IN THE BLIZZARD.
"Shove on all the clothes you can get on to you, Eng--Bill," counselled
John Nixon, sucking his teeth shrilly as he donned a lupine-looking
wombat coat and reached for his mittens, "and after that put on an extry
sweater, as they say. She's a-going to blow."
The place was the Toddburn hotel, where Sir William and John Nixon, left
there by the warm and friendly train at 11 a.m., had now, an hour and a
half later, come out of the dining-room with a good meal "under their
belts".
"You don't need to hurry, gettin' your duds on, Bill," John Nixon said,
as he went out, "the Missis will be pokin' around the store down there
for an hour yet, and Jim's buyin' himself a new suit, to have for when
Daise gets here. I've told him she's married now, but it don't seem to
sink in.... You better stay here and keep warm till we fetch the team
round to the door."
Sir William stayed--not to keep warm, but to look about him, like a boy
at a circus. Somehow, the effect of the cold dry tingling air that
resided in the streets of this prairie hamlet seemed to percolate in
from outside, in spite of storm window and door, striking upon the
nostrils bracingly and making one "feel good" in spite of the blue fog
of tobacco-smoke and the odor of wet leather and fur. The effects of
Ware's accident, now a week old, had pretty well passed, and the
hereditary health of the Wares glowed in his face again and sparkled in
his eyes.
He stood with his back toward the window, his hands tucked into the
side-pockets of his Norfolk coat, his attitude the Englishman's
inimitable easy and negligent one which imparts to the stiffest suit the
comfortable effect of flannels, and glanced down the short perspective
of the Toddburn hotel sitting room and bar, which were in a kind of
suite, with a swinging-door between.
The roof of this place was very low, and the walls were very near one,
and after the spacious places in which Ware had lived his life, it was a
bit like standing in a piano-box. If the situation of this hotel had
been a narrow byway in a city, it would have been a slum, a locality of
death, a room of hollow coughings and faces dreary with debility and
gloom. But here, on the wide prairie it was in effect a sanitarium, if
one might judge by the figures that breezed about, the harsh but
deep-lunged voices that came out of the midst of steam-clouds made when
the outside door opened, the faces glowing and tanned by gale and
snow-shine.
One only needed to listen a moment to the hearty laughing and the
sentences detached at random from the blend of cheery, companionable
greeting and rallying, to know that the minds of these western men were
as healthy as their bodies.
"No, sir--I'd never go back on him. Bob an' me was neighbors
a-homesteadin'. It ain't his fault if he had to give up farmin' and get
a job in Jim McMillan's livery stable. His health give out--that's all."
"Yes, sir, boy--she's a-goin' to blow up some harricane before dark.
This reminds me of yon day, four years ago--yous'll all remember the
time--when Elleck Hamilton an' me started out for home on the
bob-sleighs, pickled up to the eyebrows. Elleck, he was worse than me
when we started; but Elleck's as strong as a horse, and when she started
to blow, he slung off the effects of the licker like tossin' off a hat.
But the stuff had got a kind of a holt on me; I got cold and started for
to go to sleep. However, Elleck he seen me home safe. My face was froze
a little, that's all--but Elleck, he'd had to get out of his bob-sleigh
so many times to look after my team, that he'd froze both legs, one as
fur as the ankle and the other clare up to the knee. Had to have her
taken off. Never was any good after that, Elleck. He was worth about ten
thousand dollars when that happened; and to-day he's buyin' grain for
an elevator company, at seventy-five dollars a month. But I've done
pretty well myself, an' old Elleck knows this--that whenever his
pride'll let him quit work, he can come over to my place, and set down
by the stove, and put his bad leg up on a chair an' keep her there, for
life, even if he lives to be a hundred and fifty."
Exclamation and anecdote rattled on; fog of tobacco-smoke and stench of
snow melting on fur filled the air; free grammar and the broad "a" had
unchecked currency in this organ-box of a western railway-hamlet hotel:
but Sir William Ware, standing by the iron-rodded window with
philosophic hands in his coat-pockets, had only one distinguishable
impression--that he was being educated, that this west was giving him
something denied by the university.
This was Western Canada--blunt, gruff, western Canada. Not too forward
in making one's acquaintance; not too stiff and "standoffish". Not
caring sixpence--so long as you yourself were "all right"--who your
father was, nor how much money you were worth. Western Canada, where
nobody who works--or, if he can't or won't work, can tell a good
yarn--is allowed to starve. Western Canada, which never "picks" a fight,
but--well, just try to "run on" her!
A raucous "hey!" brought Sir William about. Glancing out through the
window, in the direction of the hall, he saw John Nixon signalling to
him from the seat of a bob-sleigh. Hurrying on scarf and coat, Ware
hastened out, creaked across the sidewalk and smilingly awaited
instructions as to boarding this western vehicle of the long trail. It
had a high, green-painted double box. The front and rear seats were two
boards laid across the box and draped with gunny-sacks. The front seat
was occupied by John Nixon and Jim Burns, the hired man who had brought
the equipage in to meet the train. On the hind seat Lovina Nixon
perched, nothing of her visible except one stoical pioneer-woman eye
which looked out unwinkingly at Ware through a crack between folds of
gray shawl.
"Climb in alongside the Missis, Bill," directed John Nixon, who had made
no special preparation for extreme weather conditions, other than to
pull his corduroy cap down over his ears, "We'll need to get a-goin', if
we're intendin' to strike home before we get blew off the trail. All
set?"
"All set, old chap," Sir William responded, as he tucked his end of the
goatskin robe around his knees and, in response to Lovina's mumbled
recommendation, felt with his toes for the extra brick which Nixon had
heated for him on the top of the livery stable stove; "it's a jolly good
thing Daisy decided to do as Mother wanted and stay in town for a week.
Perhaps we shall have a better day, to bring her out."
"Oh, the gal wouldn't mind this," Nixon rejoined, casually, after he had
"clucked" the horses into a trot down the drifted street; "no, sir,
Bill; she'd have got you off that seat, a-runnin' behind in the
sleigh-track, as soon as your toes would start for to feel nippy. It
would take a mighty high wind to chase Daise into the house in the
winter-time, except when dinner is ready. Her and the dog is about even,
when it comes to standin' the cold. Ain't that so mother?"
"Oh, yes, it's so," Lovina's voice, muffled but still recognizable in
its sharpness, said through the swathes of shawl, "except when I ust to
want her to fetch in an armful o' wood or a pail of water. Then you
couldn't budge her from behint the stove."
"Aw, go on," Nixon, happy to be on the way home to the "stock" again,
swung his whip jovially but harmlessly over the backs of the horses.
"Wait till you see the happy reunion between her and Rove, Bill, when
she gets here next week. It'll prove what I say about them bein' chums.
Rove, he would have no use for a girl that stayed in the house: you
couldn't coax him any closer to in-doors than the chip-pile, not if it
was sixty below zero."
The two bay sleigh-ponies--a light team had been chosen, as they could
stand quick travel over difficult roads better than the heavy-fetlocked,
big-haunched, working horses--trotted along sure-footed on the hard
ridge of the trail. The last house on Toddburn's one short street was
soon passed. Turning out at a wide angle from the railroad, at a point
where Ware saw one of the country's tall red elevators, with staccato
explosion of gasoline engine, pouring wheat into a freight-car, the
prairie road set off alone across the white country.
The snowfall had been unseasonably heavy this autumn; and Sir William,
looking over the side of the sleigh-box at a point where some passing
horse had accidentally inched out into the soft snow and put down a leg,
saw a hole nearly fifty inches deep. Plainly, if the bob-sleigh should
slip off the packed hard ridge of the road, it meant a wholesale
"spill", a floundering of horses, a chilling to the marrow of all
concerned, and much delay. If it happened after dark, with the
blizzard--the effect of which Ware had often watched from the study
window of his city home--at its height, it _would_ be a bit awkward.
"Was you ever out in a blizzard?" said John Nixon, suddenly: as though
the thought, like that of a group of castaways in an open boat under
squall-clouds, had become by sympathy communal. "No? Well, you're
a-goin' to be out in one to-night, English--"
"Come, come, now, old chap," reminded Ware, "no national imputations,
remember. I thought it was to be 'Bill'--wasn't it?"
"Well, Bill," conceded Nixon, "as I was about to say, you're goin' to be
out to-night in the finest whoopin' he-blizzard since '97. I can smell
her a-comin'--all through me."
From the sleigh--which now, with the village in the distance behind and
a wholly roofless horizon-line before, was the sole, small centre of
life and companionship in the midst of a snowy waste--Ware looked across
the drifts toward the west, where the sun of the short, late-November
afternoon was trending low. The trail ran almost due north, to where the
white line of the horizon met the pale blue of that part of the sky
distant from the transfiguring sun. Between these two cardinal
points--north and west--the voice of winter megaphoned from
northwestward that bitter weather was at hand.
The distant groves roared softly, like surf heard against the wind.
Afar, the sound had the similitude of hoarse, enormous exhalation; near
at hand, it was like the wash and hiss of water. The whole surface of
the prairie that had been fixed and frozen, now took on an aspect of
life, of ceaseless scintillation and quivering like ripples in the sun.
Ware, looking along the bright faces of the drifts, saw that this
phenomenon was caused by multitudinous lines of hurrying snow-grains,
serpentining over those white billows in the track of the wind, building
with a wondrous rapidity little ribs and ridges of snow in the lee of
every bump and projection in their path.
In the early afternoon, it had been warm, even to thawing-point. But
now, as the wind rose, it shuttled with a sharp cold the woof of the
air. Earlier, the air had been clear and speckless as the void above
quiet water, and bland in its touch upon the skin. Now, it was clouded
with gathering snow-atoms, hard as sand, whose impact upon face and
hands was needle-sharp and whose irritation of the eyeballs blinded the
vision with rheum. Earlier, the sky had been bright-blue from horizon to
zenith. Now, it was half-fogged with a kind of smoke-blue mist, that was
nothing other than the first draft of a trillion-atomed host of
snow-motes drawn up to their unfriendly function by the cold whirlwind
that should general their attack upon the prairie's winter peace.
The blizzard is like, and yet contrary to, the thunderstorm that is the
crowning phenomenon of summer. It is like, in that it is preceded by a
"weather-breeding" twelve hours or so of undue heat; it is like, in the
effect of its attack; it is like, in its whipping of the outcast, its
lashing of the earth; it is somewhat like in its roar, although there
is no thunder to diapason the storm of mid-winter. But it is contrary in
color, and in duration, and in direction--or rather, lack of direction.
For the color of a blizzard is not a definite black, but a blinding
white; its duration is not a few moments, but long hours of terrific,
unabated wind-energy; its direction is everywhere--that is to say, you
can turn your back to a thunderstorm, but you cannot turn your back to a
blizzard. If you face to windward, you get the volley of the "spindrift"
direct; if you face leeward, you get it round a corner, just as
stingingly. To the wanderer, a blizzard is a succession of intersecting
whirlwinds, not a direct blast from a definite point in the compass.
Sir William Ware, in this sleigh that was inching its course--at least,
so it seemed--across the long ten miles that separated Toddburn village
from the Nixon farm, felt an odd sense of dependence as he watched the
gathering of the storm. There was in his whole fine body and brain no
fibre of fear, as far as personal danger was concerned--for, besides the
heritage of his family and race, he was too much the philosopher to
regard the chance of death with anything but curiosity. But he felt awed
by the cold, the great white vastness, the thrilling mighty wind--not
yet at anything like its crescendo, either--and the feeling that his
sole link with safety, this bluff Canadian pioneer who held the destiny
of that sleighful in his rough-mittened hands that held the horses'
reins and his wonderful, but not infallible, pioneer's sense of
direction, was plainly a bit anxious in spite of all his experience.
"Suppose we have a song, old chap," he leaned forward and shouted in
Nixon's ear; "start up something you know, and we'll all join in the
chorus."
But John Nixon shook a diffident head. "I got all I can do, handlin' the
team, Bill," he said--in his Canadian way avoiding by the excuse the
admission that he could not sing. "Try Jim, here--he's the singin' bird
out on our ranch. Let's have that there about the 'Mistle-tree Bough',
Jim--you ain't got nothin' on your mind just now."
Jim Burns, a man of few words and short, cleared his throat and, without
preamble, started "The Mistletoe Bough":
The mistletoe hung in the old oak hall,
The holly-branch shone on the castle wa-all,
The bar'n's ree-tainers was blith' an' ga-ay
A-keepin' their Chris'mas ho-oliday;
O Mistletoe Bough!
O Mistletoe Bough!
There is something "catchy" about the words and the tune of this old
song of a famous tragedy, whose human interest has carried it as far
around the world as "Home, Sweet Home". Ware had heard it in his nursery
when it was reasonably new. He joined in it now, with a vigor that
fended off the dolor of the stormy sunset and the inching sleigh on its
high lonely trail. Nixon swung his whip in time; even a diffident
humming came from the shawl that wrapped the head of Mrs. Lovina Nixon.
After the refrain following the last stanza was concluded, Jim Burns, on
his own initiative, started his favorite, the "Blizzard Song of
Meadowlea." It is a characteristic of prairie people to sing or to talk
about an especially gloomy phase of a present situation. The person who
has newly contracted rheumatism, for instance, is told glowingly by a
sympathetic visitor that, "Hank McCaffrey, he took it in the knee--just
where you got it, Joe--an' he's a-settin' on the same chair yit, an'
that's ten years ago." And if Mrs. Pelkey, on the northwest quarter of
Section Twenty-three, sneezes after peppering the meat in the
frying-pan, Mrs. Mair, over from the northeast quarter to borrow flour
for a baking of bread, remarks, "This is a bad season for to catch a
cold, Bella--right in the spring o' the year. I never saw a person yet
that tot'ly threw off a cold they caught in the month of Ape-rile."
It was this prairie characteristic that possessed Jim Burns, when he
struck up the "Blizzard Song of Meadowlea" in the face of a gathering
blizzard. This melody is a versified account of an actual happening, in
which a farmhouse in the School District of Meadowlea caught fire during
a blizzard and the family lost their lives in the storm.
"I say, old son," Ware leaned and tapped the singer on the shoulder at
the conclusion of a line running: 'An' here an' there, in drifts of
snow, a frozen corpse they found', "that _is_ a piquant tune, you know,
and you're in splendid voice--but shall we try something we all
know--something comic, for instance?"
Jim Burns paused reluctantly. "Oh, all right," he grumbled, after a
moment; "how about 'The Dying Cowboy'?"
"Splendid!" assented Sir William, "is that comic?"
Jim Burns rubbed his head ponderingly.
"It ain't very comic, Bill," John Nixon explained, "but--I begin to see
your point--there ain't nothin' about blizzards in it. Let her go, Jim."
"Yes," said Ware, "let her go, Burns, old chap. Majority vote for 'The
Dying Cowboy'. What do _you_ say, Mrs. Nixon?"
"Oh, don't bother to ast the weemen folk, out in this country," Lovina
Nixon's voice came, muffled and sarcastic, from the depths of her shawl,
"we ain't got no say, even when it comes to invitin' pernicketty people
out to a house that ain't been swept nor dusted for two weeks."
"I took and scrubbed the whole floor, Mam, two days ago," said Jim
Burns, in an injured voice. "The minute I got your letter that you was
comin' home, I peeled off and went to her, with snow-water an' soap."
Jim Burns did not add that he had scrubbed the farmhouse because he had
expected Daisy with the party.
"Snow-water, eh?" Lovina's tone was half-hopeful, "well, Jim, you got
more sense than I thought you had. Did you scrub behind the stove?"
"I scrubbed everywhere _but_ there, Mam," said Jim Burns, a little
sheepishly.
"Everywhere but where the most grease-spots is," Lovina threw up her
hands and lapsed again into brooding silence, "that's a man, all over
again; so it is."
The last verse of "The Dying Cowboy" was snatched out of the mouths of
its singers by a great gust of wind and snow, scattering over the sleigh
like a wave breaking over a boat. Ware, concentrated on keeping the
sleighful "in good spirits", had for the moment almost forgotten the
storm; but now, rudely reminded of it by the bitter, stinging
snow-grains that assailed his face and drove deep between scarf and
neck, he drew tight the collar of his top-coat and looked up and about.
The blizzard had not yet closed about them. But in the far and hither
distance it had thickened, blotting out the sun, that must now be almost
at the horizon. Above, one could catch faint passing glimpses of the
sky, beneath which the hurricane was throwing a dim-white canopy of
upblown snow. About and about, the prairie and the air were a uniform
quivering white. For perhaps a quarter-mile radius, one could still see
definitely the drifts and the half-buried willow and poplar scrub; but
beyond this the storm had built a superstructure, that was in opacity
like a wall, but bellied and blew like a curtain under the huge
inconstant impulse of the gale. Only in one respect was the motion of
this rampart steady and uniform. That was in respect to its gradual,
sure, terrific closing-in about the sleigh and its human handful. Ware,
watching it fascinated, thought of the cell in the famous tale of "The
Pit and the Pendulum", with its contracting circular wall that
precipitated the prisoner into a central abyss.
No abyss yawned beneath the feet of the laboring horses nor the runners
of the creaking, inching sleigh. But that road they trod was like the
narrow path over a morass: all about it the footing was soft, deep,
delaying. If iron-shod hoof or steel-shod runner slipped, it meant loss
of time, lowering of precious bodily heat, fatigue, failing of the
heart--all preparations for that slowing-down of the restless
body-molecules to the final stoppage which should mark the cold triumph
of the frost:
"And here and there, in drifts of snow--"
"Ugh!" said Ware, humorously.
But there was nothing comic in that nearing wall, whose base crept over
the drifts like the edge of a tide at flow.
It might have been midnight, or a little before, when the Galician girl
whose function it had been to keep the fire going in the Nixon farmhouse
stove, saw a face move by the window outside, on the way to the door.
Mary had plenty of time to see it, for the face moved very slowly beyond
the frost-edged pane; and she noted that it was not the face of John
Nixon, with his corduroy cap, nor the red face under a "dogskin" cap, of
Jim Burns. Nor was the knock, which presently sounded faint and erratic
on the door-panel--like the chance rap of a frozen branch on a
window--recognizable as that of anybody she knew.
She was a little afraid, as she listened to that rap which sounded as
though the visitor were half-asleep; but Mary knew enough about the
northwest not to keep a man standing outside on a night like this, no
matter who he might be. Accordingly, she ran and opened the door.
"G'd ev'ng," said the blue lips of Sir William Ware, as he fumbled his
way across the doorjamb. Mary, glancing at his face, saw that uncanny
white patches covered his cheeks and that his nose was whitened to the
bridge. His feet, on the floor, dragged and scuffled like the ends of
cordwood sticks.
Mary knew: she had spent five winters in the west.
"You stay there," she said, backing Sir William out of the doorway with
a vigorous palm, "till I big pail ice-water bring. I fix you."
"Ah, but--stop a bit," Ware spoke thickly; "your master--and
mistress--far along the trail--need help. We--Burns and I--followed the
horses here. Nixon stayed--with wife--she wouldn't leave the sleigh." He
stopped and leaned heavily back against the door frame. Mary saw that
his eyes were closing.
"I fix you first," she said, snatching up an enormous wooden bucket,
throwing her apron over her head, and rushing out to the well. About her
the huge veil-ends of the storm swirled as, racing down the track of
light from the open doorway, she disappeared a moment into the roaring
dark; then, presently, came into view again, running, with the
newly-pumped icy water splashing over the edge of the bucket.
Ware, his initiative suspended and the world appearing to race about him
in a dizzy flicker of white and glare and black, leaned upon the door.
He felt his legs giving way, but could not stiffen them; and presently
he fell into a sitting posture on the door-sill, with the wild night on
his right hand, and on his left the homely interior of the farmhouse
with its coal-oil lamp flaring frantically in the draught from the open
door.
In this position, and with his eyes closed, Sir William felt a hand come
up to his face and rub so vigorously that the back of his head bumped
the door-panel with a jolt.
"I don't know what's happening," was Sir William's vague thought, "but
let it happen, whatever it is. Let anything happen--now."
The rubbing continued, with an occasional pause by the aggressor--that
might have been for more or less malicious scrutiny of his or her
work--and presently Sir William became aware of a slight tingling in a
face that up till now had been wholly without sensation. The tingling
grew to a glow; and with the glow came a bracing mental effect that
brought Ware's eyes open.
"See--I fix your face," said the voice of Mary, the Galician girl, in a
self-congratulatory way, "now I take me your boots off." And, without
waiting for the word of consent, she ripped open the laces and drew off
Ware's boots and socks. After which Sir William, watching with a curious
half-interest, beheld her scoop up liberal handfuls of snow and commence
to rub the bared feet from toe to ankle, as she had rubbed the face.
In the midst of this operation, a peal of bells sounded; and around the
corner of the house came Jim Burns, with a fresh team hitched to the
"jumper". Burns, a tough westerner, had been barely affected by the
storm, except for frozen cheeks and nose, which he had rubbed out down
at the stable. His feet, clad in thick felt "duffels", had escaped
freezing.
"Hey-o;" he said, unconcernedly; "gittin' thawed out all right? Mary, I
got to go back for Jack and the Missis--the sleigh's stuck in a drift,
about two mile back along the trail. We cut the ponies loose, an' they
led us home, right up to the stable door. Jack, he was a-goin' to come
along too, at first, and fetch the Missis on his back--him and me would
have took turns carryin' her. But she wouldn't hear of it, so Jack he
told us to go on ahead. Said the ponies would take us home, all right,
and I could come back in the jumper when I got warmed up. But," Jim
Burns could not help a bit of western swagger, "I'm all right--I don't
need no warmin' up. Rustle me a couple more blankets, Mary. I'll finish
rubbin' them feet out."
"Aa, you go on, Jeem Burns," Mary, interested in this tall,
pleasant-faced man the storm had brought her, pushed Burns away; "You
know you where yon blankets is. You get them yourself--see!"
"A-all right," the hired man, swinging his shoulders, stepped into the
farmhouse living-room, gathered up a pair of heavy gray blankets from
the rail bunk in a corner, brought the coal-oil can and refilled the
lantern he was to take with him, and then lighted the lantern.
"I guess I can keep the trail all right, goin' out," he said, as he
stepped outside, "the wind, she'll be behind me. Comin' home, the
horses'll face it all right, they'll be that keen to get back into the
stable again. Well, so-long, yous; keep a good fire on, Mary."
With this, Jim Burns tossed the blankets into the jumper, hopped in
after them and, standing up in the vehicle as though it was a
bob-sleigh, this conscious master of the northwest blizzard took off his
dogskin cap, whirled it jovially around his head, and whooped to the
horses. They broke into a trot, receding down the lee of the grove where
the snow came tumbling over the tree-tops in vaporous clouds, like smoke
from a huge smoke-stack; and in a trice the night had swallowed them.
"You come in now," said Mary, finally; "wait, I help you." And Sir
William Ware felt an arm, strong as the coil of a pythoness, constrict
his waist and lift him bodily to his now sore and burning feet.
Sensitive as they were, however, Sir William, putting away gentle Mary's
supporting arm, stood his full weight on those restored feet, rose on
his toes, turned them from side to side, and otherwise moved them to
bring back circulation and pliancy.
"The doctor, he no cut them off now, eh?" commented Mary, glancing down
at the healthily-reddened members in a satisfied way. Ware turned toward
her instantly; stepped over; grasped her hand; shook it warmly.
"Thanks, so much," he said, with a shining gratitude, "and I wish there
was a more expressive word I might use, Mary. We are, some of us," he
eyed her thoughtfully, "so used to having these things done for us as a
matter of course by those who are really our fellow-beings, that we
often omit the 'thank you'--taking the often vital service rendered as
our due, just because the good Samaritan happens to be a maid or valet.
But here in Canada we're all fellow-citizens, aren't we?"
"I get you some supper," said Mary, "and fetch you a pair of the boss's
socks."