The Foreigner Part 28

And, Jack, you must stop sending me money, for I do not need it and I will not use it, and I just keep putting what you send me in the bank for you. The Lord has given me many friends, and He never has allowed me to want.

'I shall wait two weeks, and then send you Kalman--that is his name, Kalman Kalmar, a nice name, isn't it? And he is a dear good boy; that is, he might be.' "Good heart, so might we all," cried Jack. 'But I love him just as he is.' "Happy boy." 'Wouldn't it be fine if you could make him a good man? How much he might do for his people! And if he stays here he will get to be terrible, for his father was terrible, although, poor man, it was hardly his fault.' "I surely believe in G.o.d's mercy," said poor Jack.

'This is a long rambling letter, dear Jack, but you will forgive me. I sometimes get pretty tired.' And Jack's brown lean hand closed swiftly. 'There is so much to do. But I am pretty well and I have many kind friends. So much to do, so many sick and poor and lonely. They need a friend. The Winnipeg people are very kind, but they are very busy.

'Now, my dear Jack, will you do for Kalman all you can? And--may I say it?--remember, he is just a boy. I do not want to preach to you, but he needs to be under the care of a good man, and that is why I send him to you.

'Your loving sister, 'Margaret.'

There was a grim look on Jack French's face as he finished reading the letter the second time.

"You're a good one," he said, "and you have a wise little head as well as a tender heart. Don't want to preach to me, eh? But you get your work in all the same. Two weeks! Let's see, this letter has been four weeks on the way--up to Edmonton and back! By Jove!

That boy ought to be along with Macmillan's outfit. I say, Jimmy,"

this to Jimmy Green, who, besides representing Her Majesty in the office of Postmaster, was general store keeper and trader to the community, "when will Macmillan be in?"

"Couple of days, Jack."

"Well, I guess I'll have to wait."

And this turned out an unhappy necessity for Jack French, for when the Macmillan outfit drove up to the Crossing he was lying incapable and dead to all around, in Jimmy Green's back store.

CHAPTER XI

THE EDMONTON TRAIL

Straight across the country, winding over plains, around sleughs, threading its way through bluffs, over prairie undulations, fording streams and crossing rivers, and so making its course northwest from Winnipeg for nine hundred miles, runs the Edmonton trail.

Macmillan was the last of that far-famed and adventurous body of men who were known all through the western country for their skill, their courage, their endurance in their profession of freighters from Winnipeg to the far outpost of Edmonton and beyond into the Peace River and Mackenzie River districts. The building of railroads cut largely into their work, and gradually the freighters faded from the trails. Old Sam Macmillan was among the last of his tribe left upon the Edmonton trail. He was a master in his profession. In the packing of his goods with their almost infinite variety, in the making up of his load, he was possessed of marvellous skill, while on the trail itself he was easily king of them all.

Macmillan was a big silent Irishman, raw boned, hardy, and with a highly developed genius for handling ox or horse teams of any size in a difficult bit of road, and possessing as well a unique command of picturesque and varied profanity. These gifts he considered as necessarily related, and the exercise of each was always in conjunction with the other, for no man ever heard Macmillan swear in ordinary conversation or on commonplace occasions. But when his team became involved in a sleugh, it was always a point of doubt whether he aroused more respect and admiration in his attendants by his rare ability to get the last ounce of hauling power out of his team or by the artistic vividness and force of the profanity expended in producing this desired result. It is related that on an occasion when he had as part of his load the worldly effects of an Anglican Bishop en route to his heroic mission to the far North, the good Bishop, much grieved at Macmillan's profanity, urged upon him the unnecessary character of this particular form of encouragement.

"Is it swearing Your Riverence objects to?" said Macmillan, whose vocabulary still retained a slight flavour of the Old Land. "I do a.s.sure you that they won't pull a pound without it."

But the Bishop could not be persuaded of this, and urged upon Macmillan the necessity of eliminating this part of his persuasion.

"Just as you say, Your Riverence. I ain't hurried this trip and we'll do our best."

The next bad sleugh brought opportunity to make experiment of the new system. The team stuck fast in the black muck, and every effort to extricate them served only to imbed them more hopelessly in the sticky gumbo. Time pa.s.sed on. A dark and lowering night was imminent.

The Bishop grew anxious. Macmillan, with whip and voice, encouraged his team, but all in vain. The Bishop's anxiety increased with the approach of a threatening storm.

"It is growing late, Mr. Macmillan, and it looks like rain.

Something must be done."

"It does that, Your Lordship, but the brutes won't pull half their own weight without I speak to them in the way they are used to."

The good man was in a sore strait. Another half hour pa.s.sed, and still with no result. It was imperative that his goods should be brought under cover before the storm should break. Again the good Bishop urged Macmillan to more strenuous effort.

"We can't stay here all night, sir," he said. "Surely something can be done."

"Well, I'll tell Your Lordship, it's one of two things, stick or swear, and there's nothing else for it."

"Well, well, Mr. Macmillan," said the Bishop resignedly, "we must get on. Do as you think best, but I take no responsibility in the matter." At which Pilate's counsel he retired from the scene, leaving Macmillan an untrammelled course.

Macmillan seized the reins from the ground, and walking up and down the length of his six-horse team, began to address them singly and in the ma.s.s in terms so sulphurously descriptive of their ancestry, their habits, and their physical and psychological characteristics, that when he gave the word in a mighty culminating roar of blasphemous excitation, each of the bemired beasts seemed to be inspired with a special demon, and so exerted itself to the utmost limit of its powers that in a single minute the load stood high and dry on solid ground.

One other characteristic made Macmillan one of the most trusted of the freighters upon the trail. While in charge of his caravan he was an absolute teetotaler, making up, however, for this abstinence at the end of the trip by a spree whose duration was limited only by the extent of his credit.

It was to Mr. Macmillan's care that Mrs. French had committed Kalman with many and anxious injunctions, and it is Macmillan's due to say that every moment of that four weeks' journey was one of undiluted delight to the boy, although it is to be feared that not the least enjoyable moments in that eventful journey were those when he stood lost in admiration while his host, with the free use of his sulphurously psychological lever, pried his team out of the frequent sleughs that hara.s.sed the trail. And before Macmillan had delivered up his charge, his pork and hard tack, aided by the ardent suns and sweeping winds of the prairie, had done their work, so that it was a brown and thoroughly hardy looking lad that was handed over to Jimmy Green at the Crossing.

"Here is Jack French's boy," said Macmillan. "And it's him that's got the ear for music. In another trip he'll dust them horses out of a hole with any of us. Swear! Well, I should smile! By the powers! he makes me feel queer."

"Swear," echoed a thick voice from behind the speaker, "who's swearing?"

"h.e.l.lo! Jack," said Macmillan quietly. "Got a jag on, eh?"

"Attend to your own business, sir," said Jack French, whose dignity grew and whose temper shortened with every bottle.

"Answer my question, sir. Who is swearing?"

"Oh, there's nothing to it, Jack," said Macmillan. "I was telling Jimmy here that that's a mighty smart boy of yours, and with a great tongue for language."

"I'll break his back," growled Jack French, his face distorted with a scowl. "Look here, boy," he continued, whirling fiercely upon the lad, "you are sent to me by the best woman on earth to make a man of you, and I'll have no swearing on my ranch," delivering himself of which sentiment punctuated by a _feu de joie_ of muddled oaths, he lurched away into the back shop and fell into a drunken sleep, leaving the boy astonished and for some minutes speechless.

"Is that her brother?" he asked at length, when he had found voice.

"Whose brother?" said Jimmy Green.

"Yes, boy, that's her brother," said Macmillan. "But that is not himself any more than a mad dog. Jimmy here has been filling him up," shaking his finger at the culprit, "which he had no right to do, knowing Jack French as he does, by the same token."

"Oh, come on, Mac," said Jimmy apologetically. "You know Jack French, and when he gets a-goin' could I stop him? No, nor you."

Next morning when Kalman came forth from the loft which served Jimmy Green as store room for his marvellously varied merchandise, he found that Macmillan had long since taken the trail and was by this time miles on his journey toward Edmonton. The boy was lonely and sick at heart. Macmillan had been a friend to him, and had const.i.tuted the last link that held him to the life he had left behind in the city. It was to Macmillan that the little white-faced lady who was to the boy the symbol of all that was high and holy in character, had entrusted him for safe deliverance to her brother Jack French. Kalman had spent an unhappy night, his sleep being broken by the recurring vision of the fierce and bloated face of the man who had cursed him and threatened him on the previous evening. The boy had not yet recovered from the horror and surprise of his discovery that this drunken and brutalized creature was the n.o.ble-hearted brother into whose keeping his friend and benefactress had given him. That a man should drink himself drunk was nothing to his discredit in Kalman's eyes, but that Mrs. French's brother, the loved and honoured gentleman whom she had taught him to regard as the ideal of all manly excellence, should turn out to be this bloated and foul-mouthed bully, shocked him inexpressibly. From these depressing thoughts he was aroused by a cheery voice.

"h.e.l.lo! my boy, had breakfast?"

He turned quickly and beheld a tall, strongly made and handsome man of middle age, clean shaven, neatly groomed, and with a fine open cheery face.

"No, sir," he stammered, with unusual politeness in his tone, and staring with all his eyes.

It was Jack French who addressed him, but this handsome, kindly, well groomed man was so different from the man who had reeled over him and poured forth upon him his abusive profanity the night before, that his mind refused to a.s.sociate the one with the other.

"Well, boy," said Jack French, "you must be hungry. Jimmy, anything left for the boy?"

"Lots, Jack," said Jimmy eagerly, as if relieved to see him clothed again and in his right mind. "The very best. Here, boy, set in here."

He opened a door which led into a side room where the remains of breakfast were disclosed upon the table. "Bacon and eggs, my boy, eggs! mind you, and Hudson's Bay biscuit and black strap. How's that?"