ONLY JUSTICE HAD BEEN DONE
THE reaping season passed and threshing time arrived. The farmer was
plowing his fields for the next year’s seeding because he had finished
reaping before most of the other farmers had finished. He worked himself
as hard as he worked his “critters.” That was his reputation among those
who did not have anything more serious against him, but they were few.
Every fall he, like most of the other homesteaders, left his farm and
joined a threshing crew some twenty miles south, remaining with it until
winter set in and until the wheat of the last farmer of their circuit
had been threshed.
Came the last hot spell of the year. Cold winds and rain and cloud of
early autumn gave way to a short Indian summer, so warm that insects
long too stiff to appear more than for a few hours during the warmest
part of each day, came buzzing back to life as if it were springtime.
Nose-flies began to bother the horses and the dirty, old, wire-net
nose-baskets were brought back into use.
The sunlit air sponged up the aroma that oozed from the wet earth, and
breathing it filled Dora with old longing. Sensations of loping free
over the unfenced earth, like spirits, danced enticingly before her
yearning eyes. Birds flitting through the sweet air sang with the
enthusiasm of spring and urged her to resist the forces of evil that
fettered her. But the harness on her back was heavy. The traces that
bound her to the plow and the lines that held her to the others who had
forgotten what freedom is, were inexorable as the will of the man, whose
whip was his only argument.
They had been dragging the unyielding plow for a few hours on the first
of these delightful mornings, when, looking up as they turned at the end
of a furrow, Dora saw in the distant south a horse and buggy, coming at
a good pace. All the way down that furrow she saw the buggy steadily
grow larger and clearer. Coming up on the next furrow she could see
nothing and then as she turned once more she saw White-black coming. She
stopped for just a second and the whip came down with a stinging lash.
She sprang forward and pulled along with the rest; but her head was
higher than it had been for some time and from her trembling lips came
nervous whinnies which White-black did not hear. By the time the two
moving objects met, there was a long, melodious and very welcome “whoa,”
and the four horses stopped facing the one horse in the buggy.
The three horses relaxed and stood with heads lowered, grateful for this
bit of rest, but Dora was too excited to stand still. With head erect,
ears pricked she called to her old mate with a call that shook the whole
of her weary body. White-black raised his head at the first call, looked
at the four horses, sniffed somewhat like a dog and then with all his
strength, replied. Hardly had he finished when Dora, exerting herself to
the limit of her strength, called again. White-black started forward as
he replied this time but the impatient man in the buggy, flaring up with
righteous wrath, cruelly jerked the lines. White-black raised his head
in pain and moved back a step. He called again but he did not attempt to
go to her any more. His head lowered like that of the horses beside Dora
and an expression of utter helplessness came over his white face. Dora,
too, dropped her head with the full realisation of the futility of
trying in any way to overcome the hold man had upon them.
The ploughman left the buggy side where he had been standing, conversing
with the visitor, and walked back toward his plow a few feet, then
stopped, and continued the conversation.
“Then I can depend upon you?” said the man in the buggy.
“Oh, I’ll unhook right away,” replied the other, taking out his watch,
“and I’ll be there by supper time. I’ll start just as soon as I feed the
horses and get a bite myself.”
“All right!” said the stranger, striking White-black a blow with the
whip that sent him forward at a bound.
Dora called after him. From the distance, even as he was running away at
top speed, White-black called back, helplessly. Dora tried hard to keep
her eyes on the shrinking buggy and the two white ears that protruded
above it, but her eyes were hemmed in by the blinders and she found it
difficult. She was obliged to raise her head over the mane of the little
bay mare. Forgetting for the moment the man at the plow, she rested her
head upon the bay mare’s neck and called and called again.
There was a sudden order to move on and Dora started off, expecting to
pull with all her might upon the traces. She was most agreeably
surprised to find that they had been unhooked and all the way to the
house, stirred by emotions which she had no other way of expressing, she
pulled ahead of the others, eager to get to the farmyard as if she
expected to be released there so that she could go back to the world and
the life for which she longed with old fervour again.
Dora was unharnessed and taken to her stall in the barn. The little bay
mare was released in the corral, while the two big horses with their
harness on were put into the stall next to Dora and all were fed. In an
hour the farmer was ready to depart. He came into the barn and took the
two horses out, and soon after, Dora heard the wagon rumbling away.
During the last few weeks, throughout the endless hours of wearing toil,
Dora had yearned for the stall; but now as she stood there, fresh from
the unexpected meeting with her lifelong companion, the enclosure of the
barn was as harassing as the slavery of harness, and without knowing why
she did it, realising fully that White-black was far out of hearing, she
called and called like a broken-hearted mother from whom her foal had
been taken.
Her calling was suddenly answered by the loud voice of the boy, who
dashed into the barn and began quickly to saddle her. He tightened the
cinch, as he always did, till Dora protested, and then put into her
mouth the rider’s bit with its cruel bend. So, too, he put on the
wire-net nose basket and fastened it so high that the wire-net pressed
against her lips.
As soon as Dora got outdoors she looked for signs of White-black. When
the boy jumped to the saddle she started away to the south, but with an
angry pull of the reins he turned her to the west. In spite of the fact
that she had been working to the limit of her strength, in spite of the
pain in her muscles and limbs, she leaped away like a racer, and in
spite of the fact that she was already going at her greatest speed, the
idiotic boy, as was his habit, kept applying the spurs. On the trail
along the wire fences she merely tossed her head with displeasure at
every dig, but when they reached the end of the fences and he turned her
diagonally across the trackless plains, the sight of the open,
unobstructed prairie helped her to make her show of resentment plainer.
But the stupid boy not only failed to perceive that he might have been
wrong, he resented what struck him as a challenge to his authority. He
meant to show her that he was master. He jerked the reins back with all
his might and dug the spurs into her sides.
“Go ahead!” he cried when she fled across the plains as if she had been
frightened and were running away, “You can’t go too fast to suit me!”
Before Dora, as she sped, loomed an exceedingly large badger hole, the
freshly dug, yellow earth piled high to one side. She was used to badger
holes and had long ago learned to cunningly avoid them, no matter how
suddenly one appeared in her vision. But despite his tactics the boy was
surprised by Dora’s unusually nervous behaviour. He was not at all sure
that she wasn’t really trying to run away. In spite of his fear, he
could not allow himself to dispense with his bullying proclivities, and
as she neared the hole he turned her head sideways and once more plied
the spurs without reserve.
Where she would have, without any difficulty, avoided it on her own
account, his turning her head drove her upon the mound of earth. Her leg
slipped on the loose, newly-dug earth and went down the hole and as the
boy attempted to leap from the saddle he was thrown forward six feet
from her head, landing with a thud and a shriek.
He was not badly hurt, but he was so badly scared that he yelled like a
frightened baby. When he got to his feet there was an expression of
murderous intent on his face and he stretched his arms forward as he
started for her as if he meant to beat the life out of her when he got
hold of her. But he did not get hold of her. She had been frightened,
too, and had stood looking at him, unable to decide what to do; but when
she saw those hands, she reared high into the air in an effort to
prevent his seizing the reins. This time he backed away afraid of the
hoofs that rose threateningly before him. She turned with a gracefully
defiant toss of her head and bounded away as fast as the dragging reins
would allow her to go. She could hear his frantic threatening cries, but
that voice had lost its power. Her chance had come at last!
By his futile cries she could tell how far she was leaving him behind
her. She dared not stop to look back even when she heard his cries no
more. The reins trailing on the ground impeded her flight and she felt
as if he were but a short distance behind her and would soon reach her.
In her mad race for freedom she kept stepping on the reins and every
step tore her lips and battered her palate; but not for a moment did
this actually halt her. She endured the pain like one who was aware of
the fact that the goal was worth it, till all that was left of the reins
dangled a few inches from her muzzle.
A mile farther west from the badger hole was a patch of woodland. When
she reached it, Dora stopped for a second to look back; but she did not
see the boy. A hill, in between, obstructed her view. She felt somewhat
freer not seeing him; but still she went as fast as she could go working
her way through the woods. The branches of the trees caught in her
saddle and made going very fast impossible. Twigs hooked in the ring of
the bit outside of the basket and not only hurt her but frightened her
because sometimes she had sensations of being seized by some man. But
despite these pulls and digs and impediments, dodging the branches as
best she could, she came in half an hour to a large open space. Two or
three miles beyond that she saw another patch of woods and headed
straight for that. She got through this bit of woodland without much
trouble and reaching another open space she followed the wall of trees
in its irregular curve to the north.
Still northward she fled, though the north had failed her. It was
evening, when after a steady trot for twenty-five miles she came to the
strip of forest that borders upon the Saskatchewan and there, coming
upon a deer path which was familiar to her, she plunged into the shadows
of the woods. She was too tired and still too weary of pursuit to think
of food. Coming to a windfall where she had many a time successfully
hidden in the days before her captivity, she lay down to rest.
She had been down but a short time when the prodding of the hard wooden
stirrup upon which she was lying forced her up. She tried to lie down
again, but again the stirrup forced her to get up. Again and again she
tried it, but each time with the same result, and finally with the
growing fever of a new and threatening fear, she gave up the attempt to
rest and went instead for a drink of water at the river. When she
reached the river’s edge she stopped to stare across to the wilds
beyond. There was a wish in her heart that she could find some way of
getting across the moving water, but that wish was dulled by a vague
realisation of the fact that now, without her old followers, getting
across would not be wholly satisfactory.
A great sad stillness brooded over the river, hanging over the silvery
reflections of the sky-line like a dome of mist that rested upon the
dreary shadows of the trees and banks on each side. Confinement and toil
had sickened Dora’s love of the wilds, though memory sought to exalt it
as of old, and the beauty of the wilderness, without her companions, was
only desolation. A nameless longing in her heart and a complexity of
fears she had never experienced before seized upon her like a disease.
It was as if she expected a fatal blow from some hidden enemy that moved
about her in every possible direction.
She bent down and drank at her feet. It was hard and disagreeable to
drink with the wire-net on her muzzle and the iron bit in her mouth. She
lashed the fast flowing stream with her muzzle in the hope that somehow
the nasty basket would be washed away by the water, but she gave up the
attempt and drank as best she could. Suddenly she lifted her head and
stared away into the dark spaces. In the far distance a small shadowy
form swooped from the top of a tall poplar, like a bit of shadow
breaking away from the body of the night, and disappeared in the
whiteness of the sky, leaving behind the melancholy echo of its cry. She
followed it with her eyes till it was no more visible, then suddenly
turned and ran for the open.
It was not only the open prairie she sought, because the open prairie
was the world she knew and loved best; but something else was driving
her. A fear that seemed to have been born of shadow and water and the
lonely cry of the loon. It was the sudden realisation that though she
had escaped from the detestable slavery of man and toil and dirty barn,
she had carried away from her bondage man’s inescapable curse.
Her first act upon reaching the open was to search the shaded distances,
then out of the depths of her embittered, fear-infested heart, she sent
into the wilds she had longed for her earnest appeal for companionship;
but only the mocking echo of her own voice came back from the motionless
tree-walls on each side of her. She lowered her head to graze but raised
it at once again. Now she knew what she had feared. Now she grasped
something of the extent of man’s curse. The wire-net on her muzzle, like
a trap, forbade her to eat until she returned humbly to man and
submitted to his tyranny.
In a frenzy of fear and anger she loped about in a circle for the
greater part of an hour, then she attempted to rub the cursed thing from
her lips. But rubbing on the ground pushed back the levers of the
rider’s bit and hurt her with every move. She stopped to think a moment,
gazing helplessly about. She lowered her head, pushing it along between
her hoofs, and pulling it forward, trying to rub it off that way; but
all that she did was to bend the strong wire of the basket, which after
that pressed painfully into her nose. She tried rubbing her muzzle
against the bark of a tree. A small twig point pierced the skin of her
lip and as she hastily pulled her head back the lever of the bit caught
in some way and she struggled for some time before she freed it. Then
she gave up, running off into space as if she were trying to flee from
some fearful thing she had just seen.
The cinch was still tight and though it did not bother her much when she
was up on her feet, it seemed to grow tighter and cut into her skin when
she tried to lie down; and if, for want of rest, she lay down anyway,
the stirrups always fell in such a way as to press into some tender spot
as she lay upon one of them. She would endure that for a few minutes and
then she would get up again with a groan.
The poplar woods about the Saskatchewan are not continuous. Patches and
strips covering spaces of from one to fifty acres cut up the rolling
plains. By running round about these she could keep herself invisible to
approaching enemies. Her old power to detect man’s approach seemed to
come back to her. Once that day she thought she detected some one
coming, and hid in the trees without even making sure, then coming out
on the other side and taking a roundabout run, left that section of the
country. Yet as she hastily put distance between herself and this
danger, she half realised that she might have to go back at last to the
man from whom she had escaped, who she knew could save her from the iron
grip on her muzzle. Two days later she saw some one coming on the
eastern horizon. She was certain that it was the boy pursuing her and
first going north to get under cover of a patch of woods, she fled west
for many miles.
She came late in the afternoon to the pond in the wilderness where
White-black had been trapped in the mud. She remembered clearly
White-black’s floundering in the mud and avoided that side of the pond.
She walked leisurely around it, gazing over the silent water from whose
brightness she missed the remembered sight of ducks. Many a time in her
slavery she had had visions of this bit of water with its reflections
smiling up to the heavens. It seemed hard for her to believe that she
was really there. She had longed so often to be there; yet, now, she
experienced something like a feeling of disappointment. What it was or
why, she did not know.
She was crossing a muddy spot when she slipped and fell on her side. She
was not hurt but slightly stunned and remained lying down. As she lay
there it occurred to her that the stirrup was not hurting her. She did
not think of its sinking into the mud, but thenceforth when she wanted
to lie down she came to that muddy spot. The pond came to her assistance
in another way. She had gone in some distance to get a drink of clear
water where the pond bottom was quite hard and as she drank, some of the
lower rushes penetrated the basket through the meshes of the net. She
lowered her muzzle carefully, keeping her jaws open; and when she felt
some of the rushes in her mouth, she cropped them quickly, chewing them
triumphantly as the water dripped from her muzzle.
The rushes grew tallest in the centre of the pond. She was afraid to go
in very far, feeling constantly, as she would move inward, that this
time she was going to stick there. It was not long before what rushes
she could reach had all been cropped. She learned to get some grass by
doing with the grass what she had done with the rushes, but though this
was better food she could not get as much of the grass as she had gotten
of the rushes. She managed in that way, however, to keep life burning in
her bedraggled body.
The fear of being pursued and captured again left her as the days went
by without a sign of man, but as this fear left came hunger. All day she
struggled to obtain enough grass to keep her alive and when the stirrup
resting on frozen mud kept her awake at night, she only thought of grass
and how to get more and more of it. The sweetness of the wilds she had
loved was gone, leaving them hollow and desolate and so cruelly
unresponsive as to be almost mocking.
Day after day man’s curse grew heavier to bear and the strangle-hold it
had upon her life contracted with more telling effect. It was only a
matter of a short time when its contracting hold would finally and
mercifully put an end to her misery.
The short Indian summer passed away. The nights became cold and the
frosts froze the mud into rock. When in lying down the stirrup pressed
into some tender spot, she would endure the pain, then rise next morning
and go limping over the plains. A layer of thick ice which no longer
melted by the middle of the day now covered the pond. What little frozen
dew that she could get, with the little grass she could crop, only
intensified her thirst and the desire for water drove her to
desperation. She tried to break a hole in the ice but she did not have
the necessary strength. The irresistible desire for water sent her out
upon the slippery ice in the hope of finding a weaker spot. A dozen feet
from the edge she slipped and fell with a crash, breaking through and
falling into the icy water. She was obliged to rest a while before she
could summon enough energy to get up. When she did get up she was aching
from head to foot and on her leg was an open, bleeding wound. She drank,
however, all she could hold, then she turned and looked helplessly to
the shore, afraid to step over the broken ice, falling again when at
last she ventured toward it, but finally getting back.
Her sides pained her terribly and her open wound smarted and itched. She
tried to lick it but only hurt it with the wire-net. She stood stolidly
for a few moments, her addled brain trying to clarify the great
confusion that came over it. What was she to do? What was going to
become of her? Life was almost unendurable, and instincts of terrifying
force guarded against the death that would have relieved her. Paroxysms
of fear swept over her, filling the shadows of the desolation with
beasts of prey who, leering and licking their chops, waited with
terrifying patience for the weaker moment when they expected to pull her
down.
Geese flew southward constantly and their ominous honking sang dirges to
the death of all that life had been to her in its happier past. The
skies grew grey and remained chronically grey and the atmosphere seemed
filled up with a great cosmic sorrow, like the face of a child
suppressing the impulse to cry. The winds reaching out from the frozen
north wailed with maddening grief.
A taciturn old coyote began to worry her. He would sometimes pass her
while she grazed or struggled in her attempts to graze, each time
seemingly coming nearer. He filled her soul with terror. Sometimes he
woke her at night with his demoniac howling and she would spring to her
feet and shake and tremble with fear and cold, only to find that he was
sitting on the rim of the hollow, looking down at her, his black,
hateful form cut clearly against the dark grey sky. Then one morning,
she awoke to find him less than a rod away, sitting on his haunches and
watching her. He fled when she sprang weakly toward him with a fearful
cry in which she tried desperately to be defiant; but she decided then
to abandon the horror-infested basin.
The great weakness was upon her. The coyote had long recognised it and
she knew it now. Whither she was to go or what she was to do, she did
not know. Only she felt the need of going and she went, limping slowly
and painfully, sick in body and soul, all her defiance of man crushed
out of her. Thus the erstwhile Queen of the wilds lumbered painfully
over the plains that seemed to no longer sustain her, going humbly back
to man to dumbly beg for mercy, for even in that state of mind she felt
that as man had placed his curse upon her only man could remove it.
It was a dreary, dull afternoon. The sun struggled to show itself and
its weakest warmth was driven from her protruding bones by a cold,
cutting gale. In her lumbering along over the plains that seemed
strangely dim and uncertain she stopped every once in a while and stared
like a decrepit old woman. She came at last to an open space between two
patches of woodland and stopped to gaze wild-eyed upon a black shanty
covered with tar-paper, and a sod barn.
The smells that came from that farmyard made it very hard for her to
advance, but the intense feeling of her desperation conquered each wave
of fear and step by step she made her way toward the house, stopping at
last, a hundred feet away, unable to go any farther. There was no sign
of life. Fear held her motionless yet hunger and thirst and weakness
urged her to call for help. Her call sounded weak and hollow. She called
again with greater exertion and in that call a note of conciliation was
unmistakably audible.
Suddenly she saw the door of the shanty open and a woman came out. Had
it been a man, all her unworded resolution would have gone to naught and
Dora would have turned and fled; but a woman was a different experience.
She turned nervously and walked off a short distance, but when the woman
advanced toward her holding out a hand and calling with a most winning
voice, she stopped and waited. When the woman came nearer Dora heard her
own name. The recognition of that sound gave her so much hope and
courage that she deliberately turned toward the woman who by that time
was near enough to take hold of one of the pieces of strap that still
hung from the bit-ring.
For a few minutes the woman patted her forehead lovingly and talked to
her in a way that warmed poor Dora as if the woman had placed a blanket
over her cold aching body. When the woman began leading her toward the
house she followed willingly till the door opened and a little girl came
out, then she stopped as if afraid; but when the woman urged she went
on, keeping her eyes upon the little girl.
At the well, the little girl chopped a hole in the ice on the trough
while the woman removed the basket, bridle, halter and what was left of
the saddle and Dora lowered her head quickly into the water and drank as
rapidly as she could.
“That dirty brute!” said the woman.
“He never feeds his critters,” piped in the little girl.
“He doesn’t feed his wife,” added the woman, not because she wanted to
tell this to the little girl, but rather because she wanted to express
the hatred of an old and bitter feud.
“Take these rotten things,” said the woman, pointing to the bridle and
the halter, while she seized the remains of the saddle. “Let’s get them
out of the way, and don’t you ever open your mouth to tell any one, no
matter who it is, that his mare was here. I don’t want his rotten old
saddle and bridle. He never keeps anything looking decent enough for any
one to want any of his rotten things. Anyway it is a sin to send this
poor mare back to him. It ain’t up to me to catch his runaway critters
for him and I just can’t let the poor critter go off like this and die.
When Dad gets back from threshin’, he’ll take these things and drop ’em
on the road near his place where he will be sure to find them.”
When Dora had drunk all she could, she turned immediately to some grass
near by and began voraciously to pull at it. The woman had befriended
her and she was not afraid of her. But to her surprise, when she came
back, the woman rushed at her with something in her hand which she waved
threateningly at her, clearly ordering her away. Dora ran off as fast as
she could go and when she got well out of the way, she turned to look
back with a puzzled expression on her face. Both the woman and the
little girl were calmly entering the shanty.
Without an attempt to get at the motive behind the woman’s strange
conduct, Dora went on grazing there, moving off and looking back when
her mouth was too full to crop, eating so rapidly and so absorbedly that
she had no time to think about the phenomenal change that had thus
miraculously come over her. If she was not thinking gratefully, she did
feel grateful and possibly some higher intellectual force than hers, in
some way, realised for her that only justice had been done.
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