Spoof was as good as his word. The following Sunday we saw his ox-team
as a slowly-growing speck on section Eleven, and a mile away we heard
remarks to the "bally bullocks" which, presumably, were intended to be
confidential.
"I just brought the bullocks for exercise," he explained, when he drew
up before our shack. "I could have walked much easier, and much quicker,
but they keep my arms and voice in form."
Even while Spoof was speaking, his oxen, attracted by the smell of fresh
hay at our stable, moved down over the bank of the gully and upset the
wagon _en route_. We disentangled them with some difficulty.
"I begin to lose sympathy with them; I really do," said Spoof, when we
found that the reach of his wagon was broken. "Now I shall have to bind
this bally thing together. Yesterday they balked in the hay meadow; in
the hay meadow, mind you, where, if at all, an ox should be in an
amiable mood. I argued with them for an hour, without effect, and then
I went home and read a magazine. It's an ill wind, you know. They
followed me about supper time."
"I'll tell you how to fix them," Jack remarked. "Next time they
balk----"
"But if I fix them they won't be able to move at all," Spoof protested.
"'Fix' is to make fast, to render immovable, and they're too much that
way already."
"No doubt that is what fix means in England," Jack admitted, "but in
Canada, to 'fix' a balky ox means, when everything else fails, to put an
armful of hay under him and set fire to it. It does the trick."
"By Jove, that's a ripping idea! Now why couldn't I think of that? I
suppose because I'm a greenhorn. I shall try it at the first
opportunity."
Spoof retrieved a bundle of papers which had fallen out of his wagon
box, and together we went up to the house. The girls were waiting in the
shade at the eastern side of the shack; in their Sunday dresses of
flimsy stuff appropriate to the hot weather they looked very sweet and
charming.
"Ah, here are the ladies," said Spoof, and in his manner there was a
touch of gallantry that in some way seemed foreign to either Jack or me.
"Real prairie roses, and no mistake," as he took their hands in his.
"It's jolly decent to ask a stranger over. All this out-of-doors; dawns,
sunsets, sky, distance--all very fine, but it isn't good to be too much
alone with it. Rather overwhelms one, don't you think?"
"I have felt that," said Jean, while Marjorie was fumbling for words.
"It's too grand; it oppresses one. It's--it's all soul; no body."
"That's it--that's it!" Spoof agreed. "All soul--no body. I shall write
that to the Governor. The Governor, dear old chap, thinks this country
is rather a bit off the map. I have promised to shoot him a polar bear
for Christmas, and he's quite looking forward to it. He writes to know
if I find the native labor satisfactory, and can my man mix a decent
whisky and soda. I must set his mind at rest. I let him think I run
quite an establishment, you understand; he sends a cheque now and again,
which, of course, bears a relationship to the position I am supposed to
occupy in local society."
"Doesn't your conscience trouble you?" Marjorie queried, the
conversation having swung into her orbit.
"Not at all. I am doing the Governor a kindness. He spends rather too
much money on whisky and soda--particularly the former--so I am merely
getting him interested in another kind of extravagance. A Younger Son is
a very successful form of extravagance, don't you think? What is it
Kipling says--'By the bitter road the Younger Son must tread,' or
something like that? So why shouldn't the Governor sweeten the bitter
road a little, and drink less whisky to his soda?"
While we were busy thinking of some appropriate remark Spoof remembered
his bundle of papers.
"I ventured to bring these over," he said, tendering them to Jean. "Just
some old copies of _The Illustrated London News_ and _The Graphic_.
There are some sketches by an artist showing his conception of homestead
life. I rather suspect the Governor has let him read my letters."
Presently the conversation turned to agricultural topics, and we were
more at ease.
"My plowing," Spoof explained, "has gone better since I discarded my
compass. The bullocks never took kindly to the compass. No doubt it was
a foolish notion of mine that a furrow should run either east and west
or north and south, seeing that the whole farm has to be plowed anyway.
I now let them veer and tack as they please, and we are making
considerable headway."
"Any crop in?"
"Not this year. A chap in Regina advised me to plant a sack of rolled
oats and raise my own porridge, but, thank Heaven, I'm not Scotch. No
reflection on the Scotch," he added hurriedly, noting a warning flash in
Marjorie's eyes. "They are a very wonderful people. They eat oatmeal,
and thrive on it. A very wonderful people."
"No garden either?"
"Only a few sunflowers. They should be up presently."
"Sunflowers? Why sunflowers?"
"A chap in Regina--Jake, the land guide--you know Jake, don't you?--he
told me to be sure and plant some sunflowers. They are invaluable in
winter. They stand up through the snow, and the sunlight beating on
their bright, yellow faces enables a settler to locate his shack when
otherwise the country is all a white blanket of snow. Jake assured me
that many a settler had been frozen to death through neglect of this
simple precaution."
"It's simple, all right," Jack agreed. "Our friend Jake seems to be a
good adviser. Did he give you any other hints?"
"Lots of them, but I'm afraid he's a bit of a spoofer. Told me to catch
four gophers and tie them by the hind legs to the four corners of my
farm, and their squealing would warn all the other gophers off. I tried
it but it didn't make a bit of difference. In fact, gophers seem to be
about all I'm raising this year--gophers and sunflowers. His wild duck
trap was no success, either. Jake showed me how to make a trap for wild
ducks, and told me to put some buffalo bones in it and I would catch all
the ducks I could eat. Said the ducks had to have the bone material for
shells for the eggs, and would go anywhere to get it. I set two traps,
but so far I haven't caught a duck."
"But did you put any tiger lilies in with the bones?" Jack inquired,
with a face that had its struggles to keep straight.
"Tiger lilies? No, he didn't mention that."
"Oh, that's a serious oversight," said Jack, who was rapidly taking on
the ways of the West. "Tiger lilies are the main part of the trap. You
see, the ducks cannot see the bones at night, and so they are guided by
the scent of the tiger lilies, which always grow around deposits of
buffalo bones. Just gather a few fresh lilies every evening and lay
them on the bones and you'll be surprised at the result."
In following this discussion I had not been observing Jean, or I should
have seen the gathering storm in time, perhaps, to have averted it. Now
she sprang in front of us like a mother bird at bay. If Jean, passive,
was beautiful, Jean, aroused, was magnificent. I sensed _that_ even
while swept off my feet by the blast of her indignation.
"It's a lie!" she exclaimed. "It's all a pack of lies! They're--they're
'spoofing' you, as you call it." She turned her withering glance
particularly upon her brother, but I did not quite escape it. "They take
advantage of your strangeness to the country to make you appear
foolish--they, who don't know Rembrandt from Mozart, or----or----"
Jean paused in her tirade, stuck for a figure that would express her
contempt for us. It was the first time I had seen Jean in the grip of a
righteous and belligerent indignation. She had revealed a new side of
her nature that was wonderful, adorable; perhaps a bit dangerous. The
poignancy of her beauty was not lessened by the knowledge that I had
fallen a number of degrees in her estimation, and that Spoof had
doubtless ascended a proportionate distance.
Spoof was the first to get his balance. "Why, why--that's all right," he
exclaimed. "Quite all right. A ripping good joke, I call it. I must work
that on the Governor when he comes to visit me. I shall have him pulling
tiger lilies for my duck traps,--see if I don't!"
"That will be when he comes for the polar bear you have promised him,"
said Jack, slyly. "You see, Jean, Spoof is a bit of a spoofer himself."
"I don't care if he is!" Jean flared back. "It isn't fair to-- to----"
Jean was very close to tears. "You too, Frank!" she exclaimed, suddenly
turning her wrath upon me, "You sat there like a mummy never saying a
word----"
"Well, that should let me out, I had nothing to do with----"
"Yes, you did! I saw you snicker! You're as bad as Jack, and you would
have said the same things, if you had been bright enough."
That was a body blow, but Spoof came to my rescue.
"Oh, I say!" he exclaimed, "can't we have some tea? Beastly dry
business, homesteading; no afternoon tea. I must speak to my man about
that. He's the same man as mixes my whisky and sodas, according to the
Governor's idea of it," Spoof explained.
The suggestion of tea confronted the girls with work, which, in proper
doses, is the universal restorer of good humor. They went inside, and
when in a short while they brought out tea and sandwiches the storm had
swept by, with only a dash of color in Jean's cheeks, like a rainbow in
an afternoon sky, to mark its passing.
"Do you know," said Spoof, when the girls had cleared up the tea things
and were out of hearing, "the thing of which I stand most in need at the
present moment--that thing which is so essentially English, and from
which I have been divorced for more days than I care to number--that
thing for which I would gladly give half of my kingdom, meaning the
north-west quarter of section Two? No? Observe the blushes beneath my
sunburned cuticle as I admit that for weeks I have not had a bath. For
weeks, literally. If my poor Governor could know that, not even the hide
of a polar bear would reconcile him to leaving me to live the life of a
savage."
"We can soon fix that--I mean, we can furnish the wherewithal," said I,
"and I will expect the deed of eighty acres in return." So we led Spoof
down to the pond, which the sun, now well over to the west, was
burnishing with hues of burnt-orange and amber. Along its grassy shore
on the northern side a score or more wild ducks were feeding, some of
them tail-tilted in the air as they grubbed the roots in the shallow
water. Their only notice of us was to move a little closer to the bank,
while two or three worried mothers gathered their broods in little
fluffy phalanxes behind them.
"My word, my word!" said Spoof. "Why didn't Jake tell me about this? I
will have that land guide's gizzard for this omission! . . . And how
tame they are!"
"No shooting yet," I explained. "It isn't fair to the youngsters; but
there's a great day coming. But the water is fine, and deep enough
toward the middle."
"My word, if only I had a bathing suit! I say, do you think there would
be any great danger--any danger at all, that is--of an interruption?"
"Not a bit. We have that all organized," and I showed him a red
handkerchief tied to a stick. "When the pond is in use we fly this
banner on the bank of the gully, and we're as safe as Sunday. The girls
usually have their plunge in the middle of the afternoon, for that
matter, and leave us undivided possession in the evening."
Spoof was already half undressed. "My word, and do the young ladies
swim?"
"Jean is the best swimmer I ever knew," I confessed, modestly. "We lived
beside a river at home, and she had a way of bagging all the prizes at
our swimming races."
"She bagged bigger game than that," Jack put in. "She stored up a lot of
trouble for herself and the rest of us by pulling our worthy Frank out
of the mill-pond one day, after the bubbles had begun to come." So then
I had to tell Spoof about that incident. But I avoided reference to the
pledge that had followed it.
"I'm afraid I shall be over here more often than you'll welcome me,"
said Spoof, as he revelled in the water. "You know, of course, the
difference between a bawth and a bath?"
"Don't know that I do," Jack admitted, spouting water after a plunge.
"A bawth," Spoof explained, "is what an Englishman has every morning,
and a bath is what a Canadian has Saturday nights."
After that we held Spoof under the water while I counted ten, counting
very slowly.
When we had had our swim and dried ourselves on the sand we went back
up to the house. The shadows were now falling, long and narrow, to the
eastward, and the prairie lay hushed and silent in that deep and
peaceful calm which marks the summer evening an hour or two before
sundown. The grass had taken on its peculiar evening shade of green; the
sunlight was yellow and amber, the stillness so universal and complete
that all nature seemed to await in reverence the vesper hour. All but an
irrepressible meadow-lark which, from a fence post nearby, thrust its
limpid challenge at us as we came up to the house.
After supper Spoof sat and chatted until it was time to light the lamp.
Jean set it on the table, and as its yellow glow fell across his face I
realized for the first time that Spoof was not a boy, as were Jack and
I. There were lines in the cheeks and about the eyes which, magnified by
the shadows under the lamplight, bore evidence that Spoof had known more
of this world's cares than was hinted by his usual light-hearted
conversation.
Presently he was talking of England; easing, perhaps the homesickness in
his heart by calling up scenes of leafy lanes and misty sun-shot
landscapes linking deeply into his life. He had tales of London as well;
tales of art treasures and music and theatres all alight with life and
beauty; tales of grave-stones marking the great of a nation with a
history reaching back into the early obscurity of Western civilization.
Something about the pride he showed in the great deeds of the past
seemed to strike us strangely--we of a country whose history was still
so much in the future and whose greatest deeds were still to be done.
"I tell you," said Spoof, "it is a wonderful thing to have a share in
the foundation work of a nation that is going on to-day on these
prairies. It's a wonderful thing to lay corner-stones of empire. But
it's a dangerous thing to have no past to steady you, to humble you, to
inspire. It's just as dangerous to live too much in the future, as we do
here, as to live too much in the past, as perhaps we do in England."
"That's why we need some of you people from the Old Land to mix with
ours," said Jean. "We need something to link our future with our
past--to give us balance, poise."
"Poise is the word, I think," Spoof commented. "New countries have
energy, ambition, enthusiasm, courage, optimism--all wonderful
qualities--but they are likely to need poise. That is something we are
perhaps overstocked with at home. My blessed countrymen are so well
poised that I lose patience with them now and again because they don't
lose patience with other people."
"Still," said Jack, "it's a great thing to be adaptable. What other
people would be so ready to adjust themselves to the ways of the
country, to set out their duck traps----"
"Oh, don't let us have any more of that!" Marjorie exclaimed. "I've been
all afternoon nursing Jean back into good humor, and I'm not too sure of
her yet. Let's change the subject. Do you sing, Mr. Spoof?"
"Only at great distances from civilization,--my bullocks could say a
word or two about my musical voice if they were so disposed. But surely
you or Miss Hall----"
"Jean sings and plays, if we have anything to play on," Marjorie
declared, "But we haven't added a piano yet to our equipment. I suppose
we shall have to buy a binder and horses and perhaps a threshing mill
before we have any money for musical instruments."
"And a house," I added. "I'd like to see you keep a piano in tune in a
cage like this."
"You should have a banjo," said Spoof. "By Jove, just the thing! I've a
banjo tucked away somewhere in my belongings. Something I forgot to pawn
at Regina. I'll bring it over and give you lessons, if you'll let me."
"I should be delighted," said Jean, and her voice was quite
unnecessarily low and sweet.
There was a late twilight glow in the northern sky and the smell of dew
on the prairie grass filled the air when Spoof decided it was time to go
home. We helped him bind up his broken reach and hitch the "bally
bullocks" to the wagon and watched him disappear into the darkness. Long
after he was lost to sight the rumble of his wagon and the voice of his
exhortation could be heard welling up out of the distance.
"A fine chap," said Jack, as we parted for the night. "I am glad we are
to have him for a neighbour."
"Yes," said I. But my voice had no ring of enthusiasm.