When I laid the proposal before Marjorie, she listened with a
complacency which suggested that the idea was not entirely new to her.
"I will go and keep house for you," she said, frankly, "if Jack and Jean
go too."
It was Sunday afternoon before I had an opportunity to speak to Jean. We
were strolling in secluded paths by the river, with bursts of autumn
sunshine falling through a gently rustling canopy of gold and bronze and
burnished copper and playing the rich hues of the woodland colors across
the radiant mass of Jean's fair hair. She was seventeen now, and my
wondering eyes had of late beheld her trim girlishness giving way to the
first entrancing curves of womanhood. Her light step, her grace of
motion, her clear, pink skin, her sensitive lips half parted over rows
of well-formed teeth, her eyes large and dreamful, all whispered in some
vague way in the ears of my boyhood that Jean was not as other girls;
whispered of Jean the artist--Jean the idealist! Jean had not gone into
the mill with the other girls of her age; she had continued longer at
school, and then had taken up the study of music. Among the limbo of
personalities which drifts into the bywaters of little towns, she had
found, too, an artist; a man apparently of talent, who had sought the
seclusion of our little milling centre in Ontario for reasons which were
his own. He had immediately recognized the artistic strain in the girl
and had bent his own genius to call it forth with no thought of reward
other than the joy of seeing it grow.
"You are wonderful, Miss Lane," he had said, after the first few
lessons. "You have perspective and proportion, which are the greatest
things in life."
"I think I am a very stupid pupil," Jean had murmured in answer. "You
are very patient with me--and all for nothing."
"For nothing! You leave me your debtor! You pay me a thousand times! You
have given back to me a purpose in life--an excuse for being alive! Ah,
Miss Lane, you do not know--yet--how empty a life can be. But you are an
artist, and some day you will dip your brush in pain--perhaps in sorrow
and regret--and after that you will _paint_. It is the law."
Jean told me these things that Sunday afternoon, and asked me if I knew
what he meant. I did not; but I knew the artist had given Jean an
instant's glimpse into life, and it was none the easier for me to
suggest the loneliness of a homestead "somewhere west of Manitoba."
"Do you think you could dip your brush in--in the Saskatchewan?" I
ventured.
She was gazing dreamily across the still river, and in the rich
draperies of Autumn which were mirrored at her feet there was no fairer
flower than Jean. She was the centre of a painting set against a
background of nature's gorgeousness.
"I know," she said, simply. "Jack has told me. I will go, if you--and
Marjorie--go."
It seemed to me that the reference to Marjorie came almost as a second
thought; at any rate, I flattered myself with that idea.
We had no difficulty in persuading my father and Mrs. Lane to fall in
with our ideas; in fact, they accepted our plan with some enthusiasm.
Father even insisted upon selling one of the farms and giving the
proceeds to establish ourselves in the West. It was little enough, as we
were to learn in due course, but Jack and I had also saved something of
our earnings, and during this particular fall and winter we were
unusually penurious.
"Nail down every dollar," said Jack, and we all were busy with our
nailing.
We had decided to make no start until the spring; this on the advice of
Mr. Edgar Gaines, a young man of the town who had gone west three years
before with his worldly belongings in a grain bag, and had returned
wearing tailor-made clothes and a horse-shoe tie pin set with something
which, in a favorable light, resembled a diamond. He had "proved up" and
sold out, and was living a lordly life on the proceeds--while they
lasted.
"I'm settling with myself for three years on the 'bald-headed', and I've
run up quite a bill," was Mr. Gaines' explanation of his gaiety. But he
was able to give us some suggestions born of experience.
"No use going in the winter," he explained, "nor too early in the
spring. You can't see land until the snow is off. And you have to _see_
it; otherwise you may take up a fine alkali mine. I took up my claim in
winter. That's why I had to sell it in winter."
"But don't you have to be there to put a crop in in the spring?" asked
Jack, who was eager to be away.
"First crop don't amount to much, anyway," said Mr. Gaines, making sure
that his tie pin was still in place, as the girls were in the company,
and seemed to regard him as something of a hero. "First crop don't
amount to much. Likely to be rushed in in too much of a hurry, and in a
dry season you lose your seed for your pains. Better take your time;
pick out a prime piece of land, get your shacks up, and start plowing.
If you're pushed for money, work out for somebody for awhile the first
year, or put up hay on the bald-headed; you can usually sell it to
settlers next winter, and soak 'em hard, always soak 'em hard."
"On the bald-headed?" repeated Jean; "what does that mean?"
"That means the prairie," Mr. Gaines explained, "because it's as bare as
a bald head, 'cept for a very short grass which makes wonderful good
hay."
Armed with Mr. Gaines' generous advice we prepared to start for the West
about the end of April, and, as it came about, my father and Mrs. Lane
arranged a domestic event on the very day of our departure. The affair
was quiet and unpretentious; ceremony in the church at eleven, and
dinner at Mrs. Lane's--Mrs. Hall's, I should say--where Marjorie and
Jean served, and we all tried to live in a joyous glow which was
strangely shot through with streaks of unhappiness. That night at six we
left for the West.
We travelled in a colonist car, and it was lucky that there were four of
us, as we occupied just one section. At night we pulled the seats out,
and let down the upper berth, so that there were two narrow beds. The
girls had the lower one, around which we arranged an improvised curtain,
and we had brought some blankets, which they spread on the wooden slats
of their seats.
Jean rapped on her hard bed with her knuckles. "At least, the blankets
will save the paint," she remarked facetiously.
"You're lucky," said Jack. "You should see our stone-boat."
Jack and I lay on the bare boards above. I say we lay, for during that
first night there was little sleep. We were under high nervous tension,
which the rhythmic clickety-click of the car-wheels could not
immediately soothe. Gradually the sound droned itself into my
consciousness as one word, with the accent on the last
syllable--Mani-to-bah, Mani-to-bah, Mani-to-bah. Then, as I was about to
fall asleep, the pent-up excitement of Marjorie and Jean would burst
forth in little giggling exuberances which came rippling up to our
station aloft.
It was with the morning that we really began to take stock of our
surroundings. The car was full of people; the air was foul and heavy;
sounds of most abandoned snoring came from various quarters. We made up
our berths and opened our windows; a grey mist hung on the trees and
swept by the train, but the smell of it was grateful and refreshing. We
washed our hands and faces, and were glad that Mr. Gaines had suggested
taking our own towels and soap. Marjorie discovered that there was a
stove on which tea might be made and we breakfasted out of our lunch
baskets.
By this time the other occupants of the car were astir. There were many
women and children, and the degree in the social scale seemed to range
from those with a considerable culture and a penchant for cleanliness to
those who apparently interpreted the latter term with the greatest
liberality. Several languages were spoken. Half-dressed men lolled in
their berths, exposing swarthy arms and slabs of hairy chests, and
slatternly women shuffled along the aisle, in imminent danger of
tripping on their trailing skirts and disrobing themselves. Children
whined or babbled, and, after the general disturbance of
breakfast-making was over, raced up and down the aisle, occasionally
tripping over a projecting foot or a suit-case, and raising a lusty but
short-lived outcry.
Some of the passengers understood only the barest essentials of English,
and were plainly confused over the values of a strange currency.
Whenever the conductor came through the car demanding tickets, which
seemed to be unnecessarily often, they received him with panicky
excitement or sullen stolidity. Our little party, although inexperienced
in the customs of travel, had the great advantage, which the native-born
never fully appreciates, of being in its own country. We were citizens
of it, and we had a well-developed Anglo-Saxon pride in what that meant.
We understood the language, the currency, and the customs of the people.
Brass buttons had no terrors for us. We had a general knowledge of the
geography of the country through which we travelled, and we knew, with
reasonable definiteness, where we were going. We had enough money in our
pockets to bring us back home, if that should be necessary. Most
outstanding fact of all, we had homes to come back to, should we so
desire.
And yet, with all these advantages, as the day wore on, a profound
melancholy, an intense loneliness, settled upon us. During the
excitement of our preparations we had not felt the strain, the lesions
of breaking away from parents and friends and surroundings made dear by
a thousand tender associations of childhood. But now all these things
rose up within me, and filled my heart and my throat. . . .
The saving thing was the high spirits of the girls. They seemed to look
upon the whole trip as a romantic adventure in which Jack and I, as
their young knight-errants, were cast for a somewhat heroic part. For
the most part our heroism was limited to the buying of fruit,
sandwiches, and coffee while the train changed engines at divisional
points.
"What a breakfast!" chortled Marjorie on the second morning out. "I have
had over ten miles of sausages!"
"And I have just had three telegraph poles of tea," said Jean, setting
her cup down. "When shall we see a Mounted Policeman?"
"Time enough," said I. "You may fall into their hands before you know
it."
Jean eyed me roguishly. "Do you think there's a chance?" she murmured.
"That's one of the attractions of the country which you didn't mention."
After two days and two nights we passed through Winnipeg. It was in the
grey of dawn, and we did not get off, but through the window we caught a
glimpse of lines of lights down a wide and winding street.
Daylight saw us on the prairies; not the "bald-headed," to be sure, but
the well settled country of the Portage Plains, where industry was
already fructifying in trim houses and barns, and orderly, well-kept
farms. And yet here and there was now the unbroken sweep of the
prairies, and our eyes danced and something caught our breath as we
tried to imagine what they meant. We knew what it was for men to spend
their lives in clearing ten, twenty, or forty acres, but here lay a
kingdom fresh from the hand of God and ready for the plow. And a piece
of that kingdom in the still farther West--320 acres of that
kingdom--was to be ours!
"And as much more as I can buy from year to year," said Jack, as though
picking up the thread of our thoughts, his face alive with enthusiasm.
"Boy!" he said, banging me on the knee, "there's no limit; there's no
limit!" I clasped his hand in mine with a pressure that told more than
words.
At Brandon we got off to stretch our legs while they changed engines and
filled the ice-boxes. It was the last day of April, and the station lay
in a yellow flood of lazy spring sunshine. Against the railing which
bordered the platform lounged groups of young men in shirt sleeves and
overalls, easy-going types of farm laborers waiting for a job to hunt
them down. The girls had gone a little ahead, and as they passed such a
group a young fellow in high boots and with a blue shirt open about his
hairy neck intercepted them with the remark, "Hello, girls; looking for
a man?"
Jean turned a contemptuous nose in the air, and would have gone straight
on, but Marjorie stopped, rivetted the inquirer with those flashing eyes
of hers and said, "Yes; is there one anywhere about?"
The young man threw up his arms as though to admit that the thrust was
too much for him, and the girls walked on, while from the lounging
groups came loud guffaws intended as a tribute to Marjorie's wit, and
more largely, to the goodwill which the group bore toward these two
young girls in particular, and to all girls in general.
"I couldn't have said that," said Jean, when they were out of earshot.
"I wouldn't have dared."
"Pshaw!" said the worldly-wise Marjorie, "there's nothing to those
fellows. I could make any one of them eat out of my hand."
"I believe you could," said Jean.
All that day we continued through the prairies, with here and there a
belt of scrubland to cut across the vision. All that day we rambled more
and more in the field of fancy--happy imaginings of the things we would
do with those farms of ours which lay out there, somewhere to the
westward, waiting only to be claimed. And as evening came on we watched
our first prairie sunset. There were no quick dusk and darkness, as in
the East; the sun hung long in the western sky, and as it descended
swung steadily to the northward. As it fell feather-like ruffles of
cloud almost overhead burst to color in the richest mauves and crimsons,
and long ribbons in the west floating like golden islands in a sea of
amber, caught the glow and silently unfolded a glory of pink and yellow
and orange and crimson and burnished brass. Silently and slowly the sun
dipped into the prairies as into a world-wide sea, but the sunset
continued; long after the great orb itself had disappeared, its radiance
filled the western heavens, and even while the grey twilight gathered
behind us our train seemed speeding forward into a lake of saffron and
champagne.
I turned to look at Jean. She sat by the window where the yellow light
blocked out her fine profile against the drab back-ground of the car,
and mingled in the richer yellow of her hair. And her blue eyes were all
a-glisten, as the long, fine lashes drooped and rose and drooped and
rose. And in the corner of her eye I saw a little pearl gather and grow
until, unrestrained, it stole across her cheek.
"Regina!" shouted Jack; "Regina!" springing to his feet and beginning to
gather up our effects, for we had agreed that this should be the base of
our search for land. We were ready to disembark by the time the train
had come to a stop, and our first glimpse of the prairie city was that
of buildings silhouetted against a saffron sky, and wide streets and
open spaces and the foundation-work of the metropolis that was to be.
Gaines had recommended an hotel, and we were soon located for the
night.