"Mebbe not," he said, adding, as he noticed a disposition on her part to
edge out, "But he shorely looks hungry."
It was only a coyote, and afterwards she could never recall the episode
without a blush, but the fact remains that while the grizzled apparition
crowned a roll, she threw dignity overboard and clung to Carter. It was
well, too, that she did, for more from deviltry than fear of the gray
shadow the ponies just then bolted.
Ensued a minute of dust, wind, bumpings; then, without any attempt to
check their speed, Carter got the mad little brutes back to the trail.
Several furious miles had passed before, answering a gasping question as
to whether he couldn't stop them, that imperturbable driver said:
"I ain't trying very hard. They're going our way, and we've got to hit
this trail some licks to make Flynn's by noon. He's the first settler
north of the valley."
They did hit it some "licks." One after another the yellow miles slid
beneath the buck-board, deadly in their sameness. With the exception of
that lone coyote, they saw no life. Right and left the tawny prairies
reached out to the indefinite horizon; neither cabin nor farmstead broke
their sweep; save where the dark growths of the Assiniboin Valley drew a
dull line to the north, no spot of color marred that great monochrome.
Just before they came to the valley Carter dashed around the Red River
cart of a Cree squaw. Shortly after they came on her lord driving
industrious heels into the ribs of a ragged pony. Then the trail shot
through a bluff--rugged, riven, buttressed with tall headlands to whose
scarred sides dark woods clung, the mile-wide valley lay before them.
Up from its depths rose the cry of a bell. Clear, silvery, resonant, it
flowed with the stream, echoed in dark ravines, filled the air with its
rippling music.
"Catholic mission," Carter said, and as he spoke the ponies plunged
after the trail which fell at an angle of forty-five into a black
ravine. The girl felt as though the earth had dropped from under, then,
bump! the wheels struck and went slithering and ricochetting among the
ruts and bowlders. A furious burst down the last slopes and they were
galloping out on the bottom-lands.
"Oh!" she exclaimed, regaining breath. "What recklessness!"
"Now do you really call that reckless?" His mild surprise would have
been convincing but for the wicked twinkle.
"Of course--I do," she said, choking with fright and indignation. "I
believe--you did it on purpose."
"Well, well." He shook a sorrowful head. "And to think I shouldn't
have knowed it! Look out!"
They had swung by the log mission with the black-robed priest in the
door, circled the ruins of a Hudson Bay fort, and now the Assiniboin
Ford had suddenly opened before them. Fed fat by mountain streams, the
river poured, a yeasty flood, over the ford, a roaring terror of swift
waters. While the girl caught her breath they were in to the hubs, the
thills; then the green waters licked up through the buck-board staves.
Half wading, half swimming, the ponies were held to the narrow passage
by that master-hand. On either side smooth, sucking mouths drew down to
dangerous currents, and, reaching, Carter flicked one with his whip.
"Cree Injun drowned there last flood."
A moment later he turned the ponies sharply upstream and told of two
settlers who had lingered a second too long on that turn. Indeed, it
seemed to Helen as though each race, every eddy, perpetuated the memory
of some unfortunate. She sighed her relief when, with a rush, the
ponies took them up the bank, out of the roar and swirl, into the shade
of a ravine.
Glancing up, she caught Carter regarding her with serious admiration.
"You'll do," he said. Then she realized that this man, whom she had
been trying to classify with her city tradesmen, had been trying her out
according to his standards. The thought brought sudden confusion. She
blushed. But with ready tact he turned and kept up a rapid fire of
comment on the country through which they were passing till she
recovered her composure.
For they were now in the Park Lands, the antithesis of the arid plains
on the other side of the river. Flower-bespangled, dotted with clump
poplar, retaining in August a suggestion of spring's verdure, the
prairies rolled off and away in long earth billows. Everywhere rank
herbage bowed in sunlit waves under the wind. Nor was there lack of
life. Here an elk sprang from behind a bluff. A band of jumping deer
followed him over the horizon. There a covey of prairie-chickens rose
on whirring wing; a fox grinned at them from the crest of a sand-hill.
A rich country, the girl was remarking on the lack of settlers when
Carter extended his whip.
"There's the first of them. That's Flynn's place."
Speeding through the enormous grain-fields west of Winnipeg, Helen had
seen from the cars solitary cabins of frame or sod, pinned down, as it
were, in the exact centre of a carpet of wheat, emphasizing with their
loneliness that vastness about them. But this was different, more
homelike, if quite as strange. Built of hewn logs and lime-washed,
Flynn's house nestled with its stables and out-buildings under the wing
of a poplar bluff. Around it, of course, stretched the wheat; but here
it was merely an oasis, a bright shoal in the sea of brown that flowed
on to a distant dark line, the spruce forests of the Riding Mountains.
Bathed in sunshine, with cattle wandering at will, knee-deep in pasture,
it made a beautiful picture. The girl came under its spell. She felt
the freedom, the witchery of those sun-washed spaces; their silences,
whispers, cloud-shadows, the infinity which broods upon them.
"Is our place like this?" she asked.
"Prettier." Carter indicated the distant forest line. "We are close in
to the bush and the country is broken up into woodland, lake, and
rolling prairie."
"Then I can be happy," she sighed.
Quickly averting his eyes that their sympathy might not dampen her mood,
he drew her attention to a man who was cutting green fodder on the far
side of the wheat-field.
"There's Flynn."
*IV*
*THE COYOTE SNAPS*
A tall Irishman of the gaunt Tipperary breed, Flynn straightened as
Carter reined in, and thrust out a mighty paw. "Ye're welcome, ma'am;
an' ye've come in season, for the woman's just called to dinner. Just
drive on an' unhitch before the door."
"Yes, it's a fine stand of wheat."
Walking beside them, he replied to Carter's comment: "Too foine. It's a
troifle rank to ripen before the frost." A wistful shade clouded his
face, extinguished the mercurial twinkle in his eye. "It 'll freeze,
shure." The accent on the last syllable was pitiable, for it told of
long waiting, hope deferred, labor ill-requited. It was the voice of
one who bolsters himself that the stroke of fate may not utterly kill,
who slays expectation lest it betray him. Yet in its pessimism dead
hope breathed. "Yes, it 'll freeze," Flynn assured the malicious fates.
At close range the house was not nearly so picturesque. A motley of
implements strewed the yard: ploughs, harrows, rakes, a red-and-green
binder, all resting hap-hazard among a litter of chips, half-hewn logs,
and other debris. The stables were hidden by huge manure piles. The
place lacked every element of the order one sees on an Eastern
farm--rioted in the necessary disorder of newness. Flynn's generation
were too busy making farms; tidiness would come with the next.
Not realizing this, Helen was drawing unfavorable parallels from the
pervading squalor, when Mrs. Flynn, who was simply Flynn in petticoats,
came bustling out with welcomes. Miss Morrill must come right in! It
was that long since she, Mrs. Flynn, had set eyes on a woman's face that
she had almost forgotten what they looked like!
"An' you that fond av your glass, mother?" Flynn teased.
"Glass, ye say?" Mrs. Flynn retorted. "Sure an' 'twas yerself that
smashed it three months ago. It's the bottom av a milk-pan he's been
shaving in ever since, my dear," she added.
Flynn winked. "An' let me advise you, Carter. If ivir ye marry, don't
have a glass in the house an' ye'll be able to see ye'self in ivery
tin."
Out at the stable the merriment died from his face, and facing Carter he
asked: "Phwat's up between ye and Hines? I was taking dinner with
Bender yesterday, an' while we was eating along came Hines.
"'There's a man,' he says, spaking to Bender av you. 'There's a man!
big, impident, strong. Ye're no chicken, Bender, but ye couldn't put
that fellow's shoulders to the ground.' I'm not needing to tell you the
effect on Bender?" Flynn finished.
Carter nodded. He knew the man. Big, burly, brutal, Bender was a
natural product of the lumber-camps in which he had lived a life that
was little more than a calender of "scraps." Starting in at eighteen on
the Mattawa, he had fought his way to the head of its many camps, then
passed to the Michigan woods and attained the kingship there. He
_lived_ rather than _loved_ to fight. But, though in the northern
settlements Carter was the only man who approximated the lumberman's
difficult standard in courage and inches, so far fate had denied him
cause of quarrel.
"The coyote!" Flynn exclaimed, when Carter had told of Hines's attempt
on Morrill's hay-slough. "An' him sick in bed, poor man. I wouldn't
wipe me feet on Hines's dirty rag av a soul. But he's made ye some
mischief. 'Ye're a liar, Hines!' Bender growls. 'I can lick him er any
other man betwixt this an' the Rockies.'
"Hines didn't like the lie, but he gulped it. 'Talk's cheap,' he
snarls.
"'Carter's a good neighbor,' Bender answers. 'But if he gives me a
cause--'
"'A _cause_?' Hines cackles, laughing. 'Why, him an' Morrill have
grabbed all the best hay in Silver Creek an' defy anny man to touch it.
Run your mower into their big slough an' ye'll have cause enough.'
"That made Bender hot. 'I'll do it!' he roars, 'this very day.' But,"
Flynn finished, "he had to run out to the blacksmith's to fix his mower
sickle, so he won't get out till to-morrow morning."
"If ye need anny help--" he said, tentatively, as Carter pondered with
frowning brow. Then, catching the other's eye, he hastily added: "Ye'll
pardon me! But Bender's a terr'ble fighter!"
His alarm was so palpable that Carter laughed. "Don't bother," he said.
"I'm not going to roll, bite, chew, or gouge with Bender."
"Look here!" Flynn interposed, with additional alarm. "Ye'll not be
after making anny gun-plays? This is Canada, ye'll mind, where they
hang folks mighty easy."