Although this story chiefly concerns Bull
Langdon, we must return at this point to the
three humble quarter sections aforementioned, which
are the scene of part of its action.
To the first of these the name of ranch or farm could
only by courtesy be applied. It was known as the
"D. D. D.," the "D's" being short for Dan Day Dump,
as a neighboring farmer had once called the place, and
the name had stuck to it ever since.
It was on the extreme rocky edge of Yankee Valley,
an otherwise prosperous section of the "prairie" country,
so named because most of its settlers had hailed
originally from the U. S. A.
Dan Day himself had come from the States, but he
had found a wife in Canada. They had "fetched up"
finally at this sorry "stopping-off place," as they called
it then, where first they squatted, and later, with the
assistance of neighbors, who knew better than to let
shiftless newcomers encroach upon the more fertile
lands hard by, they had staked their homestead. There
Dan Day had put up the rackety shack and lean-to
which had provided shelter of sorts for his growing
family and stock, and in that rough environment the
Day children had grown up like Indians.
Time had taught the homesteader at least one lesson,
which was that he would never squeeze a living out of
his barren acres. Day, as his neighbors were wont to
declare, shaking disapproving heads, was not cut out
to be a farmer. Nevertheless, they grudgingly gave
him work, putting up with his inept services chiefly because
as a community they waged unrelenting warfare
against the stern approach of school authorities, who
had begun to query whether the size of the Day family
did not warrant the imposition upon the municipality
of a new rural school.
Time and growth, however, are things the farmer,
most of all men, must reckon with, and even as the
crops leaped up tall and strong out of the rich black
virgin soil, even as the cattle and the stock flourished
and increased until they spread over all the wide pasture
lands of Alberta, so the Day progeny shot upward,
and seemed, hungrily, to clamor for their place in the
world.
There were ten of them. A baby--and there was
always a baby in that family--of a few months old,
a toddler of two, another of three, another of five,
twins of seven, a boy of nine, twins of twelve, and
Nettie, the eldest. The mother dying when she was
fourteen, the girl found herself faced with the desperate
problem of fending and caring for the whole wild and
hungry brood of her brothers and sisters.
Nettie was of that blonde type seen often in the
northern lands. She was a big girl, with milk-white
skin and dead gold hair, a slow-moving, slow-thinking
girl, simple-minded and totally ignorant of the world
that lay beyond the narrow confines of their homestead
land.
School had played no part in the life of Nettie Day.
She knew vaguely of the existence of books and papers,
things she remembered vaguely as having seen, but she
had not been able to read them. She believed that the
world contained two kinds of folk, the rich and the poor.
The rich lived away off somewhere on big ranches,
where the cattle were fat and the grain grew high,
though some lived also in the cities. Nettie had heard
of cities; her father had come from a small town in
Oregon. As for the poor folk, with simple resignation
Nettie accepted the fact that to them belonged such as
themselves, the Days, for whom life was one unceasing
struggle against hunger and cold.
Occasionally a neighboring farmer, riding across the
range or bringing home stray cattle, would drop in at
the Day homestead and share the meager meal shyly
set out by Nettie, and as the years went by and the
girl began to unfold in the early blossoming of womanhood
the visitor might linger a while longer to stare
curiously at this maturing product of the D. D. D.
Nettie possessed one true and unfailing friend in the
man who had brought her and her nine little brothers
and sisters into the world; who came periodically to
scold, tease and teach; to clean and work, himself, in
an effort to bring some semblance of order into the
chaotic confusion that reigned in that shack.
Dr. McDermott, in spite of his twenty years in Canada,
was still as stubbornly Scotch as on the day he
landed; He was admitted to be the busiest man in the
country, his practice extending from the prairie to the
mountains. He had brought into the world most of the
children born in that part of the country ever since he
had planted his rough homestead there. There were
other families as helpless as the Days and as dependent
upon the "Doc" to scold and instruct them, and it was
not often that he found time to talk with Nettie. She
would decide in advance the questions she meant to ask
him when his monthly visit came round, but being so
slow and shy, by the time the doctor had finished his
dissatisfied inspection of the family affairs, the questions
had all escaped her. But always the warm grip
of his hand brought something surging up within her
that sought utterance and expression.
"Growing! Growing! Growing!" the Scotch doctor
would growl, glaring round at the circle of healthy,
grimy faces, "like weeds! like weeds!" Latterly, however,
like the neighbors, he had begun to look longer
at Nettie, and with puckered brows he would change
the word "weed" to "flower." He told her she reminded
him of a wild flower, and she liked that--it pleased her
that her doctor friend had picked her out, as it were,
from the weeds, and her bosom swelled with pride when
he appeared one day unexpectedly at the shack and
took her with him across the country to help care for
a sick woman in a shack on the C. P. R. quarter section
which had been Dr. McDermott's own original homestead.
That swift running drive over the road allowances
in the doctor's democrat always stood out in her memory
as one of the few sweet days in her life.
It was early March, but a "Chinook," the warm wind
which has its origin in the Japanese current, had
melted the flying snow of a March blizzard; it was as
though a miracle had been wrought; the Chinook had
sunk deep into the earth and thawed the last bit of
frost out of the ground. Streams were running along
the roads, the sloughs were filling to the top, the cattle
no longer nibbled in the neighborhood of the fenced-in
hay and straw stacks, but hit down into the upspringing
grass, green already in this wonderful land. Eight-horse
teams were pulling plow, disc and harrow out into
the fields, preparatory for an early seeding. Overhead
a great, warm sun sent its benevolent rays abroad, filling
sky and earth with a warm glow; the land was
bathed in sunlight. Small marvel that someone had
fondly named it: "Sunny Alberta, the Land of Promise."
If Nettie was slow of speech and shy, Dr. McDermott
was Scotch and brief. There was that, moreover, on
his mind at this time, which dismayed and concerned
him deeply. It is not strange, therefore, that as he
whipped his horses to their top speed--they were upon
an errand that he knew was a matter of life or death--he
forgot the girl at his side, looking about her in a
sort of trance.
All the world seemed good and bonny to Nettie at
this time; life was thrilling. The bumping, rickety
old democrat was a luxurious coach, the rough trails
and road allowances, full of holes and mud slews, a
smooth highway over which she was being borne into a
scene that spelled romance.
She had never before had so wonderful a chance of
seeing the whole country, across to where, on the horizon,
the mighty peaks of the Rocky Mountains held
their snowy fronts. The hills always stirred something
in Nettie that was vaguely yearning, something that
thrilled even while it pained. Though prairie born, and
prairie raised, she aspired to the hills, not knowing why,
except that the hills seemed to her lifted up, up, up,
into the clouds themselves. She had a childlike faith
that "something good" would come to her out of the
hills. That "something good" she recognized with rapture
in the young rider from the great Bar Q who one
autumn day had spent a never-to-be-forgotten hour at
the D. D. D.
For several days long files of the Bar Q cattle had
been trailing down from the hill country. They were
being driven from the summer range in the foothills to
the grain ranches on the prairie where, in the shelter
of the long cattle sheds, or loose in the sunlit pastures
where stood the great straw and hay stacks, the mothers
of the famous herd were especially housed and nurtured
during the winter months, in preparation for the spring
crop of calves.
This annual fall movement was an exciting event in
the lives of the young Days. The children kept count
of every head of cattle that passed along the road, and
there was great excitement and glee the following
spring, when the herd returned to the foothills, with the
pretty, white-faced calves "at heel."
Nettie was no less thrilled than her small brothers
and sisters by the advent of the Bar Q cattle, and up
to the time of her mother's death she, too, had scrambled
with them under and over barbed wire fences, and
scampered across pasture lands to reach the road in
time to see the cattle pour by. After her mother's
death, things changed for Nettie. The babies tied her
to the house, and the best she could do was to go as
far as the edge of the corrals, a baby tucked under
either arm, and toddlers clinging to her skirts. Here,
standing upon a rail, she would call across to the flying
youngsters her admonitions to be careful.
That fall, however, hankering again to see the great
herd from the hills as it passed to the lower lands,
Nettie scrubbed the faces of her grimy little brood,
arrayed them in clean jumpers made from bleached
flour sacks, piled them aboard the old hay wagon, to
which "Tick," a brother of thirteen, had already harnessed
the team of geldings, and taking up the reins in
her competent hands, she started for the trail.
Nettie was a big girl, with the softly maturing figure
of a young Juno. She looked more than her fifteen
years. Her hair was as gold as the Alberta sun,
whose warmth, together with her unwonted excitement,
brought a flush to either rounded cheek. Her blue eyes,
wide and candid, returned the smiles of the riders, who
were visibly impressed by the picture she made driving
her wagonload of tow-headed children out into the road.
The eyes of the young men brightened; wide hats and
flowing ties were adjusted, as they rode on in the sunlight,
whistling and singing and whirling loose lariats
in their hands. More than one of them made a mental
note of the necessity of seeking strayed cattle in the
near neighborhood of the D. D. D., and when the last
of the herd disappeared down the grade, single horseman
rode out of the bush and paused alongside the Day
wagon.
His broad face was sunburned, freckled, and ruddy,
and wore a wide, friendly smile. He looked very straight
out of clear eyes, eyes often seen in western Canada
where men are ever gazing out over great distances, eyes
that seem to hold the spirit of the outdoors and the
freshness of unspoiled youth. The way he swept his
large hat from his head and held it over the pommel
of his saddle had something in it of unconscious grace
and native courtliness, and he looked curiously boyish
with his thick crop of brown hair ruffled by the slight
wind.
Had anyone in the Day wagon seen a roan heifer?
"She" had given him a "sight of trouble." Got into
the bush half a mile down the grade, and "hanged if
she didn't get plumb out o' sight somewhere in the
willows."
No one in the Day wagon had seen a roan heifer; and
the inquirer, screwing up his face, and scratching the
side of his neck, ruminated in puzzled wonder as to the
whereabouts of the missing animal, his eyes resting,
meanwhile, upon the lifted, glowing face of the girl in
the driver's seat.
While random conjecture and suggestion were being
offered by each of the boys and girls, the rider sat up
suddenly alert and pointing toward some invisible
speck, which he declared was "back of the shack there,"
he touched spurs to the flanks of his broncho and was
off toward the house after the elusive lost one. But
when the wagon pulled up into the barnyard, and the
children and Nettie scrambled down, and crossed the
yard to the house, they found the cowpuncher sitting
disconsolately on the step, fanning himself with his
great hat. Shaking his head at the shouted queries of
the Day boys, as to whether he had found her, he
replied:
"Nope. Guess she's flewed the coop. Gosh! but I'm
hungry. Guess I'd better hop along and catch up with
the bunch, before they bolt all o' the grub."
Which remark, needless to say, brought a clamorous
invitation to dinner from the young Days, and after
the usual protest at the trouble he'd be making, accompanied
by a questioning, rather wistful look toward
Nettie, who shyly seconded the children's invitation, he
"guessed, well, mebbe I will, though don't go to any
trouble for me."
Trouble! Nettie flew about the mean room, her
cheeks aflame, her eyes shining, her heart singing like
a bird's within her, while the children crowded about
their guest, on whom, in his buckskin shirt, fur chapps,
gauntlets and cowboy hat, their young prairie eyes
gazed as upon a hero.
It may, moreover, be recorded that Nettie was by no
means the only one through whose veins an exhilarating
elixir seemed to be bounding like champagne. Young
Cyril Stanley at that moment was violently aware of
a thumping organ to the left of his cardiac region.
Love knows not time. It wells up in the human heart
like the wave of the ocean that may not be beaten down.
Nettie Day, hurrying about the kitchen, preparing a
meal for the hungry stranger, and the stranger, with
a "kid" on either knee and the others pressed as closely
to him as space would allow, displaying his big jackknife,
quirt, beaded hatband and ticking watch to the
delighted youngsters, looked at each other across the
space of that poor and meager room, it seemed, though
they could not have expressed it in words, that somehow
life had become a poem, a glad dancing song.