a plough-beam, which meant an afternoon's delay and some dollars of expense. When he had started his meal his wife laid the full envelope before him. "A letter from Beulah," she said.

  Without a word he rose from the table, took the letter in his hand, and thrust it into the kitchen range. A blue flame slowly cut round the envelope; the pages began to curl like dry leaves in autumn, and presently the withered ghost of the missive shrank away in the dull glare of the coal fire behind.

  CHAPTER XI

  THE PRICE OF "SUCCESS"

  At last the ploughing was finished, and, although the rich smell of wheat in the milk filled the air, it still would be almost a month before the ripening crops were ready for the binder. Harris felt that he could now allow himself a breathing spell, and that the opportunity to investigate the rich lands of the Farther West was at hand. Many nights, while Mary milked the cows, he had walked over to Riles', and the two had discussed their forthcoming venture until they had grown almost enthusiastic over it. Riles, it must be said, was the leading spirit in the movement; although already possessed of sufficient land and means to keep him in comfort through his advancing years, the possibility of greater wealth, and particularly of wealth to be had without corresponding effort, was a lure altogether irresistible. And Harris fell in with the plan readily enough. A quarter of a century having elapsed since his former homesteading, he was now eligible again to file on free Government land; Allan could do the same, and, by also taking advantage of the purchase of script, it was possible to still further increase their holdings. In addition to all this, Riles had unfolded a scheme for staking two or three others on free homestead land: it would be necessary, of course, to provide them with "grub" and a small wage during the three years required to prove up, but in consideration of these benefactions the titles to the land, when secured, were to be promptly transferred to Riles and Harris. This was strictly against the law, but the two pioneers felt no sense of crime or shame for their plans, but rather congratulated themselves upon their cunning though by no means original scheme to evade the regulations.