When daylight came we had breakfast and started on our journey again in
rather sheepish silence. The strain lasted for perhaps half an hour;
then Jake gave a great guffaw, smothering his face in his hands.
"Yep, some of 'em is awful green," he quoted again, proving for himself
a good memory as well as a sense of satire. "Jupiter!" and there was
another outburst of hilarity. "Sittin' Crow!" and more guffaws.
"To-night we'll be in the haunts of Roostin' Turkey! Giddap! You danged
old buckskin, it's good fer you I emptied the magazine!"
Under my seat I found a tent peg. Stealthily I raised it in the air, and
joyously I walloped Jake on something solid beneath his slouch felt hat.
He rubbed his head ruefully, but without taking offence.
"Well, that's over," he said at length, heaving a great sigh, as though
he had just been relieved of some big responsibility. "It's all in a
life-time. Giddap, you piebald flyin' ants!" and Jake made a strange
clucking noise in his throat which encouraged the buckskins into a
temporary lope.
The day was much the same as the one before, except that we were now
well out on "the bald-headed." Once in a while, at great distances, we
could see a homesteader's shack, a little isolated sentinel-box of the
vanguard of settlement. Once we were intercepted by another team and
democrat, much like our own, which cut across our trail. The driver
asked if we could spare any water. We gave him half of what was in our
keg, and he extended his plug of chewing tobacco all round. We chatted a
few minutes, and then with mutual friendly shouts and waving of our arms
we were off again.
During the afternoon, Jake's mind having apparently cleared of all other
matters, he began to sing. It was some little time before we detected
the origin of the strange sound; different times I looked down at our
wheels, or glanced about to see if someone were approaching. But the
volume of sound grew as Jake developed his theme, and presently there
was no doubt that he was singing. We soon discovered that Jake had two
songs, "Sweet Marie" and "Clementine", and he used both words and music
interchangeably. As we were able to analyze it more closely we found his
rendering ran something like this:
"As I clasp your hand in mine, Sweet Marie-e-e,
"A feelin' so divine comes to me, comes to me-e. Giddap, you
danged buckskin, fallin' over your feet. Goin' to sleep? Cluck,
cluck!
"Lived a miner, a forty-nin-er,
"An' his daughter, Clementine."
But we were to discover that singing was not Jake's only forte. He had
the most amazing eyes. They were always half asleep, and in the heat of
the day they seemed more than half asleep, but he saw things long before
they hove into our vision, and, I have no doubt, he saw many things that
we did not see at all. In the middle of the afternoon he suddenly broke
off with "Lived a min-er," and brought his horses to a stop.
"Like to try a shot at that coyote?" he said to Jack.
"What coyote?" asked Jack, looking hurriedly in all directions.
"Over there," indicating a section of the horizon with a sweep of his
arm.
"Can't place him," Jack confessed.
"Beside that little mound of dirt--badger-hole, I reckon; there's a tuft
of grass in front of him; he's lookin' straight at us, wonderin' who the
hell----"
"Oh, I got him, I got him!" Jack shouted in a loud whisper, and began to
get out of the wagon, but Jake's arm restrained him.
"Don't do that. He'll run the moment you get out. Take him from here."
He slipped the rifle over Jack's arm. "She's loaded," he said, with a
grin. "Set 'er fer two hundred yards."
Jack aimed long and carefully, and even as he aimed the coyote turned
his broadside deliberately, as though to give him a better target. Then
he fired, and a whiff of dust puffed up three hundred yards away. The
coyote, however, had taken notice; perhaps the bullet didn't pass so
far above him, at that. He stretched himself like a tawny ribbon and
bolted with amazing speed into the wilderness. Jack sent two more wild
shots into space.
"Toler'ble safe," was Jake's comment as he laid the rifle away.
"Toler'ble safe."
Half an hour later he pulled up again. "How about you?" he said, turning
to me.
I could see nothing until, following the line of his arm and finger, I
at length detected an object behind a little whitish willow bush,
appropriately called the wolf willow. Even then I could see only a pair
of sharp ears and the triangular outline of a head; there was nothing
else visible.
"You better take him, Jake," I said. "You're a real shot." I felt I owed
him that much for that wallop with the tent peg.
He was nothing loath to take up the rifle, and I began to realize how
big a courtesy it was to offer us the first shot. He drew the gun to his
shoulder, craned his neck down along the stock, steadied the barrel an
instant, and fired. The coyote leaped in the air, fell on his back,
kicking and pawing in the wolf willow. We drove over to him, but already
his lips had curled back in a death-snarl from his gleaming teeth.
Jake drove on in silence while we meditated upon his amazing
marksmanship. Any comment on our part would have been superfluous, a
fact which no doubt our driver understood. But his thought was evidently
running along some course similar to ours, although skirting into wider
fields.
"If ever there's a big war," he remarked at length, "an' I reckon there
will be some day, the chaps from these prairies will sure give 'em
hell."
It was a strange speech for Jake. Jake, short and fat-waisted, guiltless
of coat or waist-coat, his coarse blue shirt flying open at the neck,
little streams of tobacco juice meandering down his stubby chin, his
slouch hat pulled low on his head and his brown, tangled hair tufted out
about the ears; most of all, his pudgy feet, which would not reach the
floor of the wagon box--surely here was as unmilitary looking an
individual as one could picture. And yet, his amazing keenness of
eyesight, his quick, accurate, uncanny marksmanship, and his calm
assurance in which there was no word of boasting, but a mere statement
of fact, that if ever there were a big war the boys from the prairies
would "give 'em hell!"
We camped that night by a stream of which Jake knew, because there was
little water on the prairies, even at the first of May. Next day we
drove all day, and later into the evening than usual; it was quite dark
when we stopped.
"This is the place," Jake said, "but you can't see it to-night. Have a
good sleep and we'll size 'er up in the mornin'."
We tried to eat breakfast without concern, but we were hurried and
nervous, and eager to see how our judgment would tally with Jake's. On
the road he had tried to explain to us the system of survey, and we had
a general idea of it in our heads. Now he took a township map from his
pocket and showed us in detail where we were.
"This is us," he said, pointing with a thick, stubby finger, "right on
the north-west quarter o' Fourteen. Immedjut west of us is a road
allowance, runnin' north an' south. Immedjut west of that again is
section Fifteen, which is railroad land, an' can't be took up free. But
immedjut north-west, cornerin' right against this quarter, 'cept fer the
road allowance, is the south-east quarter of Twenty-two, which is open.
Now these two quarters, north-west Fourteen an' south-east Twenty-two,
is as good as any land that lays out o' doors, an' better than most.
There's a bit of a gully here--you'll see it in a minute--runs down from
the north-east an' cuts off to the south-west, an' runs right between
these two quarters. There's springs in that gully somewhere, an' runnin'
water practical the year round, an' shelter fer stock an' all that kind
o' thing, an' you get the benefit of it all, an' it don't take two acres
off'n your land. It's a plumb Paradise an' you can't beat it nowhere."
"How far is it to a railroad?" Jack asked.
"Plumb down that road allowance, thirty-two miles, straight as the crow
flies, when it ain't Sittin'," he threw in with a little snicker.
"Thirty-two miles!" Jack exclaimed. "Pretty well in the wilderness,
isn't it?"
"Wilderness nothin'! This is suburban prop'rty. This is close in. I take
some of 'em back sixty an' seventy an' eighty miles. Thirty-two miles is
jus' right, an' I'll tell you why. When a new railroad comes its likely
to come about thirty miles from the other; that's about a sensible
distance apart. An' here you are, in the middle of the right-of-way,
an' may be cuttin' your homestead into town lots; ten lots to an acre
an' two hundred dollars a lot. Can you beat it? The Lord sure has been
good to you, fer no special reason that I can notice. 'Tain't your good
looks"--we were badly sun-blistered, in spite of the axle-grease--"an'
'tain't your good sense, excep' in selectin' me as your financial
advisor, so to speak. I reckon it's all account o' those
girls--_sisters_, you said."
Jake threw a querying stress on the word _sisters_, but it was against
all nature to be offended at him. Had we resented his remark he would
have laughed our seriousness out of court. But we decided to see some of
the adjoining sections.
Sixteen appealed to Jack. We could have taken the west half, and so,
working together, we would have had a mile furrow. The gully also
touched sixteen, and would have given us the same advantages as Jake
claimed for the sections he had recommended. However, we found him very
fixed in his preference for Fourteen and Twenty-two, and finally we
accepted his arguments, and set out to make a more detailed survey of
the land. The gully angled between the two quarters, taking scarce an
acre off either of them. A jolly stream, brown with the grass of its
banks, gurgled along its bed.
I knelt down to try the water; there was the taste of snow, but there
was also the harder, sharper note of spring water mingled with it.
"Runnin' water like that is worth a thousand dollars on any man's
farm," Jake declared. "An' come up this way. Wait till I show you
somethin'."
The "something" proved to be a widening in the valley, where was a
considerable growth of small willows and poplars. "Fence posts and fire
wood," said Jake, "an' on railroad land too, that won't be sold fer
years. You'll have 'em all cut down before then. That timber's worth
another thousand, or half that, anyway."
I thought of the great pine back on the old farm in Ontario, and the
"timber" looked to me like gads and switches. None of it was tall enough
to reach out of the little valley and show a green tip to the bald
surface of the prairies. But we were not in Ontario now; we were in a
land where even a three-inch tree was not to be despised.
"An' here's somethin' more," he said, setting an example for us by
walking stealthily on his pudgy legs through the clumps of willows. At
the other end of the wooded space we found a little pond opening out,
and a score of wild ducks drowsing placidly on its smooth surface. The
bright colorings of the drakes, the beautiful archings of their necks,
and their graceful movements on the water held us for a moment in silent
admiration.
"An Englishman," Jake remarked, when we had turned back, "would take
this farm fer the duck pond alone. They're the dangdest people ever was
fer wantin' to kill somethin'. He don' care if his farm is all sand or
wallows, 's long as there's somethin' to shoot, the Englishman don't.
But fer a Yankee it mus' be every acre wheat land. He don' care fer
nothin' but the long green." Jake paused as though to think over these
national characteristics.
"I dunno which is the worst," he said at length. "I reckon us Canadjuns
is about right, with a little o' both."
"It has been said that a Canadian is half Englishman and half Yankee," I
remarked. "What do you make of it?"
"Nothin' to it," was Jake's emphatic answer. "When a Canadjun is
enjoyin' an argyment with a Yankee he's all English, an' when he's
pullin' off a deal with an Englishman he's all Yankee, an'----"
"He gets the sixty pounds," said Jack.
Jake braced himself on his short, stout legs, and made a gesture that
might have been interpreted as a belligerent attitude. He ended it by
flapping his arms in imitation of flying, and emitting a series of caws.
Jack was duly suppressed. "Let's get to business," he said. "Explain
this soil. Will it grow anything, and if so, what?"
"Let's find a badger-hole," said Jake, and we had little trouble in
locating one. "Now look at this. This hole goes down five, six, seven
feet, maybe more, in the ground. Look what his nibs has kicked out.
Fine, loamy, sandy soil, not too light an' not too sticky, all the way
down. That goes plumb to Kingdom Come. Course, the top is a little
darker, on account o' the grass roots, but it's all soil. None o' yer
down-east three inches-o'-muck-an'-a-rock-bottom to that."
Jake took a fresh chew of tobacco and looked out over the greenish-brown
prairie. It certainly was a picture to kindle the imagination. Almost as
level as a floor, one could have seen a jack-rabbit jump anywhere within
a mile. The little gully was quite lost in the vista; you would not
dream of its existence until you came right upon it. In no direction was
there a sign of life, but far on the horizon a whiff of smoke hung like
a fading pennant in the still sky.
"I have it figgered out like this," Jake continued, "an' my figgers is
right; this land is worth more than any gold mine between hell an'
Whoop-up. When you take the gold out o' a mine you ain't got nothin'
left, but you can take gold out o' this mine next year, an' the year
after, an' the year after, fer ever an' ever, an' there's still as much
there as when you started--if you farm it right."
Our inspection satisfied us in every particular. Jake explained, as we
already knew, that we would have to build separate shacks on the two
quarters, to comply with the law about sleeping on the land claimed.
"But you can build one stable in the gully fer the live stock," he
added; "the Gov'ment don' care where _they_ sleep, jus' so's the
homesteader himself is sufficiently oncomfort'ble."
We smiled over his interpretation of regulations which, as we knew, were
necessary to prevent the wholesale blanketing of the free lands by
people who had no intention of living on them.
"Now we better pick a second an' a third choice, jus' in case some one
slips in ahead o' us on this," said Jake, and we spent the afternoon
driving about and making fresh locations. Much of the land was already
taken up, Jake told us, and although there were as yet no signs of
settlement we would see a great change by fall.
Jack spoke of the disadvantage of the alternate sections of railroad
land, which were not given away free, but which had to be bought. "They
are an obstacle to close settlement," he said, "and I guess loneliness
is about the worst thing there is to contend with on these prairies."
"Perhaps," said Jake, "but they're an advantage, too. They give the
homesteader a lot of free pasture an' hay land, fer instance. An' in a
few years, when you have had some good crops an' caught the bug fer big
farmin', you'll be mighty glad o' the chance to buy Fifteen or
Twenty-three."
We camped on Fourteen that night, and Jack and I were filled with plans
for our shacks and our stable. The shacks would be up on the prairie
level, on opposite sides of the gully, in full view of each other, and
about a hundred yards apart. The stable would be in the gully, close to
the road allowance, sheltered from the winds, and convenient to water.
The crossing of the stream was passable, but would stand improvement.
Early in the morning we started back, and after three full days in the
democrat we found ourselves one evening swinging up the now strangely
familiar streets of Regina. The raw prairie city of 1904 already almost
seemed like home. We were like travelers returning from strange lands to
scenes of old recollections. We had been away just seven days, but in
that time we had swung far out into the universe; we had drunk of the
air of God's new creation; we had been strangely conscious of the
company of our souls. We arranged with Jake to meet him in the morning,
when he would go with us to the land office while we registered our
claims, and at the hotel we found a note from the girls giving us their
new address. We located them without trouble; I fancy they had not known
that seven days could be so long. They had no room for us, so we had to
go back to the hotel, but first we sat with them late into the night,
recounting our adventures and picturing to them the place that was to be
our home; kindling in them, if we could, some fire of the joy of
ownership which was already leaping in our breasts.
In the morning we went with Jake to the land office; Fourteen and
Twenty-two in the township where we had decided to locate were still
open, and we had no difficulty in filing our claims. We returned to the
stable with Jake.
"What's the damage?" Jack demanded.
Jake expectorated profusely, spread his feet, and scratched his head.
"Seven times seven is forty-nine; fifty dollars fer locatin' makes
ninety-nine; I guess she's ninety-nine, boys; gosh darn it, we might
have made it a hundred."
"My word!" said Jack. "Isn't that a bit thick?"
There was a merry twinkle in the guide's half-closed eyes. "An' two
girls to go out there with you? Whad'ye expec' fer your money? But I was
forgettin' about Sittin' Crow. I'll throw off four dollars fer Sittin'
Crow. It was worth it."
But we paid him the ninety-nine and Jack threw in another. "We'll make
it the even hundred," he said. "Come out and see us when you get a
chance; we may have a bite of fried coyote for you."
"Oh, I'll be along, I'll be along," said Jake. "I'll blow out there
often."
We shook hands with Jake and turned away with a strange feeling of
cutting ourselves adrift. We had not known how quickly an attachment may
grow--on the prairies.