The New Resident
BLAKESON’S FERRY was a main-line depot. A small branch from here served
a number of rural places, of which one was Nine Springs.
Blakeson’s had quite a historic past, if legendary lore might be
believed. It was here, some fifty years ago, that an Englishman named
Blakeson came to settle with a large family, consisting of nine sons and
four daughters. The Salish Indians, resenting this invasion of their
territory, immediately sought to wipe out the intruders, and several
encounters followed, in each of which the intrepid settlers came off
victorious, for every one of the family, down to the youngest child, was
expert in the use of firearms.
Finally, feeling that the finger of fate was in it, the Indians desisted
from aggressive warfare; then Blakeson, who was a man of business,
approached them with offers of work, for which wages should be paid. But
the lordly red man has a soul above toil, and the Salish tribe to a man
would have turned their backs on the offer, but for the sight of the
“wages,” which Blakeson proposed to pay in kind.
These took the form of gay red blankets, bright-hued cottons, gleaming
knives, and other similar temptations to industry.
Even then the red man might have stood aside, and gone without these
treasures which had labour for their price. But there were the red women
to be considered; and the Salish squaws, driven to toil from babyhood,
decided _en masse_ that they might as well work for wages, when such
were to be had, as work for no reward at all. So Blakeson got his
labourers, who, although they were only women, proved quite as
satisfactory as their men might have done, if work had not been an
indignity which no red man would face.
But that was all over and past long ago, and there was only the name of
Squawlands, by which the wide tract of cleared ground by the river was
known, to remind one of the old story now.
Gertrude Lorimer thought of it, as she stood among a throng of other
passengers waiting for the main-line cars to come along and stop. All
the stories of the trials and tribulations of early settlers appealed to
her by force of contrast between the past and the present. Present-day
immigrants had only the forces of nature to repel and overcome, while if
a solitary Indian did happen to appear on the scene, he was regarded
very much as a curiosity and an object of charity, but certainly with no
trepidation.
Then her attention was disagreeably recalled to the present by the
jostling of a big fat man who was dressed like a miner, but who, when he
apologized for his rudeness, spoke as a gentleman might have done.
Gertrude might have thought no more about the man and the incident but
for the familiar and unpleasant leer which accompanied the courteously
worded apology. Drawing herself up with a haughty movement, she turned
away, just as a young man, dressed in similar fashion, exclaimed
angrily, as he dragged at the fat man’s arm—
“Haven’t you the sense to know a lady when you see one?”
The young man’s voice had the same cultured intonation, and Gertrude,
noticing it, supposed they must be immigrants fallen on hard times, and
when she was sufficiently remote from the man who had jostled her, she
turned to have another look at them. They had been joined now by an old
man with bowed shoulders and a querulous, drawling voice, who spoke in
rough tones, and was plainly just what he looked—an illiterate
countryman; and the only noticeable thing about him was that the other
two seemed to be in his command, and had to do his bidding.
The train came in at this moment, and, entering a car, she settled
herself just behind a young man who had a five-years-old child on his
knee.
Gertrude, having parted so recently from the little brood at Lorimer’s
Clearing, was just in the mood for making friends with any child who
crossed her path, and before ten minutes had gone by, had the little
fellow in her arms, and was taking off the keenest edge of her
home-sickness by amusing him.
Then the conductor passed up the car with an abrupt inquiry if there
were a doctor on board.
“I am a doctor; what is wanted?” said the young man whose child Gertrude
held.
“An old man has got a hurt and is bleeding heavily; wants binding up, or
he’ll peg out,” answered the conductor, laconically, and then added, as
if by an afterthought, “End car but one.”
“I’ll come,” said the young man, springing up; then, suddenly
remembering the child, hesitated, looking at Gertrude.
“I will take care of the boy until you come back,” she said, answering
the unspoken request, and smiling into the stranger’s face.
“Thank you,” he replied briefly; then laid his hand on the child’s
shoulder, “Be a good boy, Sonny,” he said, and, lifting his hat to
Gertrude, passed out of the car in the wake of the conductor.
“I always am a good boy,” explained the child, looking up into
Gertrude’s face with innocent, candid eyes, “except when I am bad.”
She laughed outright. “That is what most of us are, Sonny, good except
when we are bad, or bad except when we are good.”
“Are you bad sometimes?” he demanded, with a wondering look.
“Very often, I’m afraid; but I get good again as soon as I can, because
being bad is horrid.” And she shrugged her shoulders, as if to emphasize
the discomfort of the condition.
“Fader isn’t ever bad,” the boy remarked, with a pitying look at
Gertrude as if he were very sorry for her.
“That is very nice,” she answered. Then she immediately absorbed him in
a game of cat’s-cradle, being fearful lest he should begin to cry if
allowed time to think about his father’s perfections just now.
But Sonny was laughing merrily at his success in cat’s-cradle when a
little later his father re-entered the car.
“Look, fader, Sonny can do it most beautiful!” he shouted gleefully,
insisting on going through the whole performance again in order that his
father might witness his cleverness.
“It was kind of you to look after the laddie,” the young man said to
Gertrude. “A doctor is never quite like other men, you see, and he must
go where he is wanted regardless of everything, so Sonny has to be left
occasionally.”
“I hope it was not a serious case,” she said, more from politeness than
from any special interest in the man who had been hurt.
“No; only a flesh cut, although rather a deep one. The old man,
evidently a countryman and a bit of a tartar, boarded the cars with two
others at Blakeson’s Ferry—that was where you came on too, I believe.
He commenced finding fault with his companions, and kept it up until one
of them struck at him with a sharp-edged tin mug, and gave him a nasty
cut over the eye.”
“I remember seeing that group at Blakeson’s, and the old man was
quarrelling then,” Gertrude replied.
“A regular truculent old fellow, I should say, and quite equal to
hitting back when he gets the chance. However, he gave me a half-dollar
fee for my trouble, so I must not complain of my first paying patient in
this part of the world,” the young man said, with a smile.
“Have you come to settle?” Gertrude asked, with the quick sympathy and
interest which the native Canadian always feels for a new-comer.
“Yes; I’m going up into a mining district, and have been advised to
settle at Bratley, which is on a branch line from Lytton, I believe. Do
you know the place?”
He leaned forward as he put the question, and Gertrude was struck by the
likeness between him and his child.
“I am going there,” she replied. “But I’m afraid you won’t find much
work at Bratley; it is such a small place, only about ten or twelve
houses round the depot, and the nearest mines are five miles away, and
nearer to Roseneath than Bratley.”
“The question is, whether there is another doctor in Bratley or near
it?” he said, setting his square jaw in lines of sterner determination.
“I have never heard of there being one, either at Camp’s Gulch or
Roseneath,” Gertrude replied.
“Very well; I shall at least have what they call a sporting chance,
then,” he said, his stern face relaxing into a smile, “while those of
you who are my friends and well-wishers can occasionally fall ill out of
pure neighbourly kindness, so that I can keep my hand in at the gentle
art of healing.”
Gertrude laughed; then cradled the child, who had fallen asleep, still
closer in her arms.
“I don’t expect there will be any necessity for that. As soon as it is
known through the neighbourhood that a doctor is in residence, all sorts
of needs will be cropping up, and instead of your neighbours falling ill
in order to give you employment, it is much more likely that they will
have to turn to and nurse the patients who are brought from a distance
and dumped upon your hands to repair.”
“Ah, that is a good idea. I hadn’t thought of bringing the mountain to
Mohammed in that fashion,” he said quickly. “Of course, if there is no
doctor in the neighbourhood there would be no hospital either, and one
would be as necessary as the other in a wild district like this.”
“Quite as necessary,” she answered. “They have terrible accidents at the
mines sometimes, and there is nowhere for the poor fellows to be taken
care of, so they have to lie in their miserable shelters, which are not
worth the name of huts, until they get better, or die.”
“Ah, it would be uphill work, I dare say; but plainly there is room for
me here, and that is the main thing I wanted to know,” he said, drawing
a deep breath.
“There is always room in Canada, I think, for everyone,” she answered,
with a touch of land-pride in her tone.
“There ought to be, for it is big enough,” he said. Then he was silent
for a long time, looking out of the window with an absorbed gaze, which,
however, saw nothing of the scenery through which they were passing.
Presently he roused himself with a start, and, turning towards her
again, said, in a courteous manner, “My name is Russell—Charles
Russell; would you mind telling me yours?”
“I am Gertrude Lorimer,” she said simply; adding, with a blush, “but my
home is not at Bratley, although I live there when I am at work. I am
the telegraph operator at the depot.”
He bowed, thanked her, and would have taken Sonny into his own arms
then; but the child sleepily protested, clinging fast to his comfortable
resting-place and refusing to be moved.
“Please let him stay. I have brothers of my own as young as Sonny, and
it has been a great wrench to leave them,” she said, looking up at him;
but quickly dropping her gaze again, because her eyes were swimming with
tears.
He made no further attempt to take the child then, understanding as if
by instinct that there was some pain behind of which she could not
speak.
In reality, it was not the parting with Teddy and the baby which had
tried her most, nor even the straining clasp of Flossie’s thin arms
about her neck, but the sad patience on her father’s face, and the
unsteadiness in his voice when he had said to her—
“I wish you could have stayed on at home for a while, Gertrude; it is
lonely having you go away.”
“Let me stay, father,” she had cried. “I will wire from Nine Springs to
headquarters that I can’t come back.”
“No, no, child; it would never do—your mother wouldn’t like it,” he
answered; and nothing that she could say would move him. Only when she
had boarded the cars, and been carried from his sight, the weary
patience of his look remained in her memory to haunt her.
Her father was a broken man, she knew; the shock of the double
bereavement and his severe sickness had undermined a constitution
already worn down by hard work and rough living. If only she could have
stayed at home to cheer him with her presence how thankful she would
have been! But Mrs. Lorimer had willed it otherwise, and in that house
it was the mother who decided everything.
There was a wait at Lytton when they changed cars again; and afterwards,
on the run to Bratley, Gertrude was wondering, with a little
trepidation, how Nell would meet and greet her.
Nell was a dear good girl, of course; hard-working, devoted, and
self-sacrificing to a most extraordinary degree. But she was not refined
or elegant in her manners, and her fearful old clothes added to her
awkwardness. Suppose she should rush out from the office with a loud
impulsive greeting when the cars stopped, how Dr. Russell would stare
and wonder!
Gertrude shivered at the mere thought of such a thing; then reviewed
Nell by the mental pictures taken during the time she was at Lorimer’s
Clearing, doing two people’s work in a house of invalids. Nell’s hair
had always been rough, her face not invariably clean, while her clothes!
But Gertrude shrugged her shoulders and tried not to think of it at all,
only the worst of it was, the more she tried the less was she able to
banish the subject from her mind, until at length it became such
absolute torture that beads of perspiration came out on her brow.
Dr. Russell, looking at her now and then with a grave, intent gaze,
wondered at her secret agitation; but it is probable that he would have
wondered still more if he had known its cause, for Gertrude did not look
like a girl who would be influenced by a littleness of this description;
but then, every heart has its own feelings, which no outsider can even
guess at.
The cars slowed down at Bratley, and, holding Sonny in her arms,
Gertrude rose from her seat and went out on to the rear platform. Dr.
Russell was close behind her, laden with bags and bundles.
One or two other passengers only were alighting here, although the train
was packed with miners going on to Roseneath, where a mining boom was on
just now.
Sam Peters touched his cap in recognition, gave her a melancholy smile,
and immediately bestowed his attention on her trunk, as if that, after
all, were the only thing in life worth living for.
Gertrude was a little surprised, even a trifle resentful in her
thoughts, for surely Nell might have come out of the office to greet
her, and, quite forgetting her agitation on the subject a few minutes
before, she was disposed to regard the want of welcome as a grievance.
Suddenly a girl in a well-cut dark grey skirt, and a pretty blouse with
a fluttering red ribbon, came darting out from the office, and seized
upon Gertrude with a sort of whirlwind of greeting.
“Oh, my dear, how lovely to see you again! Who is this? At the first
glance I thought you had brought Teddy with you, and I was dreadfully
disappointed when the second look showed him to be a stranger.”
Was this well-dressed, eager-faced girl really Nell? Gertrude gave a
little gasp of amazement as she looked at her; then straightway became
heartily ashamed of those grudging thoughts which had tormented her all
the way from Lytton to Bratley.
“Dear Nell, how you have altered and improved!” she exclaimed. “No, it
isn’t Teddy, but a deputy little brother, borrowed to ward off
home-sickness. Is he not a darling? and his name is Sonny Russell.”
Nell wanted to make friends with the child too, but Sonny, in an
unwonted fit of shyness, put his face down on Gertrude’s shoulder and
was not to be beguiled from there.
At this moment the train began to move on again, the pace quickening
with each car that slid past.
“Why, there’s Nell!” exclaimed a fretful, high-pitched voice.
Nell turned sharply at the sound of her name in a voice she remembered
full well, but there was no one to be seen, and the cars were speeding
on to Roseneath.