The Settler

"Why didn't some one pull him off?" she cried.

His answer was pregnant. "Short fuse. Anyway, the boys didn't feel any call to mix in his experiments – especially as he swore a blue streak at them till the stump lifted."

"Horrible!" she breathed.

"Just what they said." He solemnly misunderstood her. "They never heard such language. 'Twas dreadfully out of place at a funeral."

"Oh – I didn't mean that!" Then, considering his serious gravity, "Was – was there – "

"Pretty clean." He relieved her of the remainder of the question. "Mostly translated."

Incredulous, she glanced from him to his men and received grisly confirmation, for one thrust out a grimy finger to show a horseshoe ring. "I picked it up on the track, miss, forty rod from the – obseq'ses. Didn't allow he'd want it again."

Shuddering, she turned back to Carter, but before she could make further comment the car rolled from a cut out on the edge of the Devil's Muskeg.

She thought him cold-blooded until, that evening, she learned from her friend, the cook, that he had been caught on the edge of the blast as he rushed to save the man and had been thrown a hundred feet. A little disappointed by his apparent callousness, she joined her father and lover, who, with the contractor, stood looking out over the muskeg. Sterile, flat, white with alkali save where black slime oozed from the sunken grade, it stretched a long mile on either side of the right of way. Around its edges skeleton trees thrust blanched limbs upward through the mud, and beyond this charnel forest loomed the omnipresent spruce. In spring-time its quaking depths would have opened under a fox's light padding, but the summer's sun had dried the surface until it carried a team – which fact had lured the contractor to his financial doom. A fat, gross man, he stood mopping his brow and wildly gesticulating towards the half-mile of rails that, with their ties, lay like the backbone of some primeval lizard along the mud, calling heaven and the chief engineer to witness that this calamity was beyond the prevision of man.

"'Jedgment of God,' it's termed in government contrac's," he exclaimed to the chief, who, however, shrugged at such blackening of Providence.

"Well, Mr. Buckle," he answered, as Carter came up, "the judgment was delivered against you, not us."

"Yes, yes!" the man grovellingly assented. "I know – mine's the loss. But you gentlemen orter give me a chance to make it up building round this cursed mud-hole?"

"Round what?"

He turned scowlingly upon Carter. "This mud-hole, I said." With a greasy sneer, he added: "But mebbe you kin build across it?"

"I can."

"What?" he screamed his angry surprise. "Why, hell! Wasn't it you that tol' me it wouldn't carry a grade?"

"I said it wouldn't carry yours."

His quiet assurance gave the contractor pause, while engineer and surveyor looked their surprise. "Going to drive piles down to China?" The contractor grew hysterically sarcastic. "You'll need a permit from Li Hung Chang. What do you know about grades, anyway? I was building this railroad while you was wearing long clothes."

"Likely." Carter's easy drawl set the others a-grin and caused Dorothy to hide her smile in her handkerchief. "But you ain't out of yours yet. A yearling baby wouldn't try to stack rock on top of mud. But that isn't the question. D' you allow to finish the contract?"

"Think I'm a fool?" the man rasped.

"'Tain't always polite to state one's thoughts. But – do you?" And when the other tendered a surly negative, he turned to the engineer. "You hear, sir? And now I file my bid."

The chief, however, looked his doubt. As yet engineering science offered no solution for the muskeg problem, and this was not the first grade he had seen sacrificed to a theory. "Are you serious?"

"As a Methodist sermon," Carter answered his grave question. Then, drawing him aside, he pulled a paper from his pocket – an estimate for the work. It was dated two weeks back, prevision that caused the chief to grimly remark: "Pretty much like measuring a living man for his coffin, wasn't it? But look here, Carter! I'd hate to see you go broke on this hole. I doubt – and your figure is far too low. What's your plan?"

"I'm going to make a sawdust fill with waste from the Portage Mills."

Whistling, the chief looked his admiration, then grinned, the idea was so ludicrous in its simplicity. For, all said, the problem resolved itself into terms of specific gravity – iron sinks and wood floats in water; and the muskeg which swallowed clay would easily carry a sawdust bank. Moreover, the idea was thoroughly practicable. Situated five miles from Winnipeg, the Portage Mills were the largest in the province and their owners would willingly part with the refuse that cumbered their yards.

"You've got it!" he cried, slapping his thigh.

"That's not all. If old Brass Bowels – " Noticing that the contractor was looking their way, he finished in a whisper, the significance of which caused the chief's grizzled brows to rise till lost in the roots of his hair.

"You'll break camp – ?" he questioned.

"To-morrow. Build a spur into the mills, then start prairie grading at the American line and run north. Ought to make a junction about the time the sink is filled."

And this he did. The few miles of spur-track being quickly built, a yellow tide of sawdust was soon flowing out to the Devil's Muskeg, where Bender's wood gang directed its flow. At first there was great argument about this new material, some holding that one might as well try to build a road-bed with feathers. But it proved itself. Tamping hard as clay, it had greater resilience, and soon the twisted track rose like a mained serpent from the slimy clutch of the devil. Yes, miles of flat-cars, boarded up till they loomed big as houses, moved between mill and slough through that summer, and no one dreamed of their slow procession having other significance up to the moment that Helen heard newsboys crying a special in the hot streets —

"Monopoly refuses new line a crossing. Section gangs tear up Carter's diamond."

XXVI

WINNIPEG

By that time Helen had shaken down to a life that was new as strange – though not without travail; shaking is always uncomfortable.

Coming in to the city, a natural nervousness – that indefinite apprehension which assails the stoutest under the frown of new adventures – had been accentuated by heart-sickness from her late experiences, and was justified by some to come. She viewed its distant spires very much as an outlaw might contemplate far-off hostile towers. Entering from the west, as she did, one sees taller buildings poke, one by one, from under the flat horizon. For the city sits by the Red River – smoothest, most treacherous of streams – in the midst of vast alluvial plains, its back to the "Ragged Lands," facing the setting sun. North, south, east, and west of it they stretch, these great flat plains. Vividly emerald in spring-time, June shoots their velvet with chameleon florescences that glow and blaze with the seasons, fix in universal gold, then fade to purest white. Dark, dirty, the city stands out on the soft snow-curtain like a sable blot on an ermine mantle. Withal it is a clean city, for if the black muck of its unpaved streets cakes laboring wagons and Red River carts to the hubs after spring thaws, the dirt is all underfoot. No manufactures foul the winds that sweep in from boreal seas with the garnered essences of an empire of flowers.

Purely agricultural, then, in its functions, the bulk of its burgesses were, as might be expected, store-keepers, implement men, bankers, lawyers, land agents, all who serve or prey upon the farmer; for there, also, lurked the usurers, the twenty-per-cent. Shylocks, fat spiders whose strangling webs enmeshed every township from the Rockies to the Red. Spring, fall, or winter, grist failed not in their dark mills, which ground finer and faster than those of the gods. Scattering their evil seed on the dark days, it was their habit to reap in the sunshine, competing for the last straw with their fellows, the business men, in their single season of profit – Harvest. For in summer the city drowsed amid green wheat seas that curved with the degrees over the western world; it slept, nodding, till the wheat, its life-blood, came in huge arterial gushes to gorge its deflated veins.

Thus Helen found it – asleep under the midsummer sun. Walking to her destination, she met few people; after the hotel 'buses rattled by, the streets were deserted save for an occasional buck-board or slow ox-team chewing the peaceful cud at the wooden sidewalk. When, later, she walked those hot streets on that most wearisome of occupations, the search for an occupation, she became familiar with the city's more intimate topography – the huge concrete foundations, vacant, gaping as though at the folly which planned them and their superstructures, the aërial castles that blew up with the boom; the occasional brick blocks that raised hot red heads proudly above surrounding buildings, the river, with its treacherous peace; old Fort Garry, which she repeopled with governors, commissioners, factors, and trappers of the Hudson Bay Company.

Also she grew sensitive to its varied life, easily distinguishing between emigrants, who were injected by daily spurts into the streets, the city's veins, from the old-timers – remittance-men, in yellow cords and putties; trappers from Keewatin, Athabasca, the Great Slave Lake, in fringed moose-skins; plethoric English farmers, or gaunt Canadian settlers from the rich valley round-about; Indians of many tribes – Cree, Sioux, Ojibway; the heterogeneous mixture that yet lacked a drop of the Yankee or continental blood which would flow, ten years later, in a broad river over the American border. But this was after she had fallen into her place in the household of Glaves's big sister among a scattering of teachers, up for the Normal course, a brace of lawyers, three store-keepers, and a Scotch surgeon.

Just what or where that place was would be hard to say, seeing that it varied with the view-point of each lodger, nor remained the same in the opinion of any specific one. Thus did she shine, for one whole week, the particular star in the heaven of an English teacher, a mercurial lad of twenty; then having rejected his heart with a pecuniary attachment of thirty-five dollars per mensem, she fell like a shooting-star and became a mere receptacle for his succeeding passions, which averaged three a month. His fellow-teachers swung on an opposite arc. Canadians, and mostly recruited from the country, the soil still clung to their heavy boots. The profession, its aims and objects, formed their staple of conversation. Deeply imbued with the sense of the central importance of pedagogy in the scheme of things, they wore an air of owlish wisdom that was incompatible with the contemplation of such sublunary things as girls. Having wives, it was not to be expected that the store-keepers could notice a young person whose attractions so far exceeded her known acquaintance, and though the surgeon, a young man prodigiously bony as to the leg and neck, really worshipped her from behind the far folds of his breakfast newspaper, thought transference still lay in the womb of future humbuggery and she catalogued him as injuriously cold.

From this conglomerate of humanity she gained one friend, the young wife of a lawyer who had lately come West. Prettily dark as Helen was delicately fair, each made a foil for the other, which necessary base for feminine friendships being established, their relations were further cemented by an equal loneliness, and made more interesting by the expectation of an event. As it was not yet fashionable to shoo the stork away from the roof-tree, behold the pair fussing and sewing certain small garments with much tucking, trimming, insertioning, regulating said processes by the needs of some future mystery dight "shortening" – all of which brought Helen mixed feelings. The young husband's part in said operations was particularly trying. Supposedly immersed in his paper of evenings, he would watch them over the tip with a delighted sagacity akin to the knowing look which a bull-dog bestows on a crawling kitten. At times, too, he would descend upon the work and lay wee undervests out on his big palm, tie ridiculously small caps over his shut fist, ask absurd questions, and generally display the manly ignorance so sweet to the wifely soul; while Helen sat, a silent spectator of their happiness. It is a question which the acquaintance brought her most, pain or pleasure.

The tale of the boarders would not be complete without mention of Jean Glaves, a buxom woman, fair of hair, whose strong, broad face seemed to incarnate the very spirit of motherhood. With her Helen's place was never in doubt. Opening her big heart, she took the lonely girl right in, and proved a veritable fount of energy in her disheartening search for work.

In this her first experience conformed to that usual with a working-girl – she shivered under icy stares, shrank from the rude rebuffs of busy men, and blushed under smiles of idle ones; sustained the inevitable insult at the hands of a rascally commission broker at the end of one day's employment. His quick, appraising glance, following a first refusal, would have warned a sophisticated business woman, but the innocence which betrayed Helen later proved her best protection. The horror in her eyes, childlike look of hurt surprise, set the dull reds of shame in the fellow's cheeks, but she was out in the street with hat and jacket while he was still muttering his apology. Yet his grossness fell short of the vile circumspection of her next employer. A smug pillar of society and something in a church, caution would not permit him to stake reputation against possible pleasure on a single throw, yet she labored under no illusions as to the motive behind her second discharge.

"Oh, I can't bear it! I just can't try again!" she cried that night to Jean Glaves.

"You won't have to, dearie," the big woman comforted, and having tucked her comfortably upon her own lounge with a wet cloth upon her aching head, she went straight to the Scotch surgeon's room.

Her choice of confidant may have been due either to intuition or knowledge of what was going on behind the ramparts of the young man's breakfast paper. The event proved it wise, for his giraffe neck lengthened under his angry gulps, his bony hands and nodding head emphasized and attested Jean's scathing deliverence upon men in general. "The scoundrel!" he exclaimed, when she paused for lack of breath. "The scoundrel! I'd flog him mysel' but for the scandal. But see you he'll no' go unpunished. He's a bid in for the hospital supplies, and I'll be having a word with the head doctor." And thus, later, was the smug villain hit to the tune of some hundreds in his tenderest place, the pocket.

Not content with future revenge, the Scotchman's sympathy expressed itself in practical suggestion. "If ye'd think, Mistress Glaves" – he always accorded Jean the quaint title, and it fell gracefully from his stiff lips – "now if ye'd suppose the young leddy would like to try her hand at nursing, there's a vacancy in the hospital."

While he hesitated, Jean literally grabbed opportunity by the collar. "You come along with me."

Introduced a few seconds thereafter to man and subject, Helen exclaimed that she would love the work; nor were her thanks less sincere for being couched in stereotyped form. How could she thank him? Being sincere to the point of pain, after the fashion of his nation, the young man had almost answered that the obligation lay with him in that his studies behind the newspaper would be furthered and facilitated. He replied, instead, that the pay would be small, the work hard.

Not to be discouraged, she was thus launched upon what, in her condition, was the best of possible careers. For the mental suffering which, lacking an outlet, burns inwardly till naught is left of feeling but slag and cinders, becomes the strongest of motor forces when expended in service for others. Throwing herself body and soul into the new work, she forgot the suspicion, scandal that had lately embittered her days, and had such surcease of loneliness that in one month the lines of pain disappeared from around her eyes, her drooping mouth drew again into the old firm tenderness.

Besides content, the month brought her other satisfactions. Owing to lack of accommodation at the hospital, she still slept at the boarding-house, and dropping into Jean Glaves's room for a chat one evening, she found her conversing with a girl of her own age. She would have retired but that Jean called her back. "Don't go! We were talking of you. This is Miss Dorothy Chester, who used to board with me. Miss Chester – Mrs. Morrill."

There was, of course, nothing in the names to convey the significance of the introduction to either. After that period of secret study which is covered by the feminine amenities, each decided that she liked the other. Helen gladly accepted Dorothy's invitation to call, and in this ordinary fashion began a momentous acquaintance that soon developed through natural affinity into one of those rare and softly beautiful friendships which are occasionally seen between women. And as friendship means association in a city that has no theatre and few amusements, it soon happened that any evening might see Dorothy in Helen's room, or Helen on the way to her friend's hotel. Naturally Helen quickly learned that her friend's father and lover were head engineers on Carter's road, and that she had visited them in camp; and as Dorothy was as willing to talk of her novel experience as Helen to listen, imagine the pair in the former's cosey bedroom, one snugged up on a lounge, the other coiled in some mysterious feminine fashion on pillows at her side, fair girl hanging on dark girl's lips as she prattled of Carter, or joining in speculations as to what kind of a woman his wife might be.

She positively jumped when Dorothy declared one evening: "I'm sure he still loves her. Ernest says that he scoured the city for her; only gave up when he felt sure that she had gone East to her friends. When the road is finished, he is going back to look for her."

He had searched for her! Still loved her! It rhymed with her deft fingers rolling bandages; tuned her feet as she bore medicine-trays from ward to ward; ousted the dry anatomical terms of the daily lecture from their proper place in her mind. The thought illumined her face so that maimed men twisted on their cots to watch her down the ward. Meeting her on the main stairs, one day, Carruthers, the Scotch surgeon, almost mistook her for the Virgin Mother in the stained window above the landing. He searched for me! is going back East to look for me! The days spun by to that magical refrain.

Why, in view of all this, did she not confide in Dorothy? Though its roots grip deep down in woman nature, the strange, contradictory, inconsequential, yet wise woman nature, the reason lies close to the surface. Physically akin to the impulse which urges a shy doe to fly from its forest mate, her feeling flowed, mentally, from injured wifehood. For all her natural sweetness and joy over the thought of reunion, she was not ready to purchase happiness with unconditional surrender; to make overtures directly, or through Dorothy, that might be construed as a bid for executive clemency. As he had deserted her, so he must return; and that prideful resolution was strengthened and justified by the suffering which had immeasurably exceeded her fault. Yes, first he must return, then – would she instantly forgive him? Any lover can answer the question; if not, let him consult his sweetheart. "I'd make him suffer!" she will cry, gritting pretty teeth. So Helen. Very unchristian, wicked, but natural.

No, she did not confide in Dorothy, went quietly about her business, hugging her sweet secret to her own soul, until – But this summary of her thought and feeling would not be complete without mention of a last, perhaps greatest, satisfaction – her joy in reading newspaper accounts of Carter's progress. Editorials, politics, reports, she read all, day by day, glowing over red-hot denunciations of the monopoly while she thought what good men the editors must be, and how intelligent to so clearly discern her husband's merits. She was mightily troubled by the insatiate appetite of the Devil's Muskeg, studying its rapacious dietary as though it were a diabetes patient. She triumphed when Carter successfully treated its ineffable hunger with vegetarian diet of sawdust; shivered when he was refused a crossing of the trunk line; thrilled over the battle when Bender and the woodmen beat back the monopoly's levies while the trackmen laid the "diamond," and grew sick with fear, as before mentioned, when she heard the newsboys crying out Carter's final repulse as she was walking home to her room about eight o'clock one evening.

Though very tired, she immediately turned in her agitation, and, undeterred by the continent of blue-print uniform that spread below her brown ulster, she hurried to Dorothy's hotel, an old caravansary that had survived two rebellions and the bursting of the boom. Once chief of the city's hostelries, the old house still attracted people who preferred its solid comfort to the gilt, lacquer, garish splendors of more modern rivals. The parlor in which she waited while her name was taken up to Dorothy, was panelled with sombre woods; her feet literally sank in a pile carpet, thick, green, and dark as forest moss. Walls were upholstered in hammered leather; chairs, heavy table, massive furnishings, all were of black oak. The portraits of governors, high commissioners, and chief factors of the Hudson Bay Company, soldiers and traders or both, seemed ready to step down from their frames to engage in wise council and issue fiats that would set a hundred tribes in motion. Time stood still in that solid atmosphere. Heavy odors of leather and wood, the pervading feeling of peaceful age combined to soothe her fretted nerves, and she had just relaxed her tired body within the embrace of a mighty chair when passing footsteps and a voice brought her up, tense and rigid.

Returning just then, the bell-boy repeated her question: "Gentlemen who just passed, Miss? Mr. Greer and Mr. Smythe, people that are financing the new line, and Mr. Carter, their head contractor. They are dining here with the general manager of the trunk line. If you'd like to see them," he added, interpreting her interest as curiosity, "just step this way. They've all gone in, and you can peep through the glass doors. It's that dark in the passage no one will see you."

As she tiptoed after him down the dark hallway he whispered further – "Reminds me of them old Romans, the general manager; them fellows that used to invite a man to a poisoned dinner. He's got those chaps shooed up into a corner, and now he's going to kill their financial goose over the cigars and wine. Sure, Miss, everybody knows that Greer's on his last legs. Bit off more than he could chew when he went to railroading; but old Brass Bowels will treat his indigestion. That's him, stout gent with his back this way. Greer and Smythe's either side of him. That's Mr. Carter opposite. T'other gentleman, Mr. Sparks, is general superintendent of the western division."

Slipping by the others her glance glued – the term is eschewed by purists, who ironically inquire if the adhesive used was of the carpenter variety, but it exactly describes her steadfast gaze – her glance glued to Carter's face. From above an arc lamp streamed white light down upon him, darkening the hollows under his eyes, raising his strong features in bold relief. This, be it remembered, was the first she had seen of him since he broke in upon the Ravell dinner-party, black, sooty, smelling evilly of sweat and smoke. And now he sat with a waiter behind his chair, at meat with the greatest man in the north, at a table that was spread with plate, cut-glass, linen, all of a costly elegance that transcended her own experience. The champagne bucket, at his elbow, of solid silver, with gold-crusted bottles thrusting sloping shoulders out of cracked ice, the last accessory of luxurious living, took on wonderful significance in that it accentuated to the last degree their changed positions. For surely the gods had turned the tables by bringing her in print hospital uniform and shabby ulster to witness this crowning of his development.