North of Fifty-Three Part 6

"From the United States and everywhere," Miss Ryan replied. "Take me up to your room, dear, where we can talk our heads off.

"And, furthermore, Hazie, I'll be pleased to have you address me as Mrs. Brooks, my dear young woman," the plump lady laughed, as she settled herself in a chair in Hazel's room.

"So you're married?" Hazel said.

"I am that," Mrs. Kitty responded emphatically, "to the best boy that ever drew breath. And so should you be, dear girl. I don't see how you've escaped so long--a good-looking girl like you. The boys were always crazy after you. There's nothing like having a good man to take care of you, dear."

"Heaven save me from them!" Hazel answered bitterly. "If you've got a good one, you're lucky. I can't see them as anything but self-centered, arrogant, treacherous brutes."

"Lord bless us--it's worse than I thought!" Kitty jumped up and threw her arms around Hazel. "There, there--don't waste a tear on them. I know all about it. I came over to see you just as soon as some of the girls--nasty little cats they are; a woman's always meaner than a man, dear--just as soon as they gave me an inkling of how things were going with you. Pshaw! The world's full of good, decent fellows--and you've got one coming."

"I hope not," Hazel protested.

"Oh, yes, you have," Mrs. Brooks smilingly a.s.sured her. "A woman without a man is only half a human being, anyway, you know--and vice versa. I know. We can cuss the men all we want to, my dear, and some of us unfortunately have a nasty experience with one now and then. But we can't get away from the fundamental laws of being."

"If you'd had my experience of the last two weeks you'd sing a different tune," Hazel vehemently declared. "I hate--I--"

And then she gave way, and indulged in the luxury of turning herself loose on Kitty's shoulder. Presently she was able to wipe her eyes and relate the whole story from the Sunday Mr. Bush stopped and spoke to her in the park down to that evening.

Kitty nodded understandingly. "But the girls have handed it to you worse than the men, Hazel," she observed sagely. "Jack Barrow was just plain crazy jealous, and a man like that can't help acting as he did.

You're really fortunate, I think, because you'd not be really happy with a man like that. But the girls that you and I grew up with--they should have stood by you, knowing you as they did; yet you see they were ready to think the worst of you. They nearly always do when there's a man in the case. That's a weakness of our s.e.x, dear. My, what a vindictive old Turk that Bush must have been! Well, you aren't working. Come and stay with me. Hubby's got a two-year contract with the World Advertising Company. We'll be located here that long at least. Come and stay with us. We'll show these little-minded folk a thing or two. Leave it to us."

"Oh, no, I couldn't think of that, Kitty!" Hazel faltered. "You know I'd love to, and it's awfully good of you, but I think I'm just about ready to go away from Granville."

"Well, come and stop with us till you do go," Kitty insisted. "We are going to take a furnished cottage for a while. Though, between you and me, dear, knowing people as I do, I can't blame you for wanting to be where their nasty tongues can't wound you."

But Hazel was obdurate. She would not inflict herself on the one friend she had left. And Kitty, after a short talk, berated her affectionately for her independence, and rose to go.

"For," said she, "I didn't get hold of this thing till Addie Horton called at the hotel this afternoon, and I didn't stop to think that it was near teatime, but came straight here. Jimmie'll think I've eloped.

So ta-ta. I'll come out to-morrow about two. I have to confab with a house agent in the forenoon. By-by."

Hazel sat down and actually smiled when Kitty was gone. Somehow a grievous burden had fallen off her mind. Likewise, by some psychological quirk, the idea of leaving Granville and making her home elsewhere no longer struck her as running away under fire. She did not wish to subject Kitty Brooks to the difficulties, the embarra.s.sment that might arise from having her as a guest; but the mere fact that Kitty stood stanchly by her made the world seem less harsh and dreary, made it seem as if she had, in a measure, justified herself. She felt that she could adventure forth among strangers in a strange country with a better heart, knowing that Kitty Brooks would put a swift quietus on any gossip that came her way.

So that Hazel went down to the dining-room light-heartedly, and when the meal was finished came back and fell to reading her papers. The first of the Western papers was a Vancouver _World_. In a real-estate man's half-page she found a diminutive sketch plan of the city on the sh.o.r.es of Burrard Inlet, Canada's princ.i.p.al outpost on the far Pacific.

"It's quite a big place," she murmured absently. "One would be far enough away there, goodness knows."

Then she turned to the "Help Wanted" advertis.e.m.e.nts. The thing which impressed her quickly and most vividly was the dearth of demand for clerks and stenographers, and the repeated calls for domestic help and such. Domestic service she shrank from except as a last resort. And down near the bottom of the column she happened on an inquiry for a school-teacher, female preferred, in an out-of-the-way district in the interior of the province.

"Now, that--" Hazel thought.

She had a second-cla.s.s certificate tucked away among her belongings.

Originally it had been her intention to teach, and she had done so one term in a backwoods school when she was eighteen. With the ending of the term she had returned to Granville, studied that winter, and got her second certificate; but at the same time she had taken a business-college course, and the following June found her clacking a typewriter at nine dollars a week. And her teacher's diploma had remained in the bottom of her trunk ever since.

"I could teach, I suppose, by rubbing up a little on one or two subjects as I went along," she reflected. "I wonder now--"

What she wondered was how much salary she could expect, and she took up the paper again, and looked carefully for other advertis.e.m.e.nts calling for teachers. In the _World_ and in a Winnipeg paper she found one or two vacancies to fill out the fall term, and gathered that Western schools paid from fifty to sixty dollars a month for "schoolma'ams"

with certificates such as she held.

"Why not?" she asked herself. "I've got two resources. If I can't get office work I can teach. I can do _anything_ if I have to. And it's far enough away, in all conscience--all of twenty-five hundred miles."

Unaccountably, since Kitty Brooks' visit, she found herself itching to turn her back on Granville and its unpleasant a.s.sociations. She did not attempt to a.n.a.lyze the feeling. Strange lands, and most of all the West, held alluring promise. She sat in her rocker, and could not help but dream of places where people were a little broader gauge, a little less p.r.o.ne to narrow, conventional judgments. Other people had done as she proposed doing--cut loose from their established environment, and made a fresh start in countries where none knew or cared whence they came or who they were. Why not she? One thing was certain: Granville, for all she had been born there, and grown to womanhood there, was now no place for her. The very people who knew her best would make her suffer most.

She spent that evening going thoroughly over the papers and writing letters to various school boards, taking a chance at one or two she found in the Manitoba paper, but centering her hopes on the country west of the Rockies. Her letters finished, she took stock of her resources--verified them, rather, for she had not so much money that she did not know almost where she stood. Her savings in the bank amounted to three hundred odd dollars, and cash in hand brought the sum to a total of three hundred and sixty-five. At any rate, she had sufficient to insure her living for quite a long time. And she went to bed feeling better than she had felt for two weeks.

Kitty Brooks came again the next afternoon, and, being a young woman of wide experience and good sense, made no further attempt to influence Hazel one way or the other.

"I hate to see you go, though," she remarked truthfully. "But you'll like the West--if it happens that you go there. You'll like it better than the East; there's a different sort of spirit among the people.

I've traveled over some of it, and if Jimmie's business permitted we'd both like to live there. And--getting down to strictly practical things--a girl can make a much better living there. Wages are high.

And--who knows?--you might capture a cattle king."

Hazel shrugged her shoulders, and Mrs. Kitty forbore teasing. After that they gossiped and compared notes covering the two years since they had met until it was time for Kitty to go home.

Very shortly thereafter--almost, it seemed, by return mail--Hazel got replies to her letters of inquiry. The fact that each and every one seemed bent on securing her services astonished her.

"Schoolma'ams must certainly be scarce out there," she told herself.

"This is an embarra.s.sment of riches. I'm going somewhere, but which place shall it be?"

But the reply from Cariboo Meadows, B. C., the first place she had thought of, decided her. The member of the school board who replied held forth the natural beauty of the country as much as he did the advantages of the position. The thing that perhaps made the strongest appeal to Hazel was a little kodak print inclosed in the letter, showing the schoolhouse.

The building itself was primitive enough, of logs, with a pole-and-sod roof. But it was the huge background, the timbered mountains rising to snow-clad heights against a cloudless sky, that attracted her. She had never seen a greater height of land than the rolling hills of Ontario.

Here was a frontier, big and new and raw, holding out to her as she stared at the print a promise--of what? She did not know. Adventure?

If she desired adventure, it was purely a subconscious desire. But she had lived in a rut a long time without realizing it more than vaguely, and there was something in her nature that responded instantly when she contemplated journeying alone into a far country. She found herself hungering for change, for a measure of freedom from petty restraints, for elbow-room in the wide s.p.a.ces, where one's neighbor might be ten or forty miles away. She knew nothing whatever of such a life, but she could feel a certain envy of those who led it.

She sat for a long time looking at the picture, thinking. Here was the concrete, visible presentment of something that drew her strongly. She found an atlas, and looked up Cariboo Meadows on the map. It was not to be found, and Hazel judged it to be a purely local name. But the letter told her that she would have to stage it a hundred and sixty-five miles north from Ashcroft, B. C., where the writer would meet her and drive her to the Meadows. She located the stage-line terminal on the map, and ran her forefinger over the route. Mountain and lake and stream lined and dotted and criss-crossed the province from end to end of its seven-hundred-mile length. Back of where Cariboo Meadows should be three or four mining camps snuggled high in the mountains.

"What a country!" she whispered. "It's wild; really, truly wild; and everything I've ever seen has been tamed and smoothed down, and made eminently respectable and conventional long ago. That's the place.

That's where I'm going, and I'm going it blind. I'm not going to tell any one--not even Kitty--until, like a bear, I've gone over the mountain to see what I can see."

Within an hour of that Miss Hazel Weir had written to accept the terms offered by the Cariboo Meadow school district, and was busily packing her trunk.

CHAPTER VI

CARIBOO MEADOWS

A tall man, sunburned, slow-speaking, met Hazel at Soda Creek, the end of her stage journey, introducing himself as Jim Briggs.

"Pretty tiresome trip, ain't it?" he observed. "You'll have a chance to rest decent to-night, and I got a team uh bays that'll yank yuh to the Meadows in four hours 'n' a half. My wife'll be plumb tickled to have yuh. They ain't much more'n half a dozen white women in ten miles uh the Meadows. We keep a boardin'-house. Hope you'll like the country."

That was a lengthy speech for Jim Briggs, as Hazel discovered when she rolled out of Soda Creek behind the "team uh bays." His conversation was decidedly monosyllabic. But he could drive, if he was no talker, and his team could travel. The road, albeit rough in spots, a mere track through timber and little gems of open where the yellowing gra.s.s waved knee-high, and over hills which sloped to deep canons lined with pine and spruce, seemed short enough. And so by eleven o'clock Hazel found herself at Cariboo Meadows.

"Schoolhouse's over yonder." Briggs pointed out the place--an unnecessary guidance, for Hazel had already marked the building set off by itself and fortified with a tall flagpole. "And here's where we live. Kinda out uh the world, but blame good place to live."

Hazel did like the place. Her first impression was thankfulness that her lot had been cast in such a spot. But it was largely because of the surroundings, essentially primitive, the clean air, guiltless of smoke taint, the aromatic odors from the forest that ranged for unending miles on every hand. For the first time in her life, she was beyond hearing of the clang of street cars, the roar of traffic, the dirt and smells of a city. It seemed good. She had no regrets, no longing to be back. There was a pain sometimes, when in spite of herself she would fall to thinking of Jack Barrow. But that she looked upon as a closed chapter. He had hurt her where a woman can be most deeply wounded--in her pride and her affections--and the hurt was dulled by the smoldering resentment that thinking of him always fanned to a flame. Miss Hazel Weir was neither meek nor mild, even if her environment had bred in her a repression that had become second nature.