_On to Battleford_
Excitement and bustle prevailed throughout the camp. Every day ten,
fifteen or twenty teams, nearly all hitched to garish covered wagons,
started out along the Battleford trail. Plentifully sandwiched among
them were Indian, half-breed and white freighters, their worn and
dingy equipment contrasting vividly with the resplendent convoys of
the Barr Colonists.
The Rev. Isaac M. Barr engaged scores of teams to transport surplus
luggage, stores, hospital and general supplies to the far-distant
Colony. This was his great Transportation Company going into action
for the first time. Blithely it charged the sticky trail. By the
time May Day arrived, every slough, and creek, and gumbo flat from
Saskatoon westwards for two hundred miles, was decorated with one or
more mired wagons. The piercing squeaks of ungreased wagon-wheels
heralded through the prairie solitudes the passage of the pioneers.
Perhaps it was because Barr's Transportation Company only just
escaped being stillborn that it was so weakly. Its wagons, though
driven by professionals, were quite as expert in getting stuck as
were those of the colonists.
Some families brought out pianos, and even whole suites of furniture
with them, but the greater number had been content to pack their
belongings into a few large-sized, hoop-ironed, wooden cases, heavy
as lead. It was the more cumbersome of these pieces of luggage which
broke the backs nearly, and the hearts, of the Transportation
Company's drivers, when they were forced to unload and lug the
massive boxes through waist-deep water.
Camp-beds, ploughs, stoves, tents, the inevitable portmanteaus--all
found tottering repose somewhere or other about the piled-up loads.
Infernal multi-toothed drag harrows hobnobbed with tender
stove-pipes. Dismantled disks nestled familiarly against beautiful
English blankets. Bags of flour and sugar committed hari-kari on
projecting nails, or on jagged hooping iron, stoically disembowelling
themselves like disgraced Japanese officials.
The Trailey party met many colonists trickling back to the base at
Saskatoon, en route for England. Woe-begone faces--mostly unwashed
and unshaved; disillusioned eyes; grubby hands, and clothes showing
signs of having repeatedly been slept in, were the distinguishing
marks of these panic-struck Sunday-afternoon colonizers.
There is something sad about pioneering. So many broken hearts and
shattered hopes go into it. The rewards are so slim, and the
drudgery is so sure. Westminster Abbey treasures the bodies of none
of the Empire's scouts. They are out on the veldt and the prairie,
at the bottom of the oceans and the inland seas, and buried deep in
the heart of virgin forests. The applause of the gallery was never
theirs; neither were their names honoured by being written in big
newspaper headlines beneath those of murderers, prize fighters, and
divorced movie stars. Apparently there is much more notoriety to be
got out of robbing a bank than there is out of taming a patch of
prairie; which is as it should be, perhaps, considering the
difference in the risk.
When meeting parties of advancing colonists, the faint-hearts
naturally offered voluble excuses for running away. They complained
bitterly of the awful loneliness, and of the terrible obstacles with
which Barr's Point to Point was so plentifully studded; they objected
to the obvious scarcity of theatres and music halls, and to the
untrodden wildness of the prairie. The very immensity, and its
emptiness, frightened them.
Whenever he could, Sam made a point of asking the stragglers why they
were going back. It amused him. People always interested him more
than objects did. One flat-faced man, with wide-spread ears, looked
back along the trail lugubriously, when Sam stopped to speak to him,
and said "there warn't enough ---- 'ouses up there for 'im."
"Wot!" exclaimed Sam, feigning ignorance--"not enough blinkin'
'ouses!"
"No," replied the flat-faced man; "there's nowt up there but sludge,
an' watter, an' steep 'ills like 'ouse-roofs to break yer ---- neck
goin' down."
"Yes, mister," added a voice, which belonged to a big, fat woman, who
popped her face out of the back end of the schooner-top; "an' there
ain't no schools up there, neither. That man Barr's a proper
scoundril--inticing decent people away from their 'omes. Our Horice
here"--Horice was hiding his genius somewhere inside the covered
wagon--"wants to be a archytect; he's got a stificate from his
schoolmaster intitling him to try for a scholarship. How's he goin'
to get to be a archytect up there? That's what I'd like to know,
mister."
Sam tried to assume a worried expression, in sympathy with such
profound concern, but he found it difficult. The woman's appearance
was too comical. She had three large curling-pins in her hair, one
just above each ear, and the other in the centre above her forehead.
As her cheekbones were very wide, and her brow somewhat narrow, her
face looked for all the world like a cross between a problem in
geometry, and a boy's kite turned upside down.
The party's transport animals were both of them red-and-white oxen.
While the woman had been addressing Sam, the tired brutes had flopped
down exhausted in the trail. Their mouths were open and flecked with
foam, and their flanks palpitated rapidly like a dog's.
Sam turned his gaze away from the gaunt and played-out beasts.
"Where are yer goin' to nah, then?" he said to the man.
Two voices replied so exactly in unison that they seemed like one:
"Wolver'ampton."
"'Eaps of 'ouses there, I suppose?" remarked Sam mildly.
"Miles an' miles of 'em," said the three-cornered-faced woman, as she
adjusted one of her curling-pins with a whitish hand, which was
embellished with one thin wedding ornament and three or four ruby and
sapphire rings.
"All the 'ouses there is joined tergevver, eh?" said Sam--"like
strings of sossidges."
"They are an' all," replied the flat-faced man, with a touch of
ecstasy in his voice.
"'Cept where the pubs, an' popshops, an' streets makes openings in
'em," added the woman.
At this juncture, Trailey's team caught up behind, so Sam clicked to
Tempest and Kruger to move along.
With a lusty whack across the ribs with a stout poplar pole,
administered to the panting nigh-side ox with marvellous dexterity,
the flat-faced man warned his animals that it was time to get up.
The sudden jerk, when they lunged to their tired feet, nearly threw
the woman out of the wagon.
Within forty days, two or three hundred Barr Colonists were back in
England. The English newspapers appropriately christened them "Barr
Colonist refugees."
Hour after hour, and day after day, the procession of wagons creaked
slowly along. Tin pails drummed and chattered. Corners of cook
stoves chewed away industriously at paint-veneered, near-oak wagon
boxes. Stable lamps swung like pendulums from the hoops of the
schooner-tops. Plough handles, and fork shafts, and silver-mounted
walking-sticks provided temporary accommodation for anything that
would consent to be hung, from a lady's bonnet to the back of a
kitchen chair.
Women--and ladies--who never in their lives had ridden in anything
slower or more prehistoric than a tram, sat perched high up on
top-heavy loads built by grave-eyed men with a blissful disregard of
such a thing as centre of gravity.
Children fidgeted and cried and slept in crevices between
packing-cases. Older children alternately rode and chased about
alongside the teams. Miles of heavenly puddles supplied them with
unlimited paddling. Untoughened skins frayed and peeled and tanned.
Boots became sodden, curled up round evening campfires, then in the
morning refused to be worn.
Pure light-heartedness was the prevailing characteristic. It must be
confessed, though, that quite often such an admirable spirit was
simply the effect of ignorance. The pitiful greenness of everyone
was so acutely evident to experienced spectators as to be provocative
of the keenest mirth. In subsequent years, some laughed--and still
laugh--over reminiscences of multitudes of tragi-comic incidents more
heartily than the colonists themselves.
Very few of the men had ever handled a pair of lines. Nothing in the
whole range of ignorance was more obvious than that--especially to
the poor, dumb brutes with the bits in their mouths. It was a
ghastly experience for them. Only a very small proportion of the
drivers had the faintest conception of what constituted the proper
handling and care of horses. The oxen had the advantage in that
respect.
But there is a final way out of every insupportable difficulty--for
dumb beasts, at any rate. They could always die. Scores of horses
did eventually. If they survived the hardships of the trail and the
abysmal ignorance of their masters, it was only at the expense of
their constitutions, which shortly afterwards could stand no more,
and at last succumbed. Even the prairie-hardened spirits of
acclimatized bronchos drooped, finally, in many cases, departing for
an equine heaven where perhaps green Englishmen are refused admission.
Many oxen perished. Those that did not grew terribly emaciated, and
looked about them with despairing eyes, probably wondering what they
had done to offend the grim reaper that he should refuse to waft
their own tortured spirits into the land of everlasting cuds, where
everything was green except wagons and men.
Imitation pioneers with faint hearts, wobbly wills and rubber spines,
sat back in Saskatoon, listening by day to the hair-raising stories
of retreating colonists; and at night dreaming of miles of asphalted,
lamp-lighted thoroughfares lined with semi-detached villas of a
deadening sameness, where one could always find one's own rented
house by counting either from the top or the bottom of the street.
The weaker spirits, sprouting white-feathered wings streaked with
yellow, promptly flew back to England ignominiously. Others spun
their feeble pluck into nets of vacillation and timidity, in the
toils of which they became inextricably tangled. Yet others,
shortening their horizon, and taking a reef in their vision, cast
shrewd eyes at what lay nearer their feet. These developed into
citizens of Saskatoon and other places farther south.
The weather still kept magnificently fine. The frost came out of the
ground with a rush, leaving in its wake a carpet of purple anemones.
The sun shone forth with undiminished splendour, wringing indefinable
suggestions of fertility and growth from the pleasant-smelling earth.
Disappearing snowbanks fed willow-fringed sloughs to the brim. These
tiny fictitious lakes sparkled in the sun like crystals.
Brilliant-hued mallards preened themselves in their mirror-like
surfaces. Lowly mud-hens sailed in and out among the grass and
reeds, cheerfully challenging the broadsides from the colonists' guns
long after their aristocratic relations had kicked the shimmering
water into ripples and flown away.
Frogs, the only infallible harbingers of spring, rehearsed incessant
and monotonous choruses. Deep-toned bassos kept them in time with
rasping croaks. A shot from a gun, or a sudden shout, would turn off
the music like a tap--one partly-trained voice occasionally lagging a
little behind in a sort of self-conscious note.
It was through such scenes as these that the wagons of Trailey, and
Sam and Bert, had been travelling for two whole days. Everything was
progressing swimmingly, both literally and metaphorically speaking.
In spite of detouring round sloughs, and making quick rushes at deep,
boggy creeks, Trailey had succeeded in getting stuck a number of
times. But always either Sam, or someone of experience, had come
along and hauled his wagon on to dry land.
Then, towards the evening of the second day out from Saskatoon,
Trailey, whose team was somewhat slower than Bert's, had again
dropped behind. Suddenly the trail brought him up against a series
of sloughs which appeared to run into each other and stretch to right
and left as far as eye could see. Except for a few experimental
wagon-tracks branching off here and there, the main trail led
directly into the water.
So into it Trailey bravely steered his team, which, now being
accustomed to the luxury of having its load pulled out for it, lunged
along through the water for a matter of twenty or thirty yards with a
very deceptive simulation of enthusiasm, and then abruptly stopped.
After plunging about a bit in a highly hypocritical effort to move
the wagon, the horses unanimously quit, and then calmly pretended to
drink the stirred-up water which reached to their breasts.
"Gracious me!" cried, a well-known voice from the top of the loaded
wagon. "But there, it's just what I expected. Didn't I tell you,
William, when I saw that crow fly over the tent this morning, that
either somebody was going to die or else we should all be drowned in
a bog? But you're so stupid. You never heed me, who's been your
faithful wife these twenty years and more. If I was like some women
I know--and you know, too"--Martha Trailey grew hintingly
mysterious--"no need to mention names. You know well enough. You
needn't look like that--as if you didn't know what I meant. I can
read you like a book. That Mrs. What's-her-name, for instance, who
you used to----"
"Martha, my dear," expostulated Trailey from the front of the wagon,
where he was supposed to be driving, "please keep quiet a minute.
This is rather an awkward place."
"Keep quiet!" retorted Mrs. Trailey. "Keep quiet, did you say?
Well, of all things! I wonder what next. Keep quiet--yes, I should
think so. William Trailey; allow me to tell you that ever since you
kissed that cat Priscilla Pilkins at the Bible Class Social Evening,
thirteen years ago come Esther's birthday, I've been a quiet wife to
a deceitful husband. Yes, and a faithful mother, too; but what
thanks did I ever get for it? Tell me that, William Trailey. You
can't, you know very well you can't. And now you are doing your
level best to drown us all. Oh, dear me! never any sympathy from
anybody. No comfort; no home to go to--no anything," and had not
Martha Trailey been so busy assisting her husband to solve his
present difficulty, she would certainly have shed a few tears.
The wagon was stuck to its hubs. Viewed esthetically, the slough was
really a pretty, miniature lake, and precisely the kind of duck-pond
every Barr Colonist was longing to find on his private estate.
Queerly, though, the glamour of lakes was already beginning to wear a
bit thin.
The other wagon, with Sam as pilot, was out of sight behind a clump
of naked poplars on the farther shore. The little Londoner, as
usual, had muddled safely through.
During a large part of the afternoon, Esther and Bert had been
walking ahead of the teams, presumably to scout for the bad spots in
the trail, but they had lately fallen a considerable distance behind.
With thoughts and emotions deliciously intertwined, they sauntered
idly along. Through some mysterious magnetism, they occasionally
touched one another--a shoulder, perhaps, or an elbow, or merely a
finger-tip. Probably it was because the prairie was such a tiny
place, that always when they examined anything, a flower, a
pussy-willow, a cloud effect, they kept so close together. Great
masses of smoky-white cumulus cloud rode immobile as continents in an
ocean of blue. The day had been windless and warm, threatening
thunder. For the prairie it had been languorous, the sort of day on
which souls go looking for their affinities, and the sort of day they
generally find them, too. Esther's eyes were swimming with delight,
if not actually with rapture, perhaps with something even deeper
still. Bert also reacted to the beauty of his surroundings. It was
springtime, and he was quite a normal young man.
Esther had stopped to gather a bunch of fluffy-petalled anemones,
which she had noticed dotting a sunny knoll in purple profusion.
Then they had lingered to listen to a handsome meadow-lark
proclaiming to himself and all the world, but particularly to his
mate on a stump about a hundred yards away, what a noble fellow he
was. His clear, liquid notes, pitched in a slightly melancholy key,
just seemed to harmonize with the mood of the listeners.
The summer-like heat was playing havoc with the trails. Those
colonists who had struck camp early and commenced their difficult
trek, though they knew it not at the time, were far the luckiest.
The frost-bound under-surface of the treacherous ground was a certain
safeguard against the misfortune of becoming deeply bogged.
Especially was this so where water abounded.
But the heat was doing its work well. Wagon-wheels cut into the
sodden soil like sharp spades. Moreover, scores of wagons had
churned the wet spots into mushy quagmires. The colonists had
learned and practised their first lesson in freighting, of cutting
and spreading willow bush and young poplars across the trail, but
frequently in vain. Then they had been compelled to double-up their
teams, occasionally to treble them, and, as a last resort, to lighten
the wagons, or completely unload.
"Give 'em their 'eads," shouted Sam to Trailey from the other side of
the slough. He had returned to see what had happened to the
laggards. "Foller where I'm pointin'," he called, at the same time
indicating with a short, black pipe to where, in his unfathomable
wisdom, the bog was if anything a little deeper and stickier.
Trailey gathered himself together and spoke to his team.
"Gee up, Arthur! Now then, Freddie! Get us out of this pond like
good little horses. Gee up! G-e-e u-p, I say; don't you hear me?"
Whilst uttering these and many other similar polite importunities, he
followed Sam's advice to give the horses their heads, slackening his
reins to such a generous extent as to drop one of them entirely.
"Oh, da--er--confound it! There goes one of the reins. Now what?"
"Now what! Yes, it is now what! How many times have I told you that
you're no more fit to be a rancher than you are to be a member of
parliament? But don't pay any attention to what I say? No, don't.
I know nothing. I never did--else I shouldn't have married you, and
let you drag me out here. And where's Esther? Run off with that
Tressider fellow, I'll be bound."
"I shall have to try to recover that rein, I suppose," said Trailey,
deaf to his wife's harangue. With a sudden inspiration, he turned
round to his good lady. "Pass me an umbrella, my dear--one with a
curved handle."
Most of the colonists had brought umbrellas out with them; some had
even refused to part with top-hats and frock-coats. Trailey's
unusual request smote his wife completely speechless for a moment or
two, but she soon gave tongue.
"An umbrella! What ever for? We'll have the sheet spread out on
this wagon to-morrow, I know. This sun's been too much for you."
However, she was not dull-witted. Her husband's clever idea quickly
penetrated to Martha Trailey's agile brain.
Cautiously she clambered to where the umbrella was stuck down in one
of the hindmost corners of the wagon-box. The white sheet of the
schooner-top was neatly folded and fastened to the rear hoop. As she
scrambled along the load and stooped from her precarious position to
grab the "gamp," Mrs. Trailey's face, never very pallid, partook of a
hue resembling that of one of her flannel petticoats--vivid scarlet.
Clutching the umbrella tightly, she reached across with it to her
husband.
The nearest that William Trailey had ever come to being an athletic
prodigy was when he used to climb to the top of a 'bus back home in
Leeds. His figure was comfortably stout, and designed to show to
great advantage in a deeply-upholstered divan; and his soft, fleshy
hands were never meant for performing feats more strenuous than the
manipulation of a knife, fork and spoon.
Gingerly planting himself on the near front wheel of the wagon, he
reached over to hook the lost line with the umbrella handle. Arthur,
the horse nearest to him, caught a glimpse over the top of his
blinker of the moving mass behind him. Undoubtedly he regarded
Trailey as something enormously threatening, for he gave two or three
frantic leaps forward.
The sudden jerk threw the other horse, Freddie, violently backwards,
and also, remarkable though it seems, propelled the wagon forward
about a yard. Trailey, never much of a balancer, fell back against a
packing-case, lost his nerve, and his equilibrium, and then, with a
plaintive "Ah-h" of resignation, plopped head-first into the icy
waters of the slough.
His displacement was not very great, but he made a huge splash.
Besides indicating his whereabouts, several large bubbles proved that
he was trying to breathe under water, a most difficult task.
"Oh-h-h!" screamed Mrs. Trailey when she saw her husband submerge.
"Save him! Save my husband!" she shouted to Sam, who was watching
the performance from the opposite bank; then she lapsed into an
extended series of, "Oh, mercy me's!" and such like useful
invocations.
Sam had a notion that Trailey's weight might be the means of his head
becoming stuck tight in the mud at the bottom of the slough, so,
without a second's delay, he came bounding and splashing towards the
wagon.
But Trailey's head was not intended for a slough bottom. In due
course, he rose for the first time, gulping and swallowing and
coughing like a stricken walrus in the effort to regain his breath--a
very necessary thing for a man of his age and habit to recover.
"So there you are, are you?" cried Mrs. Trailey in a tone in which
accusation and thankfulness were about equally blended. "I thought
you'd gone down for good. But a lot you care whether I'm made a
widow or not. And just look at that collar I was at the trouble to
iron for you yesterday!"
"Never mind 'is coller, missis," ventured Sam soothingly; "give 'im a
charnce ter get 'is wind. Yore 'usband is sentimentally hunfit ter
be a blinkin' diver."
"What's the matter, mamma?" called a charming voice from the bank
behind them. "Father hasn't fallen in, has he?"
Esther, with her hands full of flowers, looked exceedingly beautiful
as she stood anxiously regarding the scene of the catastrophe.
"You gallivanting little hussy, you!" returned her mother, slightly
hysterically. "Can't you see he's fallen in, or have you eyes for
nothing but pretty flowers and wild young drunkards?"
She favoured Bert with a searing look.
"Mamma!"
"I'll have you to know, big as you are, and soft as you are, that you
can't go carrying on with all the fast-living scamps in this
God-forsaken wilderness."
"Really, mamma!----"
"Has anyb-body got a drop of b-brandy?" wailed Trailey, who was
shivering with cold and misery. "This will b-be the d-death of me,"
and his teeth chattered like stones in a bucket. He was a picture of
wretchedness. Water and mud streamed down his face and whiskers, and
his clothes dripped and clung to him in clammy folds. The sun, too,
had dipped behind a clump of poplars on the far side of the slough,
which at that time of the year meant a quick drop in temperature.
"Now what d'you think of this fool ranching business?" queried Mrs.
Trailey acridly of her half-drowned husband, as she surveyed him from
her pinnacle of dryness.
"N-not much, at p-present, my d-dear," moaned Trailey as he wiped his
wet face with a wetter handkerchief, and then tried pathetically to
hold his waistcoat away from his stomach, first in one place, then in
another. His clothes were sticking to him like the skin on a snake,
and revealed the curvature of his well-nourished body to perfection.
"I should think not, indeed! No one but an idiot would dream of such
a thing, situated like you are. The very idea! What ever things are
coming to, I don't know."
"You come on, guv'ner," interrupted Sam; "yore missis'll read the
riot act till yer go an' catch a floatin' kidney or somethink. Come
wiv me," and as he commenced solicitously to guide the unhappy
Trailey towards the farther bank, he said: "Wot you want, sir, is a
roarin' fire, a drop of 'ot Scotch, an' then slip inter the blinkin'
blankits."
"Help! Help!" yelled a female voice behind them. "Help, somebody!
I'm being abandoned on the prairie by a set of cowardly drunkards,
I'm----"
"Gawd love us!" muttered Sam; then, turning round, he shouted back at
Mrs. Trailey angrily: "Shut up, missis! You'll go an' wake the
bloomin' baby if you ain't careful. I'll come back in 'arf a minit
an' carry you acrawss--if yer'll only stop that 'orrible squealin'."
The two men waded slowly along. When they reached the middle of the
slough, at which depth the water began to dribble into his
watch-pocket, Trailey moaned: "C-can't we g-go round, Sam?"
"You go on yerself nah, guv'ner," returned Sam encouragingly. "Yore
all right. I'll go back an' fetch the missis afore she gets the
'igh-stericks. Our waggin's rahnd that clump of trees there. That
gel of yourn 'as got to be fetched yet, but I know oo'll be bringin'
'er along."
With these remarks, and having indicated to his dripping companion
the whereabouts of the other wagon, the indefatigable Sam splashed
back to where Martha Trailey was trying to decide whether to weep, or
fly into a temper, or both.
"Climb dahn, ma'am," ordered Sam, "an' then put yer arms rahnd me
neck; an' mind yer don't cling too 'ard, because I ain't used to
wimming hembracin' me. Come on, nah!" he cajoled, as Mrs. Trailey
showed no signs of compliance. "Don't sit up there lookin' like a
statute of misery."
Martha Trailey still refused to descend from the load. Her attitude
soon caused Sam, who was standing up to his waist in ice-cold water,
to become exasperated.
"Are yer comin', or aren't yer?" he repeated with considerable
irritation.
"Oh, Sam! what ever will people say?" objected Mrs. Trailey, "and me
a respectable married woman, too."
"They won't say anythink, missis. Bein' married makes no difference
aht 'ere," mocked Sam. "But come on," he coaxed, "I'll shut me eyes
if yer like," whereupon Martha Trailey, redder than ever, carefully
gathered her petticoats about her still shapely legs, and then
lowered herself bit by bit into her redoubtable little rescuer's
outstretched arms.
Whilst Sam struggled through the water with his unwilling burden
(Mrs. Trailey clung to him like an excessively modest limpet),
another amusing little comedy was being staged on the bank.
Obviously Esther must be transported to the other side by someone.
The wagons were of no further use as ferryboats; and a single glance
to right and left convinced the laggards that an attempt to
circumvent the slough would only prove futile.
"Well," laughed Bert after a minute or two, "there's nothing else for
it, I suppose. How d'you prefer being carried?--pickaback, or
in--er--my arms?"
Esther was secretly delighted with the way things were turning out,
so, of course, she said she strongly objected to both methods.
"Oh, look at mamma and Sam!" she exclaimed, doubtless wishing to
prolong the joy of anticipation. "Aren't they a scream? Oh, do
look, Mr. Tressider!"
Bert looked and grinned. Sam was five feet tall, and the water was
nearly three feet deep. Mrs. Trailey weighed probably one hundred
pounds. Her right arm tightly hugged the little man's neck, whilst
with her left she held herself rigidly away from him. Her eyes were
closed, but whether with fear or shame is uncertain. Her almost
horizontal position across his chest compelled Sam to step as
circumspectly as a tight-rope-walker blindfolded.
Declining to hesitate till bashfulness absolutely unnerved him, Bert
seized his courage and his charming companion in both arms and
entered the water. Though it was probably the first time Esther had
ever put her arms round a man's neck, her half-shy, half-rapturous
expression seemed to denote that the experience proved not much worse
than she had frequently imagined it to be. Anyway, the slough
appeared to be a very narrow one, though her knight was puffing
plenty by the time he had crossed it, for his load was not light.
In only a few minutes, without mishap, soaked, streaming water,
breathing hard, his heart pounding with all sorts of queer and
pleasurable sensations, Bert set his attractive burden safely down on
the opposite bank.
"There you are," he said.
Esther expressed her thanks in a few common-place gurglings suitable
to her age and the excitement of the occasion. But her eyes divulged
much more. She had very uncommon eyes. They were somewhat heavily
lidded, and might have given her face a cruel or sensuous look, had
not the soft, lustrous blue beneath completely offset the suggestion.
"Was I very heavy?" she asked.
Bert was wringing some of the moisture from his trousers' legs. He
stood up straight and looked at his questioner.
"Just right," he replied enthusiastically. "What are you--nine stone
about?" His eyes wandered rapidly over her figure, looking clear
through her clothes and following the outline of her body, like the
eyes of most male men can. Esther flushed deeply and looked away.
"Yes, about that," she said coldly.
"Just my ideal weight for a girl."
"Oh, really."
"Yes."
Two ducks, circling swiftly overhead, interested Esther. Down they
swept close to the water, but, being unable to come to any decision
about the stuck wagon, or the pair of silly humans on the bank, they
rose again steeply, continuing to fly round and round. A couple of
crows moped in a tall poplar which grew at the edge of the slough.
They looked married. Apparently they were revelling in their first
tiff. Two white-brown rabbits squatted still as stones not forty
feet away. Safely camouflaged, they practised mental telepathy
together. Frogs shrilled incessantly. Somewhere a robin was singing
a vesper hymn delightfully. His mate, entranced, listened close by.
Even the trees appeared to lean towards each other. If the whole of
Nature had been one vast bootshop, it couldn't have been arranged in
pairs more perfectly.
Bert hovered between two ideas. He was wondering whether Esther
would be offended if he kissed her--or disappointed if he refrained.
A most terrible predicament for a young man: and since the world
became civilized, one causing a good deal of needless worry. Usually
Bert did not hesitate in such matters. Bits of fluff were made for
osculation. But Esther was so different. She wasn't a "blarney
stone" to be kissed by every predatory male who came along. Those
faintly cruel eyelids fenced her about better than any convent wall
could.
She was still watching the ducks, her face tilted temptingly
skywards. Bert wondered if she were waiting for him to make up his
mind. All his ancestors on his mother's side were signalling to him
from a celestial sphere somewhere--"Be a gentleman." His father's
people, on the other hand, shot vigorous messages from some
second-rate world or other---"Don't be a fool; kiss the girl." His
own subconscious mind whispered: "Be damned to inhibitions."
In the ecstasy of the moment, Bert neglected to observe whether
Esther returned the kiss or not, and while he was endeavouring to
remember, she ran off towards the others. Then he regarded the
slough meditatively. "I wish it had been twice as wide," he mused
regretfully.
Round the bend of a poplar bluff, where Sam had left his wagon, the
others were making camping preparations. Sam had gathered a heap of
dry wood and lighted a welcome fire. Mrs. Trailey rummaged food from
the Tressider-Potts wagon. Trailey himself was shivering like an
unripe jelly. He stood with his back close to the fire, steaming
like a stew-pot.
"Run abaht a bit, guv'ner," Sam urged. "Try ter keep yer blood
movin'." Trailey did so, but he was careful not to stray too far
from the indications of supper. The smell of bacon frying rose in
the twilight air appetizingly. Esther fetched slough water to make
tea with. Bert went with her. They didn't say much. There wasn't
any need. Mrs. Trailey watched them. "Humph," she thought, and then
bustled about the fire. She was very silent, but her eyes blazed.
Esther and Bert erected his bell tent, whilst Sam salvaged the
Trailey team from the slough, and then picketed all four horses
safely. He was awfully afraid of them getting away. So were the
others, therefore they generally left this duty to him.
By the time supper was completely ready, Sam had carried bedclothes
across from the mired vehicle, for the use of the Traileys in the
tent. The other two men had almost dried off. Their clammy
underclothing followed their every movement rather closely and
uncomfortably, but supper diverted their attention. The ladies tried
to persuade Sam to divest himself of his saturated garments and wrap
up in a blanket.
"Yes, do, Sam," pressed Mrs. Trailey. "You'll go and get rheumatics
as sure as I'm a Christian woman. I remember when the Rev. Peter
Mackenzie preached at our chapel about Jonah--or was it Moses,
William? It was somebody in the Bible who got wet, I know that.
However, Peter Mackenzie said----"
"Lor' love a duck!" ejaculated Sam disgustedly, thinking Mrs. Trailey
was off on one of her extended reminiscent tours.
"No, young man, he didn't say any such thing. And don't blaspheme.
If you were to go and catch your death of cold in those wet things,
you'd as like as not go straight to hell. Go into the tent now, and
take those wet trousers off, and let me dry them by the fire for you."
Mrs. Trailey really liked Sam. On several occasions she had evinced
a queer kind of tart fondness for the little man. She stitched
buttons on for him; and once she had bandaged a nasty cut on his hand.
"Now do as I tell you," she insisted. "I remember Esther's grandma
once saying----"
"Lor' lumme, missis, try ter forget somethink fer a change," Sam
interposed rather brutally. "An' as fer me gittin' a hillness, such
a thing ain't likely to 'appen. If a bloke 'as no pain 'urting 'im,
'ow is 'e ter know wot's the matter wiv 'im? There ain't no doctors
aht 'ere, missis, y'know."
It was Sam's mock serious manner rather than his weird logic which
quelled the argument. The sun had long since slipped out of sight.
Everyone was thoroughly fatigued. Nevertheless, Mrs. Trailey
persisted in having the few supper things washed.
"'Ere, ma'am," offered Sam, "I'll tyke 'em dahn ter the slough an' do
'em for yer," and while Mrs. Trailey remonstrated with him, he
commenced to gather the pots into a bucket energetically.
"Oh, no, Sam; I'll----"
"You go ter bed, missis. I remember 'earin' me great-gran'muvver,
the one wiv the pink eyes an' a blue nose----"
Sam's little burlesque worked. Martha Trailey went into the tent.
The others had retired earlier.
The Traileys in the tent, and Sam and Bert in the covered wagon,
slept the sleep of pioneers. Already they were dovetailing
themselves into their new environment; already they were shedding
tomfool notions of polo ponies, and ranching. Slowly but surely they
were acquiring fresh aspirations, and, in the case of two of them,
fresh emotions.