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LORIMER OF THE NORTHWEST
[Illustration: We Were in the canyon, Shooting Down the Mad Rush
of a Rapid toward Eternity.--Page 170.]
LORIMER OF THE NORTHWEST
By HAROLD BINDLOSS
Author of By Right of Purchase, Etc.
With Frontispiece By
ALFRED JAMES DEWEY
A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers--New York
Copyright, 1909, by
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
All rights reserved
January, 1909
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. The First Sowing 7
II. The Church Parade 16
III. "The Land of Promise" 25
IV. An Unpleasant Apprenticeship 35
V. A Bid for Fortune 46
VI. The First Crop 56
VII. Harvest Home 66
VIII. Held Up 77
IX. A Reckoning 91
X. A Forward Policy 105
XI. On the Railroad 117
XII. The Unexpected 128
XIII. Advocates of Temperance 138
XIV. The Hired Teamster 151
XV. Under the Shadow of Death 163
XVI. When the Waters Rose 175
XVII. The Return 184
XVIII. The Opening of the Line 195
XIX. A Generous Offer 209
XX. The Return to the Prairie 220
XXI. The Stolen Cattle 231
XXII. A Race with Time 242
XXIII. On the Gold Trail 253
XXIV. The Brink of Eternity 267
XXV. Ormond's Last Journey 280
XXVI. The Trial 291
XXVII. The Road to Dakota 305
XXVIII. The Recall of Adam Lee 316
XXIX. Concerning the Day Spring Mine 326
XXXI. The Deposed Ruler 350
XXXII. The New Ruler of Carrington 362
XXXIII. A Bountiful Harvest 375
LORIMER OF THE NORTHWEST
PROLOGUE
Fairmead, Western Canada.
It is a still, hot day in autumn, and there is a droning of mosquitoes
where I sit by an open window, glancing alternately out across the
Assiniboian prairie and somewhat blankly at the bundle of paper before me,
ready to begin this story. Its telling will not be an easy matter, but one
finds idle hours pass heavily after a life such as mine has been, and
since the bronco blundering into a badger-hole fell and broke my leg the
surgeon who rode forty miles to set it said that if I was to work at
harvest I must not move before--and the harvest is already near. So I
nibble the pen and look around the long match-boarded hall, waiting for
the inspiration which is strangely slow in coming, while my wife, who was
Grace Carrington, smiles over her sewing and suggests that it is high time
to begin.
There are many guns on the wall glistening like sardines with oil rubbed
well in, and among them the old Winchester which once saved us from
starvation in British Columbia. There are also long rows of painted
butterflies and moths whose colors pleased Grace's fancy when I caught
them in the sloos. Sometimes I wonder whether she really likes that kind
of decoration, or merely pinned them to the wall because I caught them for
her. Then, and this is my own fancy, the bit of the horse which once saved
her life hangs in a place of its own under the heads of the antelopes and
the forward half of a crane with which a Winnipeg taxidermist has
travestied nature. There are also a few oil paintings and, of course, some
furniture, but I am not learned in such matters, and know only that it
cost me many dollars when I brought it from Toronto on one of Grace's
birthdays, and I have never regretted the investment.
No, there is nothing here that merits much comment, though Fairmead is one
of the finest homesteads between the Saskatchewan and the Souris. Then as
I gaze with half-closed eyes through the open window the memories awaken
and crowd, as it were, upon one another. Far out on the rim of the prairie
lies a silvery haze, through which the vault of azure melts into the dusty
whiteness of the grasses. Then, level on level, with each slowly swelling
rise growing sharper under that crystalline atmosphere the prairie rolls
in, broken here by a willow copse and there by a straggling birch bluff,
while a belt of cool neutral shadow marks the course of a deep-sunk
ravine. At first sight it is all one glaring sweep of white and gray, but
on looking closer with understanding eyes one sees the yellow and
sage-green of tall reeds in a sloo, the glowing lights of sun-bleached
buffalo bones, and a mingling of many colors where there is wild
peppermint or flowers among the grass. Then, broad across the foreground,
growing tall and green in a few moister places, and in others changing to
ochre and coppery red, there ripples, acre after acre, a great sea of
grain whose extent is beyond the comprehension of the insular Briton.
That, at least, with its feathery oat tassels and stately heads of wheat,
is a picture well worth looking upon, for there are few places in the
world where one may see furrows of equal length. It was won hardly, by
much privation, and in the sweat of the brow, as well as by the favor of
Providence, as Grace would say, and she is right in most things, except
when she attempts to instruct me in stock feeding, for we hold on the
prairie that it is not fair to place all the burden on Providence.
Therefore the settlers who succeed cut down rations and work double tides
to help themselves in time of adversity.
Yes, though better men have done more and failed, we worked hard enough
for it, Harry Lorraine and I, stinting ourselves often to feed the stock
and deal justly with the soil, until at last the ill-fortune turned and
the kindly earth repaid us a hundred fold for our trust in it.
Grace partly approves of the foregoing, for she laid by her sewing to read
the loose sheets beside me, bending down until her hair, which is
bronze-gold with the sun in it, just touched my own. It may be that my
eyes are prejudiced, but I have never seen a woman who might compare with
her. Neither has her comeliness faded. Instead, it has grown even more
refined and stately, for Grace had always a queenly way, since the day
when I first met her, the fairest maid--I think so now, though it is long
ago--that ever trod the bleak moorlands of eastern Lancashire.
Beyond the wheat and straggling birches I can see the shingled roofs of
Harry's dwelling. We have long been partners--all the Winnipeg dealers
know the firm of Lorimer & Lorraine, and how they send their wheat in by
special freight train. Then there is a stretch of raw breaking, and the
tinkle of the binders rises out of a hidden hollow, as tireless arms of
wood and steel pile up the sheaves of Jasper's crop--Jasper takes a
special pride in forestalling us. The dun smoke of a smudge-fire shows
that Harry is in prairie fashion protecting our stock, and I see it
drifting eastward across the dusty plain, with the cattle seeking shelter
from the mosquitoes under it.
The management of a farm like Fairmead is a serious task, even when there
are two to do it, and Grace says there are weighty responsibilities
attached. How many toilers in crowded Europe benefit by the cheap flour we
send them I do not know, though last year we kept the Winnipeg millers
busy; but when, in conjunction with a certain society, we opened new lands
and homes for the homeless poor--it was Grace's pet project--all those who
occupied them were not thankful. Some also stole their neighbors'
chickens, and the said neighbors abused us. Others seemed more inclined to
live on one another than to wrest a living from the soil, while once
Macdonald of the Northwest Police lodged a solemn protest, "We'll hold ye
baith responsible for the depredations o' the wastrels who're disturbing
the harmony o' this peaceful prairie."
Still, Harry and I were once poor enough ourselves, and with Grace's help
we have done our best to weed out the worthless--Harry attends to
this--and encourage the rest. Very many bushels of seed-wheat has Grace
given them, and here as elsewhere there are considerably more good than
bad, while already a certain society takes to itself the credit of the
flourishing Fairmead colony. Harry, however, says that undeserved
prosperity has made me an optimist. But the reader will wonder how I,
Ralph Lorimer, who landed in Canada with one hundred pounds' capital,
became owner of Fairmead and married Grace, only daughter and heiress of
Colonel Carrington. Well, that is a long story, and looking back at the
beginning of it instead of at the sunlit prairie I see a grimy
smoke-blackened land where gaunt chimneys stand in rows, and behind it the
bare moors of Lancashire. Then again the memories change like the glasses
of a kaleidoscope, and I sigh as I remember comrades who helped us in our
necessity and who now, forgotten by all save a few, sleep among the
snow-bound ranges, under the bitter alkali dust, and deep in the smoking
canyons through which we carried the new steel highway.
Failures, probably their friends called them at home, but in this their
friends were wrong. With light jest, or grim silent endurance, they
played out the lost game to the bitter end, and laid the foundations of a
great country's prosperity, while if fate or fortune has favors for but
the few, those who receive them should remember with becoming humility
what otherwise they might have been. So the past comes back, struggle,
disappointment, and slow success, at last, until it is a relief when Harry
Lorraine strides laughing in and Grace fills for him a great polished horn
of cider.
"Here's success to your story! Tell them simply how we live and work, and
some of us, the best, have died in this land," he says. Then he raises the
horn high toward the rafters and I know his meaning. It is a way the
forerunners of civilization--axe-man, paddle-man, and railroad
shoveler--had, and he did it in memory of one who lies far off among the
northern snows. Taking up the weary pen as he and Grace go out together I
prepare to follow his counsel, telling the story simply and as it happened
from the beginning.
LORIMER OF THE NORTHWEST
CHAPTER I
THE FIRST SOWING
It was late in autumn, and the heather had faded into dingy brown, though
long streaks of golden fern crept winding down, when Grace Carrington
first talked with me of the Canadian Dominion on the bleak slopes of
Starcross Moor. There was a hollow in the hillside where a few
pale-stemmed birches and somber firs formed, as it were, a rampart between
the poor, climbing meadows and the waste of gorse and fern, and we two
beneath them seemed utterly alone in the moorland solitude.
Grace sat on a lichened boulder with the sunlight upon her, gazing down
across the levels of Lancashire. I was just twenty years old, and she
seemed the incarnation of all that was fresh and good in early womanhood.
Still, it was not only her beauty that attracted me, though she was the
well-dowered daughter of a race which has long been famous for fair women,
but a certain grave dignity that made her softly spoken wishes seem
commands that it would be a pleasure to obey. Grace was nineteen then, and
she lived in Western Canada with her widowed father, Colonel Carrington,
who had made himself a power in that country. Yet she was English by birth
and early training, of the fair-haired, gray-eyed, old Lancashire stock,
and had lost nothing by her sojourn on the prairie as youthful mistress of
Carrington Manor.
The land which ran west before us was not a pleasant one. Across its
horizon hung a pall of factory smoke; and unlovely hamlets, each with its
gaunt pit-head gear and stark brick chimney, sprinkled the bare fields
between, for hedgerows were scanty and fences of rusty colliery rope
replaced them. Yet it was a wealthy country, and bred keen-witted,
enterprising men, who, uncouth often in speech and exterior, possessed an
energy that has spread their commerce to the far corners of the earth.
That day the autumn haze wrapped a mellow dimness round its defects, but
Grace Carrington sighed as she turned toward me.
"I shall not be sorry to go home again," she said. "Perhaps I miss our
clear sunshine, but here everyone looks careworn in your dingy towns, and
there are so many poor. Besides, the monotony of those endless smoky
streets oppresses me. No, I should not care to come back to Lancashire."
Now, the words of a young and winsome woman seldom fall lightly on the
ears of a young man, and Grace spoke without affectation as one accustomed
to be listened to, which was hardly surprising in the heiress of
Carrington. As it happened, they wakened an answering echo within me. The
love of the open sky had been handed down to me through long generations
of a yeoman ancestry, and yet fate had apparently decreed that I should
earn my bread in the counting-house of a cotton-mill. It is probable that
I should have been abashed and awkward before this patrician damsel in a
drawing-room, but here, under the blue lift, with the brown
double-barrel--it was my uncle's new hammerless--across my knees, and the
speckled birds beneath, I felt in harmony with the surroundings, and
accordingly at ease. I was born and bred under the other edge of the
moor.
"It does not always rain here, though this has been a wet season, and
trade is bad," I said. "Will you tell me about Canada, Miss Carrington?"
Her eyes brightened as she answered: "It is my adopted country, and I love
it. Still it is no place for the weak and idle, for as they say out there,
we have no room for any but live men and strong. Yet, I never saw a ragged
woman nor heard of a hungry child. All summer the settlers work from dawn
to dusk under the clear sunshine of the open prairie, paying rent to no
one, for each tills his own land, and though there are drawbacks--drought,
hail, and harvest-frost--they meet them lightly, for you see neither
anxious faces nor bent shoulders there. Our people walk upright, as
becomes free men. Then, through the long winter, when the snow lies firm
and white, and the wheat crop has been hauled in, you can hear the
jingling sleigh teams flit across the prairie from homestead to homestead
under the cloudless blue. The settlers enjoy themselves when their work is
done--and we have no drunkenness."
She ceased, turning an eager face toward me, and I felt an old longing
increase. It was the inborn love of a fertile soil--and that wide sunlit
country seemed to call me, for my father had been the last of a long
family to hold one of the extensive farms which with their crumbling
feudal halls may yet be found in the remoter corners of Lancashire. Then,
asking practical questions, I wondered as Grace Carrington answered,
because, though she wore the stamp of refinement to her finger-tips, she
knew all that concerned the feeding of stock, and the number of bushels
that might be thrashed from an acre of wheat. I knew she spoke as one
having experience, for I had been taught to till the soil, and only
entered the cotton-mill when on my father's death it was found that his
weakness for horses and his unlucky experiments had rendered it impossible
that I should carry on the farm. So, while unobserved the sun sank low, I
listened eagerly; until at last there was a sound of footsteps among the
fern, and she ceased, after a glance at her watch. But, like the grain she
spoke of, drilled into the black Assiniboian loam, the seed had been sown,
and in due time the crop would ripen to maturity.
A man came out from the birches, a handsome man, glancing about him with a
look of indolent good humor on his face, and though for a moment Grace
Carrington seemed displeased, she showed no sign of it as she rose
leisurely to meet him.
"I am sorry you had to come in search of me, Geoffrey," she said; "this is
Mr. Lorimer--Captain Ormond. I think you have met before. I lost my way,
and he kindly brought me across the moor. I have been telling him about
Canada."
The newcomer bowed with an easy indifference, for which, not knowing
exactly why, I disliked him, as he said, "Don't remember that
pleasure--meet so many people! Canada must be a very nice place; been
thinking of going out there myself--drive oxen, grow potatoes, and that
kind of thing, you know."
He glanced at Grace, as though seeking her approval of such an act of
self-sacrifice; but the girl laughed frankly as she answered, "I can't
fancy you tramping behind the plow in a jacket patched with flour-bags,
Geoffrey;" while, feeling myself overlooked, and not knowing what to say,
I raised my cap and awkwardly turned away. Still, looking back, I caught
the waft of a light dress among the fern, and frowned as the sound of
laughter came down the wind. These people had been making merry, I
thought, at my expense, though I had fancied Miss Carrington incapable of
such ungenerous conduct.
In this, however, I misjudged her, for long afterward I learned that Grace
was laughing at the stories her companion told of his strange experiences
with sundry recruits, until presently the latter said:
"She stoops to conquer, even a raw Lancashire lad. I congratulate you on
your judgment, Gracie. There is something in that untrained cub--could
recognize it by the steady, disapproving way he looked at me; but I am
some kind of a relative, which is presumably a warrant for impertinence."
Now a saving sense of humor tempered Miss Carrington's seriousness, and
Geoffrey Ormond joined in her merry laugh. In spite of his love of ease
and frivolous badinage, he was, as I was to learn some day, considerably
less of a good-natured fool than it occasionally pleased him to appear to
be.
Meantime, I strode homeward with the fierce longing growing stronger. I
hated the dingy office where I sat under a gas-jet making up the count of
yarn; and yet four weary years I had labored there, partly because I had
to earn my bread and because my uncle and sole guardian greatly desired I
should. It grew dark as I entered the valley which led to his house, for
the cotton-spinner now lived ten miles by rail from his mill, and the
sighing of the pine branches under a cold breeze served to increase my
restlessness. So it was with a sense of relief that I found my cousin
Alice waiting in a cosy corner of the fire-lit drawing-room. We had known
each other from childhood, and, though for that very reason this is not
always the case, we were the best of friends. She would be rich some day,
so the men I met in her father's business said; but if Alice Lorimer ever
remembered the fact, it made but little difference to her. She was
delicate, slight, and homely, with a fund of shrewd common-sense and a
very kindly heart, whose thoughts, however, she did not always reveal. Now
she sat on a lounge before the fire, with the soft light of a colored lamp
falling upon her, while a great embroidered screen shut off the rest of
the partly-darkened room.
"I have been waiting for you with the tea so patiently, Ralph," she said.
"You look tired and moody--you have been out on the moors too long. See,
here is a low chair ready just inside the screen, and here is the tea. Sit
down and tell me what is troubling you."
I settled myself in the corner, and answered, looking into the fire:
"You were always kind to me, Alice, and one can talk to you. Something
made me unsettled to-day, and I didn't care about the birds, though I got
a plump brace for you. Alice, I can't help thinking that these brief
holidays, though they are like a glimpse of Paradise after my dingy rooms
in that sickening town, are not good for me. I am only a poor clerk in
your father's mill, and such things as guns and horses are out of my
sphere. They only stir up useless longings. So I return on Monday, and
hardly think that I shall come back for a long time."
Alice laughed softly, for she was a shrewd young person, then she laid her
little hand restrainingly on my arm, before she said:
"And who has a better right to the bay horse and the new hammerless
ejector than the nephew of the man who never uses them? Now, I'm guessing
at a secret, but it's probable that your uncle bought that gun especially
for you. Ralph, you are getting morbid--and you have not been shooting all
day. Did you meet Miss Carrington on the moor again?"
Now in such matters I was generally a blunderer; yet something warned me
that my answer would displease her. I could, however, see no way of
avoiding it, and when I said as unconcernedly as I could, "Yes, and talked
to her about Canada!" Alice for no particular reason stooped and dropped a
thread into the fire. Then lifting her head she looked at me steadily when
I continued, with some hesitation:
"You know how I was always taught that in due time I should work the lands
of Lindale Hall, and how, when we found on my father's death that there
was nothing left, I tried the cotton-mill. Well, after four years' trial I
like it worse than I did at the beginning, and now I feel that I must give
it up. I am going back to the soil again, even if it is across the sea."
Alice made no answer for a few moments; then she said slowly: "Ralph you
will not be rash; think it over well. Now tell me if you have any definite
plans--you know how I always used to advise you?"
I felt I needed sympathy, and Alice was a faithful confidant, so I opened
my heart to her, and she listened with patient interest. It seemed to me
that my cousin had never looked so winsome as she sat close beside me with
a slight flush of color in her usually pale face where the soft lamplight
touched it. So we sat and talked until Martin Lorimer entered unobserved,
and when, on hearing a footstep, I looked up I saw that he was smiling
with what seemed grim approval as his eyes rested on us, and this puzzled
me. Then his daughter started almost guiltily as he said, "I wondered
where you two were. Dinner has been waiting, and you never heard the
bell."
I retired early that night, and, being young, forgot my perplexities in
heavy slumber. The next morning I noticed that Alice's eyes seemed heavy,
and I wondered what could be the reason. In after years I mentioned it
when Grace and I were talking about old times together, but she only
smiled gravely, and said, "I sometimes think your cousin was too good for
this world."
The next day was one of those wet Sundays which it is hard to forget. The
bleak moor was lost in vapor, and a pitiless drizzle came slanting down
the valley, while the raw air seemed filled with falling leaves. A
prosperous man with a good conscience may make light of such things, but
they leave their own impression on the poor and anxious; so, divided
between two courses, I wandered up and down, finding rest nowhere until I
chanced upon a large new atlas in my uncle's library. Martin Lorimer was
proud of his library. He was a well-read man, though like others of his
kind he made no pretense at scholarship, and used the broad, burring
dialect when he spoke in his mill. Here I found occupation studying the
Dominion of Canada, especially the prairie territories, and lost myself in
dreams of half-mile furrows and a day's ride straight as the crow flies
across a cattle run, all of which, though I scarcely dared hope it then,
came true in its own appointed time.
My uncle had ridden out early, for he was to take part in the new mayor's
state visit to church in the manufacturing town, and even Alice seemed out
of spirits, so when I left the library there was the weary afternoon to be
dragged through somehow. It passed very slowly, and then as I stood by the
stables a man from the house at the further end of the valley, where
Colonel Carrington was staying, said to our stable lad:
"I mun hurry back. Our folks are wantin' t' horses; maister an' t'
Colonel's daughter's going to the church parade. They're sayin' it's a
grand turnout, wi' t' firemen, bands, an' t' volunteers, in big brass
helmets!"
Neither of them saw me, and presently calling the lad I bade him put the
bay horse into the dog-cart.
"He's in a gradely bad temper," said the lad doubtfully. "Not done nothink
but eat for a long time now, an' he nearly bit a piece out of me; I wish
t' maister would shoot him."
I laughed at the warning, though I had occasion to remember it, and
looking for Alice I said, "I am driving in to church to-night. Would you
like to come with me?"
Now Alice Lorimer possessed her father's keen perception, and when he kept
his temper he was perhaps the shrewdest man I ever met; so when she looked
me straight in the face I dropped my eyes, because I really was not
anxious for her company, and should not have gone except in the hope of
seeing Grace Carrington.
"Have you turned religious suddenly, Ralph?" she asked. "Or have you
forgotten you told me yesterday that you did not care to go?"
I made some awkward answer, but Alice smiled dryly, and with a solemn
courtesy said:
"Two are company, three are none. Cousin Ralph, I will not go with you.
But don't leave the dog-cart behind and come back with the shafts."
I went out with a flushed face, and a sense of relief, angry,
nevertheless, that she should read my inmost thoughts, having fancied that
my invitation was a stroke of diplomacy. I learned afterward that
diplomacy is a mistake for the simple man. With a straightforward "Yes" or
"No" he can often turn aside the schemes of the cunning, but on forsaking
these he generally finds the other side considerably too clever for
him--all of which is a wanton digression from the story.