The Prairie Mother Part 14

"The wages of sin is mud," he said as I trotted up to him. "And how much better it would have been, O Singing Pine-Tree, if I'd never taken that car!"

The poor chap was undoubtedly a little wrong in the head, but likable withal, and not ill-favored in appearance, and a man that one should try to make allowances for.

"It would have been much better," I agreed, wondering how long it would be before the Mounted Police would be tracking him down and turning him to making brooms in the prison-factory at Welrina.

"Now, if you'll kindly trot ahead," he announced as he relighted his little briar pipe, "and show me the trail to the ranch of the blighted windmill, I'll idle along behind you."

I resented the placidity with which he was accepting a situation that should have called for considerable meekness on his part. And I sat there for a silent moment or two on Paddy, to make that resentment quite obvious to him.

"What's your name?" I asked, the same as I'd ask the name of any new help that arrived at Alabama Ranch.

"Peter Ketley," he said, for once both direct and sober-eyed.

"All right, Peter," I said, as condescendingly as I was able. "Just follow along, and I'll show you where the bunk-house is."

It was his grin, I suppose, that irritated me. So I started off on Paddy and went like the wind. I don't know whether he called it idling or not, but once or twice when I glanced back at him that touring-car was bounding like a reindeer over some of the rougher places in the trail, and I rather fancy it got some of the mud shaken off its running-gear before it pulled up behind the upper stable at Alabama Ranch.

"You ride like a _ritt-meister_," he said, with an approvingly good-natured wag of the head, as he came up as close as Paddy would permit.

"_Danke-schon!_" I rather listlessly retorted, "And if you leave the car here, close beside this hay-stack, it'll probably not be seen until after dinner. Then some time this afternoon, if the coast is clear, you can get it covered up."

I was a little sorry, the next moment, that I'd harped still again on an act which must have become painful for him to remember, since I could see his face work and his eye betray a tendency to evade mine.

But he thanked me, and explained that he was entirely in my hands.

Such being the case, I was more excited than I'd have been willing to admit when I led him into the shack. Frontier life had long since taught me not to depend too much on appearances, but the right sort of people, the people who out here are called "good leather," would remain the right sort of people in even the roughest wickiup. We may have been merely ranchers, but I didn't want Peter, whatever his morals, to think that we ate our food raw off the bone and made fire by rubbing sticks together.

Yet he must have come pretty close to believing that, unimpeachable as his manners remained, for Whinnie had burned the roast of veal to a charry ma.s.s, the Twins were crying like mad, and d.i.n.kie had painted himself and most of the dining-room table with Worcestershire sauce. I showed Peter where he could wash up and where he could find a whisk to remove the dried mud from his person. Then I hurriedly appeased my complaining bairns, opened a can of beans to take the place of Whinnie's boiled potatoes, which most unmistakably tasted of yellow soap, and supplemented what looked dishearteningly like a Dixon dinner with my last carefully treasured jar of raspberry preserve.

Whinstane Sandy, it is true, remained as glum and silent as a glacier through all that meal. But my new man, Peter, talked easily and uninterruptedly. And he talked amazingly well. He talked about mountain goats, and the Morgan rose-jars in the Metropolitan, and why he disliked George Moore, and the difference between English and American slang, and why English women always wear the wrong sort of hats, and the poetry in Indian names if we only had the brains to understand 'em, and how the wheat I'd manufactured my home-made bread out of was made up of cellulose and germ and endosperm, and how the alcohol and carbonic acid gas of the fermented yeast affected the gluten, and how the woman who could make bread like that ought to have a specially designed decoration pinned on her ap.r.o.n-front. Then he played "Paddy-cake, paddy-cake, Baker's man," with d.i.n.kie, who took to him at once, and when I came back from getting the extra cot ready in the bunk-house, my infant prodigy was on the new hired man's back, circling the dinner-table and shouting "Gid-dap, 'ossie, gid-dap!" as he went, a proceeding which left the seamed old face of Whinstane Sandy about as blithe as a coffin-lid. So I coldly informed the newcomer that I'd show him where he could put his things, if he had any, before we went out to look over the windmill. And Peter rather astonished me by lugging back from the motor-car so discreetly left in the rear a huge suit-case of pliable pigskin that looked like a steamer-trunk with carrying-handles attached to it, a laprobe lined with beaver, a llama-wool sweater made like a Norfolk-jacket, a chamois-lined ulster, a couple of plaid woolen rugs, and a lunch-kit in a neatly embossed leather case.

"Quite a bit of loot, isn't it?" he said, a little red in the face from the effort of portaging so pretentious a load.

That word "loot" stuck in my craw. It was a painful reminder of something that I'd been trying very hard to forget.

"Did it come with the car?" I demanded.

"Yes, it came with the car," he was compelled to acknowledge. "But it would be exhausting, don't you see, to have to tunnel through a hay-stack every time I wanted a hair-brush!"

I icily agreed that it would, scenting tacit reproof in that mildly-put observation of his. But I didn't propose to be trifled with. I calmly led Mr. Peter Ketley out to where the overturned windmill tower lay like a museum skeleton along its bed of weeds and asked him just what tools he'd need. It was a simple question, predicating a simple answer. Yet he didn't seem able to reply to it.

He scratched his close-clipped pate and said he'd have to look things over and study it out. Windmills were tricky things, one kind demanding this sort of treatment and another kind demanding that.

"You'll have no trouble, of course, in raising the tower?" I asked, looking him square in the eye. More than once I'd seen these windmill towers of galvanized steel girders put up on the prairie, and I had a very good idea of how the thing was done. They were a.s.sembled lying on the ground, and then a heavy plank was bolted to the bottom side of the tower base. This plank was held in place by two big stakes. Then a block and tackle was attached to the upper part of the tower, with the running-rope looped over a tripod of poles, to act as a fulcrum, so that when a team of horses was attached to the tackle the tower pivoted on its base and slowly rose in the air, steadied by a couple of guy-ropes held out at right angles to it.

"Oh, no trouble at all," replied the expert quite airily. But I noticed that his eye held an especially abstracted and preoccupied expression.

"Just how is it done?" I innocently inquired.

"Well, that all depends," he sapiently observed. Then, apparently nettled by my obviously superior smile, he straightened up and said: "I want you to leave this entirely to me. It's my problem, and you've no right to be worried over it. It'll take study, of course, and it'll take time. Rome wasn't built in a day. But before I leave you, madam, your tower will be up."

"I hope you're not giving yourself a life sentence," I remarked as I turned and left him.

I knew that he was looking after me as I went, but I gave no outer sign of that inner knowledge. I was equally conscious of his movements, through the shack window, when he possessed himself of a hay-fork and with more than one backward look over his shoulder circled out to where his car still stood. He tooled it still closer up beside the hay-stack, which he mounted, and then calmly and cold-bloodedly buried under a huge mound of sun-cured prairie-gra.s.s that relic of a past crime which he seemed only too willing to obliterate.

But he was callous, I could see, for once that telltale car was out of sight, he appeared much more interested in the water-blisters on his hands than the stain on his character. I could even see him inspect his fingers, from time to time, as he tried to round off the top of his very badly made stack, and test the joints by opening and closing them, as though not quite sure they were still in working order. And when the stack-making was finished and he returned to the windmill, circling about the fallen tower and examining its mechanism and stepping off its dimensions, I noticed that he kept feeling the small of his back and glancing toward the stack in what seemed an att.i.tude of resentment.

When Whinnie came in with one of the teams, after his day a-field, I noticed that Peter approached him blithely and attempted to draw him into secret consultation. But Whinnie, as far as I could see, had no palate for converse with suspicious-looking strangers. He walked several times, in fact, about that mysterious new hay-stack, and moved shackward more dour and silent than ever. So that evening the worthy Peter was a bit silent and self-contained, retiring early, though I strongly suspected, and still suspect, that he'd locked himself in the bunk-house to remove un.o.bserved all the labels from his underwear.

In the morning his appearance was not that of a man at peace with his own soul. He even asked me if he might have a horse and rig to go in to the nearest town for some new parts which he'd need for the windmill. And he further inquired if I'd mind him bringing back a tent to sleep in.

"Did you find the bunk-house uncomfortable?" I asked, noticing again the heavy look about his eyes.

"It's not the bunk-house," he admitted. "It's that old Caledonian saw-mill with the rock-ribbed face."

"What's the matter with Whinnie?" I demanded, with a quick touch of resentment. And Peter looked up in astonishment.

"Do you mean you've never heard him--and your shack not sixty paces away?"

"Heard him what?" I asked.

"_Heard him snore_," explained Peter, with a sigh.

"Are you sure?" I inquired, remembering the mornings when I'd had occasion to waken Whinnie, always to find him sleeping as silent and placid as one of my own babies.

"I had eight hours of it in which to dissipate any doubts," he pointedly explained.

This mystified me, but to object to the tent, of course, would have been picayune. I had just the faintest of suspicions, however, that the fair Peter might never return from Buckhorn, though I tried to solace myself with the thought that the motor-car and the beaver-lined lap-robe would at least remain with me. But my fears were groundless.

Before supper-time Peter was back in high spirits, with the needed new parts for the windmill, and an outfit of blue denim apparel for himself, and a little red sweater for d.i.n.kie, and an armful of magazines for myself.

Whinnie, as he stood watching Peter's return, clearly betrayed the disappointment which that return involved. He said nothing, but when he saw my eye upon him he gazed dourly toward his approaching rival and tapped a weather-beaten brow with one stubby finger. He meant, of course, that Peter was a little locoed.

But Peter is not. He is remarkably clear-headed and quick-thoughted, and if there's any madness about him it's a madness with a deep-laid method.

The one thing that annoys me is that he keeps me so continuously and yet so obliquely under observation. He pretends to be studying out my windmill, but he is really trying to study out its owner. Whinnie, I know, won't help him much. And I refuse to rise to his gaudiest flies.

So he's still puzzling over what he regards as an anomaly, a farmerette who knows the difference between De Bussey and a side-delivery horse-rake, a mother of three children who can ride a pinto and play a banjo, a clodhopper in petticoats who can talk about Ragusa and Toarmina and the summer races at Piping Rock. But it's a relief to converse about something besides summer-fallowing and breaking and seed-wheat and tractor-oil and cows' teats. And it's a stroke of luck to capture a farm-hand who can freshen you up on foreign opera at the same time that he campaigns against the domestic weed!

_Thursday the Eleventh_

We are a peaceful and humdrum family, very different from the westerners of the romantic movies. If we were the cinema kind of ranchers Pee-Wee would be cutting his teeth on a six-shooter, little d.i.n.kie would be off rustling cattle, Poppsy would be away holding up the Transcontinental Limited, and Mummsie would be wearing chaps, toting a gun, and pretending to the sheriff that her jail-breaking brother was _not_ hidden in the cellar!

Whereas, we are a good deal like the easterners who till the soil and try to make a home for themselves and their children, only we are without a great many of their conveniences, even though we do beat them out in the matter of soil. But breaking sod isn't so picturesque as breaking laws, and a plow-handle isn't so thrilling to the eye as a shooting-iron, so it's mostly the blood-and-thunder type of westerners, from the ranch with the cow-brand name, who goes ki-yi-ing through picture and story, advertising us as an aggregation of train-robbers and road-agents and sheriff-rabbits. And it's a type that makes me tired.

The open range, let it be remembered, is gone, and the cowboy is going after it. Even the broncho, they tell me, is destined to disappear. It seems hard to think that the mustang will be no more, the mustang which d.i.n.ky-Dunk once told me was the descendant of the three hundred Arab and Spanish horses which Cortez first carried across the Atlantic to Mexico. For we, the newcomers, mesh the open range with our barb-wire, and bring in what Mrs. Eagle-Moccasin called our "stink-wagon" to turn the gra.s.s upside down and grow wheat-berries where the buffalo once wallowed. But sometimes, even in this newfangled work-a-day world, I find a fresh spirit of romance, quite as glamorous, if one has only the eye to see it, as the romance of the past. In one generation, almost, we are making a home-land out of a wilderness, we are conjuring up cities and threading the continent with steel, we are feeding the world on the best and cleanest wheat known to hungry man. And on these clear and opaline mornings when I see the prairie-floor waving with its harvest to be, and hear the clack and stutter of the tractor breaking sod on the outer quarter and leaving behind it the serried furrows of umber, I feel there is something primal and poetic in the picture, something mysteriously moving and epic....

The weather has turned quite warm again, with glorious spring days of winy and heart-tugging sunlight and cool and starry nights. In my spare time I've been helping Whinnie get in my "truck" garden, and Peter, who has reluctantly forsaken the windmill and learned to run the tractor, is breaking sod and summer-fallowing for me. For there is always another season to think of, and I don't want the tin-can of failure tied to my spirit's tail. As I say, the days slip by. Morning comes, fresh as a new-minted nickel, we mount the treadmill, and somebody rolls the big red ball off the table and it's night again.

But open-air work leaves me healthy, my children grow a-pace, and I should be most happy.