The Marton Homestead
Molly Marton was standing in the storm doorway of her home. She was
gazing out at the magnificence of the winter sunset blazing on the
crystal peaks of the far-off mountains. The hour of the evening meal
was approaching, and the savoury odours of simple cooking pervaded the
warm interior behind her. In less than an hour the glory of the sunset
would have passed, and the purpling twilight would reduce the snowbound
world to the bleak prospect of the reality of the season.
The girl was awaiting her father’s return from his day’s work in the
timber belt. It was the time of the early winter labours, when the
haulage of cordwood for the fuel store was the chief consideration.
He would be along soon now, and everything was in readiness for his
comfort.
Molly’s devotion to her father was almost a passion. Her mother had
been dead for many years, and in all her eighteen years the girl had
never known a moment when her sturdy father had not been the whole of
everything to her.
The Marton homestead was far enough beyond such civilisation as city or
township afforded. It was set in the heart of the lesser foothills of
the Rockies. Its nearest human neighbour was an Irishman of ill-repute,
Dan Quinlan, who boasted some sort of a mixed ranch about twenty-five
miles farther up in the hills, and the nearest township was that of
Hartspool, some twenty-odd miles to the east, where the hills came down
to the prairie lands, and the waters of Whale River flooded its banks
every time the spring freshet broke.
Molly loved her home, and the hard, free life of it. She knew every
trick and turn of Nature’s whim in the progress of the seasons. She
asked nothing better; she knew nothing better. The sturdy life of
it was hers. She had been born, and bred, and deeply inured to its
hardships, and she would not have changed one moment of it for the
narrower delights of city life.
Of hardships there were plenty, of privations none. The fierce winters
of the hill country were no easy thing to face. But every coming of the
perfect summers saw an increasing yield of the abundant fruitfulness of
the earth which the thrifty mind of her French-Canadian father taught
him so well how to foster.
The homestead was a whole section of land, with practically unlimited
grazing rights. It consisted of a log-built and thatched home, with
barns and out-buildings similarly constructed. There were corrals
rudely but strongly set up, and nearly one hundred acres lay under the
plough. There was a water-front on a nameless mountain creek, and a
stretch of prairie feed that was pretty well inexhaustible. In short,
there was everything a good farmer could need to make life reasonably
prosperous and endurable in a climate that knew little of moderation.
The delight died out of Molly’s grey eyes with the passing of the
sunset. And she turned her gaze in the direction where the snow-trail
vanished round a bluff of woodland. It was from that direction her
father would come, and she looked for him now.
She was pretty and attractive in her neat, home-made clothing, that was
more calculated to resist the onslaught of the elements than add charm
to the delightful figure it concealed. She was dark, in an essentially
French-Canadian fashion, but her eyes were merry, and her strong young
body was tall and vigorous, after the manner of the Anglo-Saxon mother
she scarcely remembered. She was full of an easy patience that robbed
her not one whit of a wholesome joy of life. Animal spirits were
always surging in her, and helped her to discover happiness in the
unlikeliest moments of the life that was hers.
Movement down at the barn distracted her watch on the distant trail.
It was the hired man bearing a bucket of fresh milk, steaming in the
wintry air. He was a tall, lean creature of an age he would have been
reluctant to admit. He wore a chin-whisker that was almost as white as
the snow that overlaid the world. And he came up to the house at a gait
the vigor of which suggested a youth he could never hope to see again.
“She’s runnin’ slack,” he said, in a tone that jarred harshly on the
still air. “But I ’low she’s a swell beast, and she’s made a good
winter feed for herself. There’s a good haf-gallon of juice that’ll be
solid cream by morning.”
“Jessie’s surely a good cow, Lightning,” Molly smiled. Then her smile
broadened into a laugh. “Say, it’s queer how our feelings bubble over
when we get the thing we want. Jessie hands us gallons more milk in the
year than any of the others. So she’s a swell beast, and we pat her,
and make a fuss of her, and give her an extra dope of feed. If she gave
us less, why, she’d just be any ordinary old thing, from a fool cow to
something worse. It’s the way of things, eh? When folks hand us all we
ask we purr over them like a bunch of cats when you stroke them right.”
The lean face of Lightning Rogers distorted itself into a grin. He
loved to hear his young mistress “say things.” Often enough he failed
to get the meaning underlying her laughing comments, but his twisted
smile was a never-failing response.
Lightning was a derelict of a strenuous past. He had, like many another
of his kind, passed through a disreputable life, to settle down to an
old age that was completely occupied with the attempt to supply his old
body with sufficient fuel to keep burning the smouldering fires of
such life as remained to him. Maybe the hot spirit of early days had
lost something of its volcanic nature, but there were still flashes
of it to be discovered by those who knew him well enough. He still
prided himself on his skill with his ancient guns, which, in his early
cattle days, had earned him the sobriquet of “Two-gun” Rogers. He still
delighted in the thought that he could take his liquor like a man, and
not want to shoot up more than one town at a time when the red light
of Rye whisky flooded his bemused brain. He still found satisfaction
in a flow of anathema that had never yet failed him. For all his sixty
years, he was still a creature of extraordinary vigor of mind and body.
And nothing on earth could dissuade him from working from sun-up to
sun-down, whether in the height of summer or the depth of winter.
Molly had known him as her father’s hired man nearly as long as
she could remember. And even now there still remained something of
the fascination for his tattered chin-whisker, which, in her early
childhood, had made her love to claw it with both hands whenever she
could find a position of reasonable security on a lap that somehow
never seemed to have been built for the accommodation of any human body.
Lightning went off into a guffaw of laughter.
“Cats! That’s what we are,” he cried. “Full of claw’s an’ meanness if
you don’t stroke us right. That’s how it was, Molly gal, when I shot
the glass of Rye right out of the hand of Jim Cluer when he said my paw
must ha’ bin a Dago ’cos I guessed to the whole saloon I’d a big hunch
for a feed of spaghetti. It sure is a mean thing to rob a boy of his
liquor. I----”
“That’s enough of your bad old past, Lightning,” Molly cried, with
another laugh. “I can stand for your talk of other days till you get
inside the saloons. You see,” she added slily, “the saloons are still
only twenty-odd miles away, and I haven’t heard that twenty-odd miles
worries you a thing with a Rye highball at the other end of it. Are you
through with the chores?”
The man’s grin passed, and a look of uncertainty clouded his snapping
eyes. He was afraid lest the girl was really offended.
“I’m makin’ the crik for a bar’l of water,” he said. “Then I’m through,
I guess.”
Molly nodded and smiled, and the man’s look of doubt passed.
“Good. Food’s mostly ready, and father’s just coming round the bluff.
I’ll take that milk right in.”
She took the pail from the man and passed back into the house. And
Lightning hurried off to the barn to hook up a team to the water sled.
* * * * *
It was still daylight when the farmer’s team drew up at the cordwood
stack. The pile of winter fuel was stored against the log walls of the
corral, which was nearly three parts surrounded by a dense bluff of
spruce. The intervening barns and sheds cut it off from all view of the
house, where Molly was busy with the evening meal.
George Marton climbed down from his seat on the load, and stood beating
warmth into his mitted hands. He stood thus for a moment, his gaze upon
the tuckered flanks of his steaming team. He was a stocky creature
of a year or two over forty, with a keen, dark face that was partly
enveloped in a close-cut, pointed black beard that matched his hair and
eyes.
After a moment he brushed away the icicles accumulated about his mouth
and passed around his team. He examined their fetlocks for abrasures.
He knew the damage that was possible on the snow-trail from the sharp
calks with which the beasts were “roughed.” He was very careful of his
team.
Satisfied with their well-being, he started to unhook the horses. The
sled load would remain where it was for the night, but the team must
be well and carefully tended. The tugs released, he passed on to the
creatures’ heads to lead them to the barn. But he halted half-way, and
a curious, startled rigidity seemed to grip his body. He stood there
quite unmoving and obviously listening, an alert figure of tense-strung
energy in the thick bulk of his heavy clothing.
It was a sound. It was an unusual sound that broke sharply from within
the adjacent bluff. It came with the snapping of breaking brush. Then,
in a moment, it ceased with the lumping sound of a falling body.
Just for an instant it was in the man’s mind to move out and
investigate. But the thought passed. He remained where he was, and
turning gave a sharp word of command to his patient team, which
promptly moved off in the direction of the barn.
There was no doubt in the farmer’s mind; there was also no undue
concern. But as his horses moved off he removed the fur mitt from his
right hand, and plunged it deeply into the pocket of his capacious
leather coat. It was a movement of instinct. It was a movement that
was the outcome of existence in a territory where survival depended
upon the capacity of the individual in defence. His muscular hand was
gripping the gun that he never failed to carry somewhere secreted about
his person.
The silent moments prolonged. Then the sound broke again.
The next instant George Marton found himself gazing upon the unkempt,
haggard face of a fellow-creature. The face was peering out, framed
by the boughs of snow-laden spruce which had been thrust aside. And
a pair of hungry blue eyes were staring at him out of deep, hollow
sockets.
“Well? What’s the game?” Marton spoke quietly, but there was an
incisive note in his challenge. “You’re covered. Move hand or foot till
I say, an’ you’re surely a dead man.”
The stranger’s reply was a laugh. But he obeyed very literally.
“Well? I’m waiting.”
Marton had not moved a muscle. But the understanding behind the
stranger’s wild eyes was plain enough. The man in the bluff knew the
farmer’s gun was levelled at him in the depths of his pocket.
It was a wofully hoarse voice that replied as the laugh died out.
“I’m lost. I’m starving. Another night in the open without a feed and
I’ll be dead.”
Marton’s reply was instant.
“Put your hands right up over your head and come out of that bluff.
Your hands up first.”
He was obeyed without demur, and the farmer beheld the steel handcuffs
that were set about lacerated wrists.
“Now come right out.”
The farmer’s tone had changed ever so slightly. Maybe the sight of the
lacerated wrists had excited his pity. Perhaps there was relief that
the man was defenceless. At any rate, the tone had less sharpness and
more humanity in it.
* * * * *
They stood face to face, and within two yards of each other. The
stranger was the taller. He was clad in the black sheepskin coat of the
police. His fur cap was pressed low down over his fairish face. There
was a stubble of beard and whisker disfiguring the lower part of his
face; and, on his cheekbones, and on the end of his nose, were great
blisters of frost-bite. But it was the man’s hungry eyes that held the
well-fed farmer.
“What’s your name?” he demanded.
“James Pryse.”
“What are those irons doing there?”
“I made a getaway from the police patrol taking me down to Calford
penitentiary for five years.”
“For cattle?” The question came backed by a fierce light in the black
eyes.
The stranger shook his head.
“No. My brother killed a man who’d robbed him of a wife and seduced
her. I held up the police while he made his getaway.”
“Is that the truth?”
“God’s truth.”
“And the patrol?”
“Guess he’s hunting me right now.”
“He--wasn’t hurt?”
“Not a hair of his head.”
Marton nodded.
“Then come right along. I’ll do what I can.”