Two "green" hands were now at Bar Q. They had
been sent out by the Government Employment
office, and for several days before his search for
Nettie had begun Bull Langdon had been trying to
break them into the cattle "game." They were English,
guileless, clean-cut youngsters of good family,
who looked upon the foully swearing cowman as a
pathological subject that both interested and amazed
them.
Their knowledge of ranching or "rawnching," as
they called it, was of the vaguest, but they were good
riders and the life appealed to them as sportsmen.
One of the anomalies of the ranching population
of Alberta is its tremendous variety of types. Here
you will find a man who can neither read nor write,
and his neighbor, often his chum, will be the son of
an English lord, one of those odd derelicts that drift
over from the Old Country and take so kindly to the
ranch life that more often than not they return unwillingly
to their homes. University men and agriculturists
experimenting with irrigation projects and intensive
cultivation live side by side with business men
and men from New York and other great cities in the
States, who for diverse reasons have broken away from
the cities, and gone in for farming on a big scale,
raising the business of farming to the level of great
enterprises rather than the slovenly and weary process
it usually is. For the most part, however, the farming
population of Alberta is made up of that solid, plodding
type that have trekked out from eastern Canada
or the midwestern states, tempted by the cheapness of
the land and the richness of the soil. These are the
backbone of the country and between these and the
others are sandwiched colonies of peasants from Scandinavia
and other parts of Europe.
It is with the hired man as with the owner. He may
be an illiterate clod of the old type, or a fresh-faced
college-bred son of a man of wealth, even of title, or
again some chance wanderer, gone "broke" in the
colony, and using up the remittance from home on drink
and cards. Besides these there is also the type of English
student and sportsman, who enjoys "roughing it"
and hires out partly for experience and partly for a
lark.
To this latter type the men at Bar Q belonged.
They had come up largely to escape a city of gloom
and plague, and were extremely anxious to remain at
the great ranch. The Bull, intent on getting away,
endeavored in a few days to teach them what he called
the "A B C" of ranching. They demonstrated their
ability to remain in the saddle eight or ten hours at a
stretch, and to ride over thirty or forty miles without
undue fatigue.
The Bull showed them "the ropes"; pointed out where
certain cattle were to be gathered in; indicated the
fields where they were to be driven, and promising to
return "in a few days," as he rode off and left the
"tenderfeet" in charge of the great ranch.
After his departure, the two young Englishmen rode
over the place, marked the likely places for big game,
took a "pot" or two at the yowling coyote on a hill;
rode over the pleasant hills and pasture land, back to
the comfortable bunkhouse, and decided that they
had a "snap" and that "rawnching" was the life for
them. It was a jolly sight better than hanging around
a small city up to its neck in sickness. In the warm
spell that followed soon after the departure of Bull
Langdon, the Englishmen "rode the range" like hunters,
and their methods of rounding up cattle, though
weird, were highly effective. They raced and chased
the cattle, galloping along at top speed, thrilled by the
spectacle of the fleeing herd which they persistently
and doggedly tried to overtake. The experienced cowpuncher
lopes along leisurely behind or alongside a
bunch of cattle, taking care not to hurry them, for to
run cattle is to "knock the beef" off them. That spring
the lean cattle of the Bar Q amazed even the least
sophisticated ranch folk, and it is certain that the
guileless Englishmen never dreamed they were to blame
for the animals' emaciated condition.
When a cold spell followed the thaw, the Englishmen
gaped at the thermometer, which was dropping rapidly
towards thirty below zero, and retreated hastily
into the warm bunkhouse, firmly convinced that no
creature living could survive such a temperature. The
rapid change from cold to warm and back to cold again
is a peculiarity of the Alberta climate, but the Englishmen
had thought that the Chinook was the first warmth
of an early spring. The unexpectedly bitter weather
alarmed and appalled them; they spent the day
shut up in the house, piling huge logs into the great
square wood stove, that spluttered and sent off an enormous
heat. They concocted toothsome dishes for their
entertainment, for, like most Englishmen, they were
expert hands at "batching" and camping, and knew
how to cook. Their fare included such game as venison,
moose, mountain goat and sheep, to say nothing of
the small game, mallard duck, prairie chicken, partridge,
grouse and quail which abounded in the wild
woods of Bar Q, and the Englishmen had prudently
"brought them down" while rounding up the cattle, not
knowing that the shooting had contributed considerably
to the flight of the terrified herd.
This game, expertly drawn to the ranch by horse
sleds, was piled up frozen in the immense storeroom
adjoining the bunkhouse, where they also found an
ample supply of stores. It was certain that no matter
how long the siege of Arctic cold might last, the
hands of the Bar Q would survive starvation.
Shut in the bunkhouse, their days were by no means
empty, for when not engaged in cooking or feeding
the wood stove, they wrote articles on "ranching in the
wild northwest," or indited epistles home to thrilled
relatives, who received from their letters a vague notion
that their dear boys were sojourning in polar regions.
Sometimes they would find in the letters from their
English friends, whose knowledge of Canada was of
the weirdest, warnings to be careful of the treacherous
Esquimaux, and reminders to call, when they found
time, upon some relative whose address was somewhere
in their neighborhood, in Ontario or Nova Scotia. The
ignorance abroad of the immense extent of the Canadian
provinces was almost unbelievable. To all their
folks at home the young Englishmen took delight in
concocting thrilling romances in which they figured as
big game hunters and fishermen, and through which
they moved heroically, followed by bands of noble red
men.