The Homesteaders Part 6

Harris tied his team at the door and went in, shaking the snow and frost from his great-coat. The air inside was close and stifling with tobacco, not unmixed with stronger fumes. A much-smoked oil lamp, hung by a wall-bracket, shed a certain sickly light through the thick air, and was supplemented in its illumination by rays from the door of a capacious wood stove which stood in the centre of the room, and about which half a dozen men were sitting.

"Night, Harris," said the landlord, who had a speaking acquaintance with every settler within twenty miles. "Ye're drivin' late. Ye'll have a bite supper, an' stable the team?"

"No, Hank, not to-night, thanking you the same. But I'm after Dr.

Blain, and I'm in a hurry. Is he here, and--is he fit?" There was an anxiety in the last words that did not escape the host.

"Nothin' ser'ous, I hope? Frost, or somethin'?" Then, without waiting for reply, he continued: "Yes, doctor's here. Upstairs, bed to the right as ye go up. Just got in a little back. As for fit--dig 'im out an' judge for yourself."

Harris lost no time in scaling the ladder which led to the upper half-storey of the building. It was a garret--nothing better--where the cold stars looked through knot-holes in the poplar shingles, and the ends of the shingle-nails were tipped with frost. Another wall-lamp burned uncertainly here, flickering in the wind that whistled through the cracks in the gables, and by its light Harris found "the bed to the right." The form of a man lay diagonally across it, face downward, with arms extended above the head, and so still that Harris paused for a moment in a strange alarm. Then he slipped his hand on the doctor's neck and found it warm.

"Come, Doctor," he said, "I want you with me." But the sleeping man answered with not so much as a groan.

"Come, Dr. Blain," Harris repeated, shaking him soundly. "I want you to go home with me." He might have been speaking to the dead.

In sudden exasperation he seized the doctor by the shoulders, and with one heave of his mighty arms set him upright on the floor and shook him vigorously.

Dr. Blain opened his eyes and blinked uncertainly at the light.

"Whatche doing, Harris?" he said at length, and the recognition brought a thrill of hope. "'S no use...Gotta sleep it off. 'S no use, Harris. 'S no use." And he crumpled up in the bed.

But Harris was desperate. "Now I'm not going to fool with you," he said. "You get up and come with me or I'll take you. Which is it?"

But the doctor only mumbled "'S no use," and fell heavily to sleep.

Throwing open his coat to get free motion for his arms, Harris in a moment wrapped the sleeping man in a couple of blankets from the bed, threw him over his shoulder, carried him down the rickety ladder, and deposited him, none too gently, in the sleigh. There was a mild cheer from the men about the stove over these heroic measures, and one of them thoughtfully threw the doctor's satchel into the sleigh. The next moment all were lost in the darkness.

Harris drove for an hour, watching the trail keenly in the whitish mist of the winter's night, and urging the horses to the limit of their exertions. He had almost forgotten his pa.s.senger when he felt a stir in the bottom of the sleigh. Looking down closely he found the doctor trying to extricate a flask from one of his pockets. With a quick wrench he took it from him, and would have thrown it into the snow, but the thought struck him that it might be needed, and he put it into his own pocket.

The doctor struggled to his feet. "Say, Harris, you're friend o'

mine, but don't take too many liberties, see? 'S no use tryin'

without it. Jush give me that bottle now, or I'll get out an' go home."

Harris was so pleased at the signs of returning coherence that he could have hugged the doctor, but he only said, "You've had enough for to-night. And you won't get out, because if you try to I'll knock you senseless in the bottom of the sleigh."

Then the doctor changed his tactics. He threw his arms about Harris's neck, and genuine tears coursed down his cheeks.

"Say, Harris, you don' know anything about it. You don' know what I'm up agains'. Jush got in from Wakopa to-day, and I haven't had my closh off for week. 'S right! I tell you, Harris, you don' know...Oh, I know I'm a fool--yes, don' tell me. But th' engineer knows it too when he ties down th' shafety valve t' make th' grade. Dosh it jush th' same. Thash jus' like me. Come on, Harris, hand it over. I got t'

have it, or I can't make the grade."

"Well, you'll make the grade first to-night," said Harris.

After that the doctor remained silent for some time. Then suddenly he demanded: "Shay, Harris, where you takin' me to, anyway?"

"I'm taking you home."

"Home? What home? I got no home, jus'a--"

"I'm taking you to my home."

"Wha' for? You're all right, I guess..." Suddenly the doctor stood erect. "Harris, is your wife sick?"

"That's why I came for you."

"Well, why the devil didn't you say so? Here, give me that whip.

Harris, Harris, what did you waste time arguing for?"

"I didn't waste much. The argument was mostly on your side."

"Harris," said the doctor, after a long silence, "you think I'm a fool. You're right. It isn't as though I didn't know. I know the road I'm going, and the end thereof... And yet, in a pinch, I can pull myself together. I'm all right now. But it'll get me again as soon as this is over... Any good I am, any good I do, is just a bit of salvage out of the wreck. The wreck--yes, it's a good word that--wreck."

Just as the dawn was breaking he knelt beside her. Her eyes were very large and quiet, and her face was white and still. But she raised one pale hand, and the thin fingers fondled in his hair. She drew his face very gently down, and big silent tears stood in his eyes.

"We will call him Allan," he said.

CHAPTER VI

IN THE SPELL OF THE MIRAGE

A quarter of a century is a short time as world history goes, but it is a considerable era in the life of the Canadian West. More things--momentous things--than can be hinted at in this narrative occurred in the twenty-five years following the great inrush of 1882.

The boundless prairie reaches of Manitoba were now comparatively well settled, and the tide of immigration, which, after a dozen years'

stagnation, had set in again in greater flood than ever, was now sweeping over the newer lands still farther west. Railways had supplanted ox-cart and bob-sleigh as the freighters of the plains; the farmer read his daily paper on the porch after supper, while his sons and daughters drove to town in "top" buggies, tailor-made suits, and patent-leather shoes. The howl of the coyote had given way to the whistle of the locomotive; beside the sod hut of earlier days rose the frame or brick house proclaiming prosperity or social ambition.

The vast sweep of the horizon, once undefiled by any work of man, was pierced and broken with elevators, villages, and farm buildings, and the whiff of coal smoke was blown down the air which had so lately known only the breath of the prairies. The wild goose no longer loitered in the brown fields in spring and autumn, and the wild duck had sought the safety of the little lakes. The pioneer days had pa.s.sed away, and civilization and prosperity were rampant in the land. There were those, too, who thought that perhaps the country had lost something in all its gaining; that perhaps there was less idealism and less unreckoning hospitality in the brick house on the hill than there once had been in the sod shack In the hollow.

Mary Harris hurried about her capacious kitchen, deep in the preparation of the evening meal. The years had taken toll of the freshness of her young beauty; the shoulders, in mute testimony to much hard labour of the hands, had drooped forward over the deepening chest; the hair was thinner, and farther back above the forehead, and streaked with grey at the temples; the mouth lacked the rosy sensuousness of youth, and sat now in a mould, half of resolution, half submission. Yet her foot had lost little of its sprightliness, and the sympathy in her fine eyes seemed to have deepened with the years.

A moist but appetizing steam rose from the vegetable pots on the range, and when she threw back the iron door to feed more coal the hot glow from within danced a reflection along the bright row of utensils hanging from the wall, and even sought out the bra.s.s plate on the cream separator at the far end of the big room. Through the screen door came the monotonously redundant clic...a...clank of the windmill, and a keen ear might have caught the light splash of water as it fell in the wooden horse-troughs from the iron nozzle of the pump.

Mary stuck a fork in a potato to ascertain if the "bone" was all gone, meanwhile shielding her face from the steam with the pot lid, held aloft in an ap.r.o.ned hand. Having satisfied herself that the meal was making satisfactory progress, she stepped to the door and sent a quick look across the fields, to where a streak of black smoke was scrawled along the sky.

"Beulah," she called, turning toward the interior part of the house.

"Come, Beulah, set the table. They're coming from the field."

In a moment a girl of twenty, plainly attired in a neat calico dress, entered the kitchen. She was fresh and beautiful as her mother had been that first summer in the sod house on the bench, and something in her appearance suggested that with her mother's beauty and fine sensibility she had inherited the indomitable spirit which had made John Harris one of the must prosperous farmers in the district. She moved in an easy, unconscious grace of self-reliance--a reliance that must be just a little irritating to men of old-fashioned notions concerning woman's dependence on the sterner s.e.x--drew the long wooden table, with its covering of white oilcloth, into the centre of the kitchen, and began placing the dishes in position.

"I don't see why we can't have supper in the dining-room," she protested at length. "Before we built the new house we were always talking about how fine it would be to have a separate room, for our meals, and now we don't eat in it once a week."

"I know," said the mother, in a quiet, tired voice. "But you know what your father thinks about it. You know how down he is on style."

"It's no great style to eat in a dining-room," continued the girl.

"What did he build it for? To take off his boots in? That's about all he does there, nights before he goes to bed."