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Title:      Fruits of the Earth (1933)
Author:     Frederick Philip Grove (1879-1948)
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Language:   English
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      Fruits of the Earth (1933)
Author:     Frederick Philip Grove (1879-1948)






Contents


Author's Note

PART I--ABE SPALDING

  1.  The Homestead

  2.  The Idyll

  3.  First Neighbours

  4.  Husband and Wife

  5.  The School

  6.  The Great Flood

  7.  Election

  8.  The District

  9.  The Child

 10.  The Crop

 11.  Success

 12.  The Bridge


PART II--THE DISTRICT

 13.  The Prairie

 14.  The Changing District

 15.  Abe's Household

 16.  The Campaign

 17.  The Poll

 18.  Jim

 19.  The New School

 20.  Marion

 21.  Changes

 22.  The Christmas Dinner

 23.  The School-House

 24.  The Lure of the Town

 25.  Distress

 26.  Haying

 27.  Ruth

 28.  The Conflict

 29.  Abe

Map of Spalding District

Map of Somerville Road




Author's Note


When Joseph Conrad in 1917 reissued Nostromo, he accompanied it by
an author's note the first two paragraphs of which so exactly fit
the case of the present book that I cannot refrain from reprinting
them here, substituting the present title for Nostromo and Jane
Atkinson for Typhoon.  Jane Atkinson is an unpublished novel which,
at the time of its completion, I considered the last volume of what
I have come to call my (still largely unpublished) Prairie Series.

"Fruits of the Earth is the most anxiously meditated of the longer
novels which belong to the period following upon the completion
[Conrad says 'publication'] of Jane Atkinson.

"I don't mean to say that I became then conscious of any impending
change in my mentality and in my attitude towards the tasks of my
writing life.  And perhaps there was never any change, except in
that mysterious, extraneous thing which has nothing to do with the
theories of art; a phenomenon for which I cannot in any way be held
responsible.  What, however, did cause me some concern was that
after finishing the last story of the Prairie Series it seemed
somehow that there was nothing more in the world to write about.

"This so strangely negative but disturbing mood lasted some little
time; and then, as with many of my longer stories, the first hint
for Fruits of the Earth came to me in the shape" [here I leave
Conrad's text] of certain hints dropped by a real-estate dealer
with whom I was driving along over the prairie, regarding the
history of a certain farm which we were passing.

This farm was such as to suggest a race of giants who had founded
it; but on inquiry I found that it was held by tenants who tilled a
bare ten per cent of its acreage.  In a barn built for half a
hundred horses they kept a team of two sorry nags; and they
inhabited no more than two or three rooms of the outwardly palatial
house.

I have since found many more farms like that in Manitoba; and in
every case I have investigated their history.  Slowly, the
composite impression gained grew into a compelling urge; and the
result was the present story.

F. P. G.




PART I

Abe Spalding



ONE

The Homestead


When, in the summer of 1900, Abe Spalding arrived in the village of
Morley, in the municipality of Somerville, Manitoba, he had been
travelling in the caboose of a freight train containing a car with
four horses and sundry implements and household goods which
belonged to him.  He came from the old Spalding homestead in Brant
County, Ontario.

He had visited the open prairie a year before and, after careful
investigation, filed a claim on the south-west quarter of section
five in the township beginning four miles north of Morley.  He had
had good and valid reasons for choosing that particular location.
The neighbourhood as such he had fixed on because his twin sister
Mary, who a few years ago had married a doctor by name of Vanbruik,
and who up to 1897 had lived in the county seat, was at present,
for somewhat obscure reasons, domiciled in this very village of
Morley, where her husband, having sold his practice, was conducting
the business of a general merchant.  The particular quarter section
on which Abe Spalding had filed seemed, to the casual observer, to
offer no advantage over any other that was available; but he had
found that, while the water which covered the district in the
spring of the year stood for months on other parts, this quarter,
and the whole section to which it belonged, as well as the sections
north and south of it, dried several weeks in advance of the rest
of the prairie.  Further, he had been informed that the province
was on the point of drawing two gigantic ditches through the
district, one of them being surveyed to pass exactly along the
south line of section five.  These ditches were not primarily
designed to drain a seemingly irreclaimable swamp, but rather to
relieve an older settlement farther west, around the town of
Torquay; but, while they were not meant to drain the land which he
had chosen, he had shrewdly seen that they could not help improving
matters.  With his mind's eye he looked upon the district from a
point in time twenty years later; and he seemed to see a prosperous
settlement there.  The soil was excellent, and there was no
fundamental farming problem except that of drainage.  Lastly, he
was not the first settler to make the venture; the two quarters
composing the north half of the section had been taken up a decade
ago.  The men who owned them, it was true, had not been able to
make a success; they had left after having wasted their substance
and energy; but not before they had received their patents, which
they held on the chance that the land might in time become worth a
few dollars per acre.  A third settler, a bachelor by name of Hall,
was actually in residence on the quarter adjoining Abe's claim to
the west.

Abe came from a small Ontario farm of eighty acres, half of which,
on account of rock and sharp declivities in its formation, could
not be tilled.  He was possessed by "land hunger"; and he dreamt of
a time when he would buy up the abandoned farms from which all
buildings had been removed; and, who knows, perhaps even the
quarter where Hall was squatting in his sod-hut.  In his boldest
moments he saw himself prosperous on so great a holding and even
reaching out north; for the section there adjoining was No. 8,
held, as part of the purchase price paid by the Dominion for the
rights of sovereignty in the west, by that ancient institution, the
Hudson's Bay Company.  In any other place, where his land would
have been surrounded by crown land, any one might have limited
Abe's expansion by settling next to him; for no settler could
acquire more than a hundred and sixty acres by "homesteading."
Here, all things going well, Abe might hope one day to possess two
square miles; for the Hudson's Bay Company held its lands only in
order to sell them.  Abe was a man of economic vision.

As the lumbering freight train banged and clattered to a stop near
the little station, in what was euphemistically called "the yard"--
distinguished by nothing but a spur of the track running past a
loading platform to the three grain elevators along its southern
edge--Abe alighted from the caboose and stood for a moment
irresolutely by its side.  The conductor had told him that the car
containing his chattels was going to be shunted to the loading
platform, where it would be ready in an hour or so.  Abe was not
anxious to go to his sister's house; but his impulsive and
impatient temperament made him desirous, above all, to get over
that interval of waiting without being too conscious of his wasting
time.

He swung about and strode swiftly across to the station, where a
few idlers were lounging.  Emerging on the east-west road, he found
himself at the west end of the village, which had nothing in its
aspect that could be called urban.  The buildings of Main Street
were aligned on one side of this road into which three short by-
streets debouched from the north; to the south, the growth of the
settlement was arrested by the right-of-way, no buildings but the
grain elevators having been erected beyond it.  Like the whole
landscape, Main Street was treeless; and only the side-streets were
shaded by tall cottonwoods which seemed to lose themselves, to the
north, in what resembled a natural bluff--a deceptive semblance,
for all trees had been planted.  Main Street, with its single row
of buildings, hardly deserved the name of a street, just as the
agglomeration of houses hardly deserved the name of a village; it
formed a mere node in the road running, in a straight line, from
Somerville in the east to Ivy in the west, a distance of twenty-two
miles.

Just beyond the first side-street rose the one building which gave
the street a measure of distinction; a store unusual for a small
prairie town by reason of its dimensions as well as of the solidity
of its red-brick structure; it might have stood in the streets of
any small city.  The whole of its long, two-storied façade
consisted of large show-windows filled with a miscellaneous and
effectively arranged exhibit of what could be bought inside, the
assortment including everything from farm implements and furniture
to groceries and tobacco.

Behind the store, facing west, on the first side-street, stood the
one residence which, like the store, had an air approaching
dignity.  That was where Abe's sister lived; and the store was the
Vanbruik Department Store, owned by her husband and managed by a
high-salaried young man, Mr. Diamond.

Abe was very fond of his sister Mary; he wished he had sent her a
wire message announcing his arrival so that she might have met him.
A frown settled on his large round face, under the peak of the grey
tweed cap which he wore.  If he hesitated about calling at the
house, it was on account of his brother-in-law, the mysterious
doctor who a few years ago had suddenly given up his large
flourishing practice at Somerville to turn merchant.  Coming as Abe
did from a small Ontario farm, inherited five years ago from his
father who had died a sudden death, and now advantageously sold to
an industrial concern, Abe had the prejudice of the man who made
his living by what he called "work" against the merchant who made
"money" by calculation.  Besides, Dr. Vanbruik was in everything
Abe's antipode, physically as well as temperamentally.  The mere
fact that the doctor was a professional man had seemed to place Abe
at a disadvantage in what little intercourse they had had.  The
doctor was a graduate of Queen's; and Kingston stood, to Abe, for
all that was provincial in the spirit of Ontario; it seemed
strangely eastern; it represented all that Abe had abandoned in
coming west.  Abe had deliberately chosen the material world for
the arena of his struggles; the doctor, though he had turned
merchant, seemed to live in a world of the spirit.  Mary had, with
Abe's own early consent, received a high-school and college
education as the equivalent of her equity in the farm, there being
only two children.  The cost of her education had been defrayed by
placing a mortgage of five thousand dollars on the parental place.
Mary, too, therefore, was in a sense Abe's superior, though Abe was
fully aware of the difference between an informational education
and native intelligence, in which latter he did not feel himself to
be deficient.  Yet he could not help begrudging his sister that
refinement of manners and forms which is imparted by the association
with cultured men and women: he begrudged it while secretly admiring
and imitating it.  This was all the more the case with his brother-
in-law, who had a way of quietly listening to an argument and then
settling it by a display of superior information.

Physically, Abe was extraordinarily tall, measuring six feet four;
the doctor was almost correspondingly small, for he lacked an exact
twelve inches of Abe's stature.  Abe was built in proportion to his
height, broad-shouldered and deep-chested; the doctor was slender
and fine-limbed, and yet he stooped.  Temperamentally, Abe was
impulsive, bearing down obstacles by sheer impetuosity; the doctor
was deliberate, hesitant even, weighing every aspect of a matter
before aligning himself.  Consequently, at the age of thirty, with
his life a blank page before him, Abe was disinclined to seek the
company of this man who, besides, was his senior by fifteen years,
having lived his life.

The struggle between Abe's desire to let his sister help him over
the next hour or so and his disinclination to meet his brother-in-
law was plainly visible in his face, which, above any pair of
shoulders but his, would have looked disproportionately large.  And
there was still another reason for his hesitancy.  Before leaving
Ontario Abe had married Ruth, against the, at least implied, advice
of Mary and her husband.  When, a year ago, he had mentioned his
intention, neither had voiced any open disapproval; but, in the
course of the few weeks which he had spent at Morley, they had
somehow conveyed a lack of enthusiasm over it, now by a silence,
now by a hesitant question.  "Will she be able to adapt herself to
rural conditions?"  "Won't she suffer from the unavoidable
isolation on a pioneer farm?"  For Ruth was the daughter of
smalltown merchants; her father had a bake-shop at Brantford; her
mother, a confectionery operated in conjunction.  The worst of it
was that Abe himself had his misgivings when he pondered the
matter; to have his own unvoiced fears put forward by others, if
ever so tentatively, disconcerted him.  The conclusion could not be
evaded that he had been in love with a face and a figure rather
than a mind or soul.

Yet he strode impulsively forward at last, diagonally crossing the
sleepy street of the ugly village and hoping that his brother-in-
law would not be at home.

That hope was fulfilled.  His sister met him in the door of the
wide-spaced living-room in the white house which was surrounded by
an extensive veranda.  At sight of her brother, Mary exclaimed:

"Abe! . . .  Why in the world did you not let me know?"

Abe shrugged his shoulders; but he bent down and kissed her cheek.

"Charles isn't in," Mary said.  "He went to the city on business."

Mary, too, was tall, even somewhat large and rather heavy.

"I'm in town only for an hour or so," Abe said as they were sitting
down--Abe on the large, grey chesterfield, his sister in an arm-
chair of the same colour and design.  "I have my stuff in the train
and I'm going out at once."

"Surely not," Mary said, scanning his face through her glasses.
"Or do you intend to come back to-night?"

"I don't think so.  I want to start work."

"Not to-day, Abe?"

"Not to-day, perhaps.  I have a tent along.  I want to do as much
breaking as I can this summer; and to build.  Ruth will be out in a
week or two."

Mary gave him a quick look.  "So you got married after all?  Why
did you not let us know?"

"It was all done so suddenly.  I sold the place and didn't know
where to go.  We got married, and two days later I started west."

"Why did you not bring her?  She could have stayed with me."

"I came by a freight train and had the horses to look after.  I'll
put up a shack at once."

Mary nodded and rose.  "I'll get you a cup of tea, shall I?"

"I won't decline."

When Mary had left the room, Abe sat for a few minutes, looking
straight ahead.  Then he rose and walked about, stopping in the bay
window which looked to the street, turning again and stepping over
to a library table covered with books.  Of these he picked up one
or two, and, finding that they were poetry, dropped them again,
resuming his walk.

"I had a late dinner," Mary said when she returned.  "I won't
partake, if you don't mind."  She moved a small low table to her
brother's side, placing the tray upon it, and went out again to
fetch the tea.

When she brought it, Abe helped himself.

"Why not let Ruth come at once, Abe?" Mary asked shortly.  "You
know I'd be glad to have her."

"Oh, well--"  Then bluntly, "I believe she'd rather not."

There was a pause.

"And the old farm is sold?  I can hardly believe it."

Abe, knowing that he was unjust, took that remark to hold a vague
reproach.  "What could I do?  Eighty acres!  And mortgaged at
that."

Seeing that the money raised by the mortgage had paid for her
education.  Mary might have been offended in turn.  But she
smoothed all occasion of offence away.  "It was the logical thing
to do.  The same amount of work put in here is bound to bring
better results.  We have both gone west, after all.  You will miss
the trees, though."

"I shall plant trees here,"

"I suppose.  But no cedars."

"No," Abe said after a silence.  "Nor hard maples."

This addition to what his sister had said restored the inner
understanding between them; they spoke of their old home for a
while.

Then Abe rose.

"You won't return for the night?" Mary asked once more.

"No.  I shall have to keep an eye on the horses."

Half an hour later Abe was unloading his chattels at the platform,
leading his horses out first and then manoeuvring his wagon into a
position where he could pile it high with a minimum of lost motion.
Having taken as much as he could, he hitched two horses in front--
Belgians these--and tied a team of Percherons behind.  Thence,
driving along the trail between track and elevators, he went west
till he was opposite the station building.  There, leaving his
teams, he crossed the right-of-way and spoke to the agent, to tell
him he would return for the remainder of his goods next morning.

At last he climbed to the top of his load and started north for the
six-mile trek over open prairie.

A few hundred yards from the Somerville Line, as the east-west road
was called, he reached that flat and unrelieved country which, to
the very horizon, seemed to be a primitive wilderness.  North,
east, and west, nothing showed that looked like a settlement, and
the impression of an utter loneliness was perhaps even enhanced by
the knowledge that somewhere it harboured at least one man by name
of Hall, half-crazed with work and isolation, and destined to be
Abe's neighbour.  As for others, the two who, probably under an
impulse to huddle close together in this immensity, had a decade
ago filed on the two northern quarters of the same section, they
were gone, and having "proved up" on their claims, had vanished
again in the outer world.

Abe's brief call at his sister's had somewhat unsettled him.  For a
year he had mentally lived on that open, flat prairie, planning and
adjusting himself.  He needed room; he needed a country which would
give scope to the powers he felt within him.  Forbidding as it
looked, this was that country.  But Mary's casual remark about the
cedars had reawakened in him the vision of the old farm as a place
to live in: the house in its cluster of cedars, with the gnarled
apple trees in the orchard behind; with the old furniture in the
rooms--not very comfortable perhaps, but harmonious in the half-
light admitted by the scanty windows half closed with vines:
mellowed into unity by being lived in through generations.  Here,
everything was of necessity new and raw.  Ruth in the midst of
this?  She knew nothing of what she was going into except that Abe
was to create some sort of home for her: Ruth, whom a year or so
ago he had met casually when buying oranges in a store. . . .

Well, he would conquer this wilderness; he would change it; he
would set his own seal upon it!  For the moment, one hundred and
sixty acres were going to be his, capable of being tilled from line
to line!

He would conquer!  Yet, as he looked about, he was strangely
impressed with this treeless prairie under the afternoon sun.
This utterly undiversified country looked flat as a table-top.
Differences in level, small as they might be, must exist.  Why,
otherwise, should there be bare soil here and there, with the
smooth and cracked surface of a dried mudhole in clay?  Whereas
elsewhere the greyish-green, silky prairie grass grew knee-high.
Why should the spring floods which he had not yet seen drain away
to the east, into the river which carried them to the great lake?
Why should it have been observed by those who had preceded him that
certain sections of this wilderness dried sooner in spring than
others?  There must be undulations in the soil.

A year ago, Abe had scanned the district from a purely utilitarian
point of view.  Apart from the bush land in the far north, this had
been almost the last district where free land was still available.
Within it he had looked for depth of topsoil, for nearness to
possible neighbours, for a convenient distance from a shipping-
point.

Nothing but such considerations had had any influence with him a
year ago.  That the general conformation of a landscape might have
to be considered, such an idea he would have laughed at.  Yet this
prairie seemed suddenly a peculiar country, mysteriously endowed
with a power of testing temper and character.  But that was exactly
what he had wanted: a "clear proposition" as he had expressed it,
meaning a piece of land capable of being tilled from line to line,
without waste areas, without rocky stretches, without deeply-cut
gullies which denied his horses a foothold.  He wanted land, not
landscape; all the landscape he cared for he would introduce
himself.

Yet, half unbeknown to him, there was a dream: of a mansion such as
he had seen in Ontario, in the remnants of a colonial estate--a
mansion dominating an extensive holding of land, imposed upon that
holding as a sort of seigneurial sign-manual.  Dominating this
prairie.

Had he undertaken more than he could do?

So far he had allowed his horses to idle along the faint trail.  At
this thought he straightened on top of the tent which covered his
household goods.  There, just ahead of him, came the turn; so far
he had gone north, covering four miles in that direction.  Now two
miles west; and then look out for the stake which marked his
corner.

He shook the lines over the backs of the horses and looked up.
There did not seem to be even birds about!  But this immense and
utter loneliness merely aroused him to protest and contradiction:
he would change this prairie, would impose himself upon it, would
conquer its spirit!

At last he arrived on his claim and stopped just within his lines.
Before he climbed to the ground, he scanned the quarter section
immediately west.  On close scrutiny the monotony of the flatness
proved to be broken there by what, at this distance, looked like
two blisters in the soil: sod-hut and sod-stable of his neighbour;
built by cutting with a spade squares of the prairie turf, matted
with ancient roots, and using them like enormous flat bricks.  Not
thus was he going to build his first abode!

He slipped to the ground and unhooked his horses, throwing the
traces over their backs; then he hitched them all four abreast and,
behind them, strode over to Hall's place.

Hall was at home: a short, fat man of forty.  As he issued from the
sod-shack, which had two small square windows and a plank door
fitted into its shaggy wall, he betrayed no surprise.

"Well," he said, "you got here, eh?"

"Yes," Abe replied.  "Can I water the horses?"

"Sure.  Help yourself.  Help yourself to anything you can find on
the god-damn place."

"Have a crop in, I suppose?"

"They's seed in the ground; an' it's up.  Quite a height, too."

"How much?"

"Thirty acres.  But whether it's going to make a crop--"  And the
man shrugged his shoulders and flung an arm which came naked out of
a sleeve ripped from the shoulder down.

"What's wrong with it?"

"Put in too doggone late.  Water didn't go till nearly June."
There the man stood, hardly raised, mentally and in his aspirations,
above the level of that prairie from which he had come to wrest a
living.  "Truth to tell, if you want to know, if it were to do over
again, I wouldn't do it.  That's flat."

Abe nodded.  "Well, I'll take the horses down to the pool."

"Help yourself.  Anything you can use, just help yourself."

"I see you've a drag-shovel there."

"Take it.  Take it.  It ain't mine.  But the fellow what owns it
ain't hardly going to come back for it.  He's done and gone."

Again Abe nodded.  "Shall have to dig a pool myself."  And he
turned away with his horses to where, behind the stable, a dam of
yellow subsoil circled the waterhole in which a supply of the
precious liquid remained from the previous thaw-up and the summer
rains.

Half an hour later, back in the south-east corner of his own claim,
Abe tied the horses to the wheels of his wagon, took a steel
measuring-line from a pocket, and marked off a hundred and twenty
yards to west and north.  That was to be the site of his farmstead.
It was done half in protest against a rising discouragement; and,
yielding completely to that need for a protest, he returned to his
wagon, threw the tail-gate out, and pulled from under the load a
huge hand-plough, which he lowered to the ground with a supreme
effort.  For a while he was busy fitting evener and trees to the
implement.  Then, looking up at the sun, which was approaching the
western horizon, he hitched his horses in front.

"Get up there!" he shouted; and, throwing the plough over, so that
the share slipped smoothly along the ground, he went north, to the
point where, from his measurements, the line of his yard was to be.
Reversing the plough, he slanted the point into the virgin prairie
and began to step out behind his team, throwing his weight now to
right, now to left, according as the plough threatened to be thrown
out of the ground by such resistances as the soil afforded.  Thus
he drew a furrow around the site of the yard; and, having finished
it, he returned once more to the point whence he had started and
began the task of breaking his first field.  He did shallow
ploughing; for he knew that the prairie should be broken and back-
set.  As he stepped along, he did double work: he guided his plough
and counted his steps; and when he had taken three hundred and
eighty strides he turned, for on the trip west he had figured out
that that line squared would give him thirty acres.

At the end of his back-furrow he stopped and hesitated.  Should he
let it go and put up his tent, so as to have shelter for the night?
If he was to have a meal, he must get ready for cooking.

No.  He reversed the plough for another furrow; and once he was
committed to more than one round, he stayed with the work till it
was too dark to see.  He was here to conquer.  Conquer he would!
Before long he had opened ten furrows; the sun was down; and still
he went on.  A slight mist formed close to the ground, and he had
the peculiar feeling as though he were ploughing over an
appreciable fraction of the curvature of the globe; for whenever he
turned at the north end of his furrow; he could no longer see his
wagon, as though it were hidden behind the shoulder of the earth.

By the time he left off it was after ten and quite dark.  He had
gone sixteen rounds.  He unhitched and unharnessed near the wagon,
fed his horses a modicum of oats poured on the ground, staked them
out, and supped on bread and raw bacon.  Then he rolled up in a
blanket under the wagon, with the tent for a groundsheet, and fell
at once into a dreamless sleep.



TWO

The Idyll


A year had gone by.  Again Abe Spalding was in town, driving a team
of rangy bronchos hitched to a topless buggy.  He had taken a can
of cream to the station, to be shipped to the city.  Every motion
of his betrayed hurry.  Having dispatched the can, he drove to the
Vanbruik store and, among the many other teams that were slanting
back into the road, tied his horses to the rail of steel piping
which ran along the sidewalk in front of the windows.

As he entered the swing-door, clad in a dark-coloured suit of
combination overalls--jacket and trousers in one--and began to make
his way through the crowd--for the store was flourishing and
attracted custom by special Saturday sales, one of which was in
progress--the manager of the establishment espied him from his
vantage-point on the mezzanine landing of the flight of stairs
leading to the upper story where furniture, rugs, and similar goods
were displayed.

This manager, Mr. Diamond, was a smart young man of good build and
appearance, well dressed, with a dash of metropolitan refinement,
his blue-serge trousers being sharply creased, his linen spotless,
his face freshly shaved to the quick.  That he went about in shirt-
sleeves seemed done, not to spare his coat or to make him
comfortable, but to put himself on a level with the crowd.  He was
a shrewd business man, willing to give liberal discounts for the
sake of a quick turnover; yet hard to deal with when a note given
in payment was not redeemed in time or when a long-term credit was
asked for.  To such pleas the doctor was less inaccessible; he had
been known to take over a debt owing to the store, accepting a
personal note and allowing it to be forgotten.  Mr. Diamond's motto
was "Cash and Carry"; though with such as worried more over their
debts than their bills receivable he urged the convenience of a
charge-account.  To travelling salesmen he said, "We discount our
bills."  He would not have been out of place in a large city store;
but this rural establishment he might own one day.

As he caught sight of Abe, he came running down the stairs.  That
Abe was singled out for personal attention may have been due to the
fact that he was the owner's brother-in-law; but it was sufficiently
explained by the consideration that he had one of the largest and
most reliable monthly accounts, which he settled with "cream
cheques."

Mr. Diamond flashed a gold-filled smile.  "Anything for you.  Abe?"

"Yes," Abe replied and produced a slip of paper on which Ruth had
written out a list of her needs.  "Have these put into my buggy.
The bronchos, right at the door."  The better customers' horses
were known to the clerks as well as the customers themselves.

"I'll have it attended to at once."  And Mr. Diamond held up a
finger to one of the white-frocked clerks.

"The doctor at the store?" Abe asked.

"I don't think so.  He'll be at the house."

But the manager led the way to look about, for the store was too
large to be swept by a glance.  Abe's physical superiority reduced
the other man to a mere satellite.  He himself looked like a fact
of nature.

They made the round without finding the doctor.  Abe stood
irresolute.  In the course of the year he had learned not to resent
his brother-in-law's ways any longer.  But now he half blamed his
sister for the fact that she and Ruth did not pull together.

"I am going to the post office," he said at last.  "I won't be
back.  I am in a hurry."  He always was.

"No need."  Mr. Diamond nodded.  "You'll find your things in the
box."

Abe passed through a door and went briskly along the sidewalk
fronting a second, much smaller store conducted by a tiny, square-
bodied Jew.  Crossing the second street, the far corner of which
was occupied by a hardware store, he reached, a few hundred yards
beyond, a white frame building in which the post office was housed.

Like every place accessible to the Saturday crowd, the public room
was filled with people who stood about conversing, the weekly trip
to town being made quite as much for the sake of the social
intercourse it afforded as for the purpose of trading.  All these
men came from south of "the Line."  It would have been easy for Abe
to strike up acquaintances and to have himself admitted to the
general conversation about the weather, the prospects of the crops,
and provincial or municipal politics.  But he merely nodded; and,
under a general cessation of the buzzing talk, a few of those
present silently and casually returned his nod.  As if to expedite
matters, they stepped aside and opened a lane for him to pass on to
the wicket.

The reason for this reception was that Abe had not only made no
advances but had even met such advances as were made to him with an
attitude of reserve.  He was considered proud; and he did look down
on people satisfied with a success which secured a mere living.
His goal was farther removed than theirs, and the very fact that he
had so far realized few of his ambitions made him the more
reticent; he was not going to allow himself to be judged by what he
had done rather than by what he intended to do.

Having received from the aged postmaster that bundle of circulars
which constituted his weekly mail, he left as briskly as he had
entered.

He went to his sister's house, where Mary met him at the door.

"You'll stay for a while?  I'll make a cup of tea?"

"I just want to see Charles for a moment."

"He's in the study."  Mary looked queerly at her brother.  When she
had so much wished to have him in the district, he kept aloof!

The study was a small room opposite the dining-room.  In contrast
to the rest of the house its floor was bare; the general impression
it made was that of an untidy litter.  Its walls were lined with
unstained bookshelves made by a local carpenter; the furniture
consisted of a table strewn with papers, a roll-top desk, and two
Morris chairs in one of which the doctor was sitting, a book in his
hand; the seat of the other was encumbered with pamphlets and
letters.

As Abe entered, Dr. Vanbruik looked at him over his glasses,
dropped the hand holding the book, bent forward to sweep the
encumbrances of the other chair to the floor, and said unsmilingly:
"Sit down, Abe."

If the doctor's whole physique was small, his face was diminutive.
It looked contracted, as if its owner lived in a perpetual
concentration of thought.  His dark clothes, though old, still bore
traces of having been well tailored; but the creases at shoulders,
elbows, and knees were worn in beyond the possibility of being
removed by pressing.  He had his right foot drawn up on his left
knee and, with his free hand, was nursing its ankle.

As Abe sat down, there was a moment's silence.

"Hall's ready to sell," Abe said at last.  "He's entitled to prove
up if he gets the buildings he needs."

The doctor nodded.  "You know my views.  The farmer who isn't
satisfied to be a farmer makes a mistake.  You want to be a
landowner on a large scale.  You'll find you can't get the help you
will need.  At least you won't be able to hold it."

Abe gave a short laugh.  "Machines."

"Well, we might thresh it all out again.  It would lead nowhere."

"What I want to know is this," Abe said.  "I could put up the
buildings for Hall; or I could buy them and haul them out.  But
it's illegal for him to pledge the place before he has his patent.
You have known him in a business way.  Is he going to do what he
promises when I can't force him?"

"No.  You want his farm.  If he owes you money when he proves up,
he will sell to the man who offers cash, if he can find him."

"I offer him eight hundred dollars."

"Don't pay a cent till he turns his title over."

"He must have that house, worth three hundred dollars.  And
meanwhile he must live."

"Get more work out of him."

"That's your advice, is it?"

"If you must have more land, that's the way to go about it.  As for
Hall, I wouldn't trust him across the road."

Abe rose.  "That's what I wanted to know.  I must be going."

As he passed through the living-room, Mary stopped her brother.
"You won't stay?  Not for half an hour?"

"I can't.  Work's waiting."

"It's Saturday.  Other farmers have time."

"They!"

"How's the baby?"

"All right as far as I know."

"Ruth?"

"The same."

Mary stood and looked at him.  Abe laughed, patted her back, bent
down to kiss her, and turned to the door.

As he backed out of the row of vehicles in front of the store he
looked at his watch.  He had acquired the trick of timing himself
on his drives.  When the trail was dry, he tried to beat his own
record, cutting off seconds from the time required.

He was sitting bolt upright and held his lines tight; the wheels
bounded over the road.  It took him twenty-four minutes to cover
the four miles to the turn west.  Having made the turn, he used the
whip, just flicking the horses' rumps.

As he approached his claim he looked about.  What he had achieved
in a year might justify pride.  There was a two-roomed shack, built
like a shed.  East of it lay a pile of poplar boles, hauled from
the river, a distance of twenty-five miles, in winter; there was a
year's fuel left, well-seasoned now.  Along the west edge of the
yard stood a frame stable large enough to house six horses and four
cows, but too small right now.  The yard was fenced with woven
wire; and a strip thirty-two feet wide, inside the fence, was
ploughed and kept black, to be planted with four rows of trees next
spring.  South of the stable loomed two large haystacks, cut of the
wild prairie grass west of Hall's.  North of the barn there was a
huge water pool, forty by a hundred feet, fifteen feet deep.  The
whole south line, too, was fenced; with barbed wire only, it was
true; but the posts were of imported cedar; and along the other
lines posts and coils of wire were laid out, the posts all pointed,
ready to be driven into the ground with a wooden maul after the
next soaking rain.  North of the yard lay the field, forty acres of
good wheat.  The remaining hundred-odd acres were all broken; black
as velvet they stretched away as far as one could see.  That being
so, Abe needed more land; with more land he would need help; a good
thing that so far he had a thriftless neighbour willing to work for
wages rather than to attend to his own claim.

Abe had lived through one spring flood.  For three weeks in April
Ruth had never left the square plot about the shack where he had
piled the earth dug from the pool, thus securing the house from
being invaded by water and doing away with the eyesore of the raw
clay at the same time; he himself had had to don rubber hip-boots
to cross his yard.  But the flood had run out in time for seeding.
One trouble was that the water had spread the seeds of foul weeds
all over his land.  Where the prairie remained unbroken, the grass
had held its own, apart from small patches where skunk-tail had
gained a foothold.  But on the breaking where his crop was seeded,
a damnable mixture of charlock, thistle, and tumbling mustard had
sprung up with the wheat.  These pests the water had brought from
the older settlements to the west, in the famous Torquay district,
south-east of Grand Pré Plains where, so they said, farming was
already becoming a problem.

One other change Abe noted as he drove into his yard.  South-west,
seven miles away as the crow flies, a new grain elevator was being
constructed, at a flag station called Bays, after the oldest
settler south of the Somerville Line.  That building, with
glistening planks still unpainted, was a reminder that the country
was being settled; land was going to rise in value; it was time to
secure one's share of the prairie; no longer did a half section
seem such a bountiful slice of the universe to build a mansion on.

As he drove to the house, Abe looked again at his watch.  He had
made the trip in thirty-three minutes and thirty-five seconds,
cutting twenty-five seconds off his last record.

Ruth, in a long, dark print dress, was standing in the door, a
smile on her pretty face and a child a few months old in her arms.
She was not exactly small; but she was getting plump; and the
plumper she grew the less tall she seemed.

Abe answered her smile by a nod, alighted, and at once carried the
box with her groceries and empty cream can into the house.  Then,
from old habit, he glanced at the sun; and without a word, he took
the baby, helped the young woman to a seat in the buggy, and,
returning the child to her keeping, reached for the lines to drive
to the stable.

In front of the open slide-doors he unhitched, allowing the horses
to go to the huge trough of corrugated iron which reached through
the yard-fence into the field beyond.  Between trough and pool
stood the pump, which he worked vigorously for five minutes.  When
the bronchos had drunk their fill, he entered the stable and
stuffed their mangers with hay; having tied them, he slipped the
harness off their backs.  Next, he filled the mangers and feed-
boxes of the remaining stalls and finally went to the door where he
stood for several minutes, one hand raised to its frame, shouting
at the top of his voice, "Come on--come on--come on!"

This was the signal for the work-horses and the cows to return to
the stable; and since they were always fed a measure of oats and a
handful of shorts, a scarcely visible cluster of animals began at
once to move from the open prairie towards the farmstead.  As soon
as Abe saw that they were on their way, he ceased calling, turned
back into the stable and turned the drivers out into the yard.
There being no room for all his stock in the barn, he had to feed
in relays.  Then he went to the gate and waited for the rest of the
horses to come.  Even his waiting he seemed to do briskly, calling
again for the horses when they lingered to snatch another bite of
good grass.  At last they started their nightly comedy of a
struggle between their love of freedom and their love of oats.
Invariably the desire of the belly conquered; and, leaving the more
deliberate cows behind, they entered the yard in a galloping rush,
tossing their heads, and raising their tails.  The cows followed at
a walk, breaking into a short run only as they passed the master
who impatiently closed the gate behind them.

All this while Ruth had been sitting in the buggy and looking on.
A somewhat empty smile never left her lips.  Was this routine of
the farm still new enough to her to retain its charm?  Or was she
so intensely in love with her vigorous and swift-moving husband
that she was unwilling to lose a minute of his company?

Abe was occasionally conscious of a twinge of impatience with her--
or was it with himself?  He would have liked to say something; what
was there to say?  He had tried to speak of his plans; the topic,
endlessly repeated, had exhausted itself.  Sometimes she looked as
though she were waiting; for what?  He was doing his best.

The milking next, for evening was coming fast.  Meanwhile, in the
house, supper was waiting; and Abe was conscious of being hungry.

Ruth descended from the buggy and stood in the door, looking on.  A
year ago she had tried her hand at the traditional woman's task,
with poor success.  Laughing at herself, she had given it up; and
Abe preferred to do all outside work himself.

Together they went to the house, Abe carrying the brimming pails.
At the table, nothing was being said, either, beyond such brief
words as were called for by the task in hand.  Abe was thinking of
his coming negotiations with Hall; Ruth--of what?

Supper over, Abe separated the cream while Ruth cleared the table
and washed the dishes.  It was seven o'clock; but the sun was still
high.  Abe carried the skimmed milk to the pig-pen beyond the pool.

When he returned, he stopped in the centre of the yard.  "Coming
out?" he called to Ruth who was still in the shack.

She came to the door.  "Might as well."

Might as well!  Yet every bit of work was Abe's.

They went to the field where the wheat stood knee-high, being in
the shot-blade; and for two hours they went about pulling weeds;
bright-yellow charlock and paler tumbling mustard.  As always, Abe
worked like a whirlwind; Ruth languidly, she being pregnant.  Abe
kept slapping neck and hands, for mosquitoes were bad.  Ruth
laughed, immune.

Suddenly Abe straightened and listened.  "By jingo!" he exclaimed.

"What is it?" Ruth asked; for she, too, had caught a faint
pulsation in the air.

"The ditchers," Abe said.  "Come on!"  And, turning, he ran for the
yard, leaving Ruth behind.

The sun was almost setting; and as they passed through the gate
where Abe had waited, they saw, straight west, little puffs of
steam and smoke rising into the clear evening air.

"It IS the ditching machine," Abe said.  "They'll get past here
after all this summer.  I'll hitch up to-morrow; we'll have a look
at them."

He took Ruth's arm and, bending down to kiss her, led her back to
the field where they rogued for another hour till it was too dark
to distinguish weeds from grain.  The weeds Abe piled in the
margin, at right angles to a rope which he had brought and by the
help of which he swung the huge bundle on his back.  Thus, through
the dusk, they returned to the yard where Abe kindled a fire with
chips from the wood pile, smothering the flames with the green
weeds till they disengaged a dense, acrid smoke which dispelled the
increasingly troublesome mosquitoes.  Ruth brought two chairs from
the shack; and they sat down in the smudge, Abe in the thickest of
it, Ruth near the margin.

They had been sitting there for half an hour, Abe yawning with that
abandon which comes from overwhelming drowsiness, when, from the
trail beyond the fence, a voice sounded across:  "Seen the
ditchers?"

Abe and Ruth gave a start.  "Yes," Abe said.  "Heard and seen
them."

"Both?"

"What do you mean?"

"They're working on both lines," said Hall's voice.  "They're
nearer on the south line."

"Come," Abe said to Ruth; and again he took her arm.

"Do you mean to say they work at night?" Abe asked at the gate.

Hall laughed and spat.  "They had better.  They've contracted to
finish the work before freeze-up."

The bright glare of a headlight was visible against the dark sky
from which the pallor of the sunset had vanished; and farther south
a second similar light pointed eastward, less brightly, for these
three humans were not in the line of its focus.

"That there machine," Hall said, pointing ineffectively with a
chewed-off pipe-stem, "is two miles south.  It's the bigger one;
they work three steam-shovels there; that's why they've overtaken
this here devil.  They've shipped in two carloads of forriners,
Ukarainians, dodgast them.  I was thinking of asking fer a job my
own self.  But the white man don't stand a chancet in this country
any longer."

"That reminds me," Abe said.  "I'm going to build a granary.  You
can get a job right here."

"All right, bo'.  What about that there house you were talking of?"

"I'll get you the house.  Trouble is, I'll have to owe you the
money it costs.  You have to sign under oath that the house is
yours."

Hall chuckled.  "So long as I gets my money when I pull out."

"You don't need to pull out till you've got it."

"That's so.  It's all right then.  I'm danged if I stays on this
prairie a day longer than I've got to."

Three, four miles to the west, lights shifted, crossing the pointed
finger of the headlight.  The night seemed to intensify into a more
palpable blackness; and the pulse of the engine ceased.
Startlingly, two or three of the movable lights were reversed,
pointing converging beams backward, against the face of the machine
that was straddling the ditch it excavated.  Magically, it seemed
drawn nearer.

"Something wrong," Hall said, spitting.  "Lighting up for repairs."

They stood and stared but could not, of course, see what was going
on.  The second outfit was visibly forging ahead.  Whenever Abe
looked away for a second, he noticed the progress made in the
interval.

"That there outfit," Hall said, "lifts three yards of dirt at a
bite; the ditch is forty feet wide and thirty deep; but that there
monster digs it at the rate of two rods an hour.  Twenty rods in a
ten-hour day; that's two miles a month.  They're speeding her up
now to five miles a month, what with night work and more help.
They've got to finish her, or they lose their deposit."

"That so?  How do you know?"  Abe felt Ruth pressing against him.

Hall, however, did not take the slightest notice of her.  Again he
spat.  "I've been down.  Foreman told me."

"Well," Abe said, turning away, "I was thinking of hitching up and
driving down myself to-morrow, it being Sunday."

"No work on Sundays," Hall said.  "Stop at midnight.  Wait till
Monday."

Abe was fingering the gate.  "No time on weekdays."

"You're in a blasted hurry.  Learn better by-m-by.  When do I start
on that there granary of yours?"

"Report on Monday.  We'll haul the lumber . . .  Good night."

And once more husband and wife sat in silence within the smudge
till the excitement of the trip to the road had worn off and
drowsiness reconquered body and mind.



THREE

First Neighbours


Again a year had gone by; and Abe, with the help of a huge steam-
tractor rented from Anderson, the round-faced young hardware dealer
in town, and operated by Bigelow, the powerful, club-footed
blacksmith, had hauled out for Hall a three-roomed farm-house which
he had bought from Wilson, postmaster at Morley.  The price, three
hundred dollars, had been figured, as Dr. Vanbruik had advised,
against the wages which Abe owed Hall for work done during the
year.

It was in that spring of 1902 that Nicoll first came out to look
the district over.  He was renting a farm along the southern edge
of Grand Pré Plains.

"Renting!" he said to Abe.  "You don't know what that means.  No
chance to do as I think best.  My landlord wants me to summer-
fallow eighty acres.  'Very well,' I say, 'give me a lease so that
I can count on some return from my labour.  Unless I know that I
can crop that fallow next year, I won't earn wages for my work.'
'I can hardly do that,' he says.  'I may want to sell; or another
tenant may offer a better rent.'  Then,' I say, 'I'll crop what I
till or go where I can do so.'  'You've got your living,' he says;
'what more do you want?'  I always leave my land better than I
found it; but it's no use.  I have to have land of my own.  I have
my own horses and implements, such as they are.  And I've a little
money besides.  I've GOT to have land of my own."

"The land's here," Abe said, irritated by the man's hesitation, yet
liking him.  "It has its drawbacks, like any land.  It's subject to
floods coming down from the hills.  They bring weeds.  But I'm
farming.  Seems to me I'm getting ahead; though, of course, it's
hard to say where you stand in this game.  So far I've been tying
my money down, what little I had.  But this year I'll have a crop
of a hundred and fifty acres; and it's doing well.  I came when
there wasn't even a ditch.  We are getting the better of the water.
I'm buying more land and proving up on the homestead.  Seems to me
I'm on the safe side."

"It looks that way," Nicoll said.

But he did not, that year, file on the quarter section which he had
picked and decided upon.

In the summer of 1903 he returned.  During the previous fall Abe
had built a huge barn and added a room to the shack, financing his
operations by using his last capital and borrowing at the
Somerville bank--a process which he found surprisingly easy.  True
enough, it was a short-term loan of only fifteen hundred dollars;
but, after threshing, he had paid off only eight hundred, covering
the balance by a renewal note.  In the spring he had planted a
four-rowed wind-break of black poplar, with spruces interspersed
along the north and west lines of the yard.  There were other
changes which Nicoll inspected and duly admired.  The whole of what
was now Abe's half section was fenced; and the land was divided by
a cross-fenced pasture of twenty acres, extending from the rear of
his huge, red, curb-roofed barn for twenty rods west and for half a
mile north.  In the house which he had bought for Hall lived Bill
Crane who had been a notorious idler in town but who, having
married, seemed to have changed his ways, for young Mrs. Crane
could often be heard shrilly driving her man to work in the
morning.  Hall, having received eight hundred dollars, had turned
over to Abe his newly acquired title and left for parts unknown.
Abe had a hundred acres of this new land under crop; and sixty
acres were freshly broken when Nicoll appeared.  The total number
of horses on the place was eleven now, not counting three colts
born in the new barn.  Ten cows were being milked; and there were
steers and heifers besides, and pigs and fowl.

Nicoll, medium-sized, middle-aged, bearded, deliberate, went about
and looked at it all.  "You say you came here with a few wagon-
loads of truck and slept on the ground for the first two weeks?"

"That's what I said."  They were standing in the open door of the
magnificent barn.  Opposite, in front of the house--for with the
new room and the gable roof it was hardly a shack any longer--two
youngsters played about; and a cradle stood in the shade north of
the building.  This cradle held a little girl called Mary, after
her aunt, though, to avoid confusion, her parents had resolved to
change the name to Marion, which was the first name of Ruth's
mother.

Nicoll smiled up at Abe, sighing.  It would have been hard to
define his expression.  Ordinarily he seemed to look into himself
rather than at the things surrounding him.  Now he seemed ready to
be impressed.  At times his look verged on adoration and yet seemed
on the point of turning on itself and, in a smile half veiled by
the reddish beard streaked with grey, of becoming tinged with a
gentle irony.  Abe was by far the younger man of the two; but the
way in which Nicoll looked at him might have suggested that he gave
him credit for superior wisdom and experience while at the same
time half mocking at it.

In spite of the fact that Abe could not understand the man's
hesitation he was attracted.  To him the world was a thing to be
conquered, waiting to take the impress of his mind and will.
Nicoll seemed rather to look for a niche to slip into, unnoticed
and unobserved.

"You," Nicoll said at last, "were of course in a different position
when you arrived.  "You had capital."

"I had five thousand dollars."

Nicoll seemed to shrink within himself.  "As I said," he muttered,
with his curious smile.  "Dukes and lords . . ."  He had said
nothing of the kind; but perhaps he had thought it.

"But look what I've got!" Abe said impulsively.  "This barn cost me
three thousand dollars.  My stock is worth two any day.  And all
that"--indicating, by a sweep of his arm, the fields with their
crops-"is clear profit, not to mention the rest of my equipment.  I
had nothing but a hand plough when I came.  Before I'm through,
I'll be farming whole sections of land, ploughing with tractors, an
acre every two minutes."

"No doubt," Nicoll said.  "Dukes and lords.  How about the margin?"

"The profit?  Before I'm through, I'll build a house over there fit
to stand in any city."

Nicoll repeated, "No doubt!" not hesitatingly this time, but
decisively.  "Not a doubt on earth! . . .  But I didn't mean it
that way.  Do you find time to live?  Besides, I've half a score of
kids."

"I've three," Abe said with a laugh.  "There hasn't been time for
more.  What we want.  A population.  What do I want more than
anything else?  I'll tell you.  Neighbours."

Nicoll laughed; and, with an intonation almost of archness which
sat strangely on a man of his age, he added, "To buy out?"

Abe frowned but took no offence.  "Tell you.  I'll buy out every
no-account fellow who settles next to me.  Rather than let his
claim revert to weeds which would be a menace to me.  But if a man
shows he can make a success, I'll help him all I can.  Why, man,"
he burst out vigorously, "I'll tell you why I need neighbours.
Because I need roads; because I need cross-ditches and other
improvements.  And as the kids grow up, I'll need a school.  That's
why I need neighbours.  There's been a Yankee snooping around.  I
don't like him.  A runt of a fellow, with an eye and a nose like a
terrier dog.  I've encouraged him.  Why?  Because he might know the
business end of a rake from the handle.  And Germans have been
looking the district over, from the reserve down south.  Even a
Ukrainian came last fall; had been working on the ditching machine.
I'd like to have men of my own colour about.  But rather than stay
alone, let niggers and Chinamen come."

"Good farmers," Nicoll said pensively, "those Germans and
Ukrainians.  And Chinamen, too. . . .  I believe I'm going to do
it.  I'm not quite ready.  But that corner suits me to the ground
if it can be farmed."

"I've been steering others away from the place."

"I believe I will," Nicoll said, and went to his buggy as though to
start at once for the land-titles office.

But in the spring of 1904 there was no sign yet of any Nicoll in
the district.

Abe had suddenly seen himself forced to buy a third quarter of
land, unless, indeed, he had been willing to let it go to someone
else.  It was the north-west quarter, and, together with other
parcels in other districts, it had been put up for public sale.
Abe had been taken by surprise; and though the price was low, he
had had to borrow at the bank.  Not that it mattered; but his
increased acreage demanded an ever-rising investment in implements;
and Ruth was plainly getting impatient about the house.  What could
he do?  He could not afford to let the land go to any one else.
If, for a few more years, they had to put up with a house less
roomy and less well built than their hired man's, it could not be
helped.  He had bidden the land in, paying seven hundred and fifty
dollars for it.

Yet he was worried and restless.  He was in debt.  He worked
frantically; he even pulled weeds again by hand, a thing he had not
done for a year or two; and he did it alone now; for Ruth no longer
kept him company.  The crop did not promise so well that year; the
flood had been slow in running out; and after that there was a
drought; in patches the wheat was turning yellow before it had
headed out.  It was, of course, impossible to rogue three hundred
acres of grain; he did what he could.  Yet there were odd little
twinges of a lack of confidence.  With his thirst for conquest he
lived dangerously, always assuming new debts before the old ones
were paid off; he was discounting the future; he was selling
himself into slavery.  Such curious, harrying thoughts could be
shaken off only by desperate spurts of work.  Never was the day's
task finished before eleven at night; he never sat about with Ruth
any longer.  The hired man had his more or less defined hours; Abe
had not.  Conscience-stricken over his neglect of Ruth, he tried to
compensate for it by an occasional ostentation of solicitude.
There were four children now: two boys and two girls, the name of
the youngest being Frances.  He urged Ruth to get help for the
house.  Ruth asked scornfully, "Where should I put a girl?  In the
hay-loft?"  Yes, yes, the house was too small.

All this was worrying Abe when, one evening, Nicoll drove into the
margin of the field where Abe was roguing.  Sitting in his old,
wobbly buggy, he asked whether he could spend the night in the
barn.

"Sure," Abe said.  "Had your supper?"

"Had a bite in town.  Well, I am coming at last."

"To stay?"

"Not yet.  We'll move next spring.  But I've filed on the place."

"A wonder nobody got ahead of you."

"That risk I had to take.  But I'm coming; provided I can count on
getting occasional work on your place for a year or two."

Abe laughed.  "You're a godsend.  Want to start tonight?"

"Not this summer.  I've only a few weeks to spare before harvest.
I need that for building.  But if you say I can make enough to pay
my store bill next summer, I'll go to town tomorrow and buy the
lumber I need.  I must have the house.  There's been another kid
during the year."

"Same here.  A girl.  Number four."  Nicoll's coming would solve
Abe's most pressing problem: that of help for the summer-fallowing
while he and Bill did the breaking on the new quarter.  An
extensive fallow had become imperative unless he was willing to
look on while his acres were being fouled with weeds.  "I've bought
a new quarter," he added.

By way of answer, Nicoll looked at Abe with his queer, half-ironic
smile.  "I'm honestly tired," he said.

"I haven't the time to feel tired," Abe replied.

Thus the spring of 1905 saw Abe's desire for a neighbour fulfilled.
North of the bridge across the ditch a house had been built, with a
commodious, roofed-over porch.  Behind it, a small stable with a
granary as a lean-to on one side, and a henhouse on the other.  A
strip of ploughing, for the wind-break, surrounded the two acre-
yard.  West of it, twenty acres of new breaking extended to the
north.

Blessings, like disasters, have a habit of coming in pairs.  Two
miles east of what was henceforth to be known as Nicoll's Corner, a
log-shack went up, south of the ditch.  For a long while neither
Abe nor Nicoll knew who was building in this furtive way.  Whoever
it was did his hauling and fitting at night, after dark.  For hours
there was a continual going and coming about the place by lantern
light.  Nicoll at last rode over on horseback.  He reported to Abe
that the walls of a house twenty by eighteen feet were going up
there.  Not a soul had been visible about the place.

The next time Abe was at Somerville he dropped in at the land-
titles office and inquired.  The man had given his name as Shilloe;
he was a Ukrainian who had little English.  When filing his claim
he had produced naturalization papers.  He lived at a town called
The Coulee, eight miles south-west of Somerville, where he was
employed as a section man by the Great Prairie Railroad.

Abe felt encouraged.  For five years he had been alone; now he was
going to have two neighbours at once.  They would help to bring in
other settlers.  He had also noticed that the ditch along the
Somerville Line was being deepened and widened; it had been taken
over by the provincial government.  But when he mentioned at Morley
that this was evidently being done to attract settlers, he was
laughed at.  It was done, he was told, to attract votes to a
certain party.

As for Nicoll, he and Abe became more than neighbours that summer;
they became friends.  Considering their almost antipodal outlook on
life, this was a remarkable fact. . . .

Abe was breaking the newly acquired quarter section; and,
belatedly, he was fallowing the south-west quarter.  This ploughing
Nicoll did while Bill Crane helped Abe with his breaking.
Sometimes it happened that Abe and Nicoll met at the line dividing
the two quarters where Abe had taken down his fence and replaced it
by a shallow ditch.

Often, when they met, Nicoll jumped across to join Abe while the
horses rested; and they talked; sometimes, as is often the case
with farmers, on curious and recondite subjects.

Thus Wilson, the postmaster at Morley, having suddenly died,
leaving his daughter Susie in charge, Nicoll said with seeming
irrelevancy and in that light tone with which we touch on things
that disquiet us, "Strange thing, death, isn't it?"

"I don't know," Abe replied.  He had a definite aim in life: to be
the most successful farmer of a district yet to be created; he was
a materialist and felt uncomfortable when facing fundamentals.

"I wish we could know!"

Abe turned and picked up the lines of his team.  "Best not to
inquire, I guess," he said, and clicked his tongue.

When they met again, Nicoll pursued the topic.  "I read an article
recently," he said.  "The doctor gave it to me."  He meant Dr.
Vanbruik, not Dr. Schreiber, the practising physician at Morley.
"It said a life after death was impossible unless we had existed
from all eternity."

Abe's eyes swept over the landscape beyond his fences.  He did not
often allow it to do so.  Rarely, during the first years of his
life on the prairie, had he given the landscape any thought.  It
had offered a "clear proposition," unimpeded by bluffs of trees or
irregularities in the conformation of the ground; the trees he
wanted he had planted where he wanted them.  But when Nicoll spoke
as he had done, Abe felt something uncanny in that landscape.
Nicoll's words impressed him as though they were the utterance of
that very landscape itself; as though Nicoll were the true son of
the prairie, and he, Abe, a mere interloper.  Incomprehensibly he
was drawn to this man even while resenting the fact that his,
Abe's, brother-in-law should loan him things to read.  Abe read
nothing but farm papers; and in them only what might enable him to
farm more land more efficiently than any one else.

Again he picked up his lines.  But, still standing in his place, he
shrugged his shoulders.  "What of it?  Suppose we come from nothing
and go to nothing?  While I'm here, what difference does it make?"

Nicoll gave him a troubled glance.

"Get up, there!" Abe shouted, shaking the lines over the horses'
backs; and as they bent into their collars, he caught up with the
plough by running a few steps before he lifted himself to its seat.

Here and there, in the long strip of pasture, cows were grazing in
groups; others were lying down and chewing the cud.  To the east,
two miles away as the crow flies, a slight indentation of the sky-
line marked the spot where Nicoll's farmstead lay.  Shilloe's
buildings were quite invisible.  Abe's own barn was so far the only
landmark to be seen from Morley.

Conquest of that landscape depended on ways and means of speeding
up the work.  Abe owned three quarter sections now.  No doubt the
man who held the remaining quarter of the section would turn up one
day prepared to sell.  Abe would have a square mile then; how could
he farm it?  Hired men?  Bill Crane needed too much supervising
right now; when he milked, he did not milk dry; when he fed, he
seemed to grudge the hay and yet wasted more than he saved.  Why in
the world, he had recently asked, did Abe not turn the horses out
at night?  Even the horses liked it better.  "They can't pick up
enough green feed to keep in trim for the work and sleep besides,"
Abe had answered.  What was the solution?  There was only one:
power-farming as it was called: machinery would do the work of many
horses and many men.  But Abe liked the response of living flesh
and bone to the spoken word and hated the unintelligent repetition
of ununderstood activities which machines demanded.  Yet sooner or
later he must come to that; he would have to run the farm like a
factory; that was the modern trend. . . .

At noon, when the men went to the yard for dinner, two little boys,
four and three years old, crossed from the house to the open door
of the barn, plying their little legs as fast as they could and
holding each other by their hands.  Three teams, sixteen horses in
all--for Bill and Nicoll worked with six horses each, while Abe
drove his "crack" team, four full-blooded Percherons--crowded
around the water trough north of the barn.  Abe left them and
entered behind the children.

The two little boys were in the first stall opposite the door,
south of the driveway, a stall never used except to drop hay into
from above.  Abe began to take oats to the various stalls.

But as boys will do, Charlie and Jim ran to the door every now and
then, to scamper back to the protection of the stall, crowing.

They were on such a run when the first horses entered: a cunning
mare with colt at foot.  "Watch out!" Abe shouted.

The children jumped into safety; and the mare ran successively into
several stalls to stick her nose into the feed-boxes.  This was a
trick of hers to steal a mouthful of oats here or there while the
other horses filed in; but every time Abe gave a lusty shout; and,
tossing her head and slipping on the planking, she backed out
again.  The children laughed at her antics.

Abe was still carrying oats into the various stalls, greeted
wherever he went by impatient whinnyings and the thuds of shifting
feet, when Bill and Nicoll entered and distributed the hay.  The
feeding done, Bill climbed by the ladder into the loft to throw
down enough hay for the evening's feeding.  This was a special
delight for the boys, who allowed themselves to be buried as each
forkful came down.

"Bill!" Abe called when there was enough hay.

"Yah?"

"Look into the bin and see how much oats is left."

The answer came shortly:  "Not much.  A bushel or so."

"We better fill up to-night before we quit," Nicoll said.

That was it!  If all helpers were like Nicoll, it would not be bad.
Bill would never have suggested working overtime to fill up a feed
bin that was running low.  The feed was there, in the granary. . . .

Abe picked up Jim, the smaller one of the boys, and put him on his
shoulder; Charlie reached for his hand.  And, with a nod to the
other men, he strode off to the house, frowning.

He always frowned when he went to the house while Nicoll was there.
He resented it that Ruth had suggested Nicoll might take his dinner
at Bill's.  At first Abe had flatly refused to agree to such an
arrangement; but Ruth had made their meals so uncomfortable that he
had broached the matter to Nicoll who had at once consented.  "I
quite understand.  It's all right."

What was the matter with Ruth?  Much was the matter.

Immediately after dinner Abe rose from table and returned to the
yard where Nicoll joined him.  Nicoll never got tired of admiring
that barn of Abe's; but he did so with his peculiar smile which
seemed on the point of turning from admiration into irony.

"I've often wondered," he said, making futile attempts at using a
straw by way of a toothpick, "whether this sort of thing pays."

"What sort of thing?"

"Buying more and more land.  Working with hired help."

"Does it pay to farm?  Seems to me that is the question."

"I don't think it is.  While you do your own work, farming is bound
to pay.  It has paid since the world began.  You make better wages
for your labour than anywhere else and remain your own master."

"I'm hanged," Abe said, "if I'll work for a dollar a day.  That's
all I pay you.  There must be some profit over."

"You pay more than the wages.  You need two ploughs instead of one;
or three or four.  You feed two or three teams instead of one.  You
pay more in taxes.  And--Oh, well, it's all right when you hire a
neighbour with time to spare.  But when it comes to what you call a
hired man!  He won't work so hard; he won't work so well.  There's
more wear and tear on your implements, and on your horses.  Right
now, I believe, the greater your acreage, the less your yield per
acre."

This argument told; for already, within five years, Abe had to
contend against a decreasing yield.  Yet he defended himself.  "The
soil gets poorer.  You'll be up against the same thing."

"Perhaps."  Nicoll shrugged his shoulders and pushed out his lips.
"I don't say.  But the moment I gave up moving from place to place,
my yield increased. . . .  And it gets harder to find help."

"Machines," Abe said, struck by the coincidence of Nicoll's
arguments with those of his brother-in-law.

"That's so," Nicoll said pensively.  They were squatting in the
narrow strip of shade along the east wall of the barn.  "When you
hitch an engine to your plough, you know it won't slack.  But the
thing's got to be built.  You get your hired man one degree
removed.  He's going to get the better of you.  And then . . . I've
been watching these threshing outfits.  Do a lot of work.  But . . .
just for the fun of it, I threshed a strawstack over last year,
in winter time, with the fanning mill."

"And what did you find?  I've often wondered."

"I fanned a hundred and three bushels of wheat out of that stack."

"That a fact?  I'll be hanged!"

And with that Abe rose, more disquieted than ever. . . .

In the fall of the year Shilloe moved out to his claim; but not
before section crews were dismissed for the winter.  He proved to
be a pleasant, round-faced, clean-shaven man of thirty-odd, good-
looking in his way, though unmistakably Slavic.  As for his wife,
neither Abe nor Nicoll ever saw her, and whenever either of them
passed the place, a flock of children scampered for house or stable
to hide.



FOUR

Husband and Wife


Abe had been married for nearly six years; and in rapid succession
four children had arrived.  Then, there was a cessation of births.

Just what had happened between Abe and Ruth?  Neither of them knew;
they had simply drifted.  There had been a time when both had
foreseen the coming estrangement and dreaded its approach.  Both
had tried to forestall it.  Abe had asked Ruth to accompany him on
necessary drives: calls here and there, rounds of inspection when
planning operations for the following season.  Ruth had again
sought his company in the long summer evenings.  Gradually such
attempts had been abandoned till, in occasional retrospection, both
were often struck by the fact that a day, a week, a month had gone
by without their having spoken more than such few words as were
demanded by the routine of life.

Physical attraction had died in satiety, renewing itself in ever-
lengthening intervals; on Abe's part because he immersed himself
more and more in his work: he came home exhausted and overtired; on
Ruth's part because, unperceived, a revolt flamed in her against
she hardly knew what: the rural life, the isolation, the deadly
routine of daily tasks.  She had become used to exhausting her
emotional powers on the children.  These children had been born as
the natural fruit of marriage, not anticipated with any great
fervour of expectancy; yet they had come to absorb her life; for
Abe, engrossed in other things, had left them to her.  When,
occasionally, she had told him of their progress in growth or
development, he had listened absently, had treated her enthusiasm
with an ironic coolness which made her close up in her shell.  In
his presence she had ceased to let herself go in her intercourse
with them.  When she was playing with them, and he entered, a mask
fell over her face.  Gradually, she ceased to play with them.

A peculiar development was the consequence.  The children, always
thrown with her, began to take her for granted; Abe was the
extraordinary, romantic element in their lives; mostly he was away,
driving or working in the fields; he did not encourage their
familiarity; he tolerated them as an adjunct to his life; but he
was also the dispenser of such rare glories as a ride on horseback,
in buggy or wagon.  When they begged for such favours and he
briefly declined to comply with their wishes, they accepted his
verdict as that of a higher power; but they soon learned that their
mother's "no" need not be accepted.

Both Ruth and Abe were aware of these things.  Ruth resented them;
Abe, noticing that she did, took them with a humorous good nature
which had often an ironical point.  Suppose the children were noisy
and Ruth tried vainly to quiet them.  Abe waited till she had
worked herself into a state of nervous excitement, the worse for
his observant eye; then suddenly he would "settle them" by a word
of command.  His instant success had an effect as though he had
said, "I'll show you how to deal with them."  Ruth felt that it was
easy for him to retain his power over them, but that he made no
attempt of exerting it in her name or to her advantage.  Although
he corroborated her own demands, he did it in such a way as to
damage her authority rather than to confirm it.

On the rare occasions when Abe gave these things a definite
thought, he realized his own lack of consideration; but somehow he
seemed unable to remedy it.  His regret was always retrospective;
he could not foresee it.  His material struggle absorbed him to the
point where he had no energy left to ponder nice questions of
conduct and to lay down rules to govern his intercourse with wife
and children.  When, in a flash of insight, this became clear to
him, he postponed the difficulty.  The "kids" were still small; he
would take them in hand later; let him build up that farm first, an
empire ever growing in his plans.

There was another point of friction between him and Ruth: the
house.  Ruth did not forgive him the fact that the hired man of
whom she disapproved had a better place to live in than herself.
When Abe said that this was provisional, that one day he would
build her a house which was to be the envy of everybody, she could
not summon any enthusiasm; she wanted comfort, not splendour;
convenience, not luxury.  That was the reason, too, why she adopted
an attitude hostile to the Nicolls; she envied them their house:
but the Nicolls were mere peasants; she could not rid herself of
the conceit of the city-born.

She was city-born!  In this she was handicapped.

Abe had never expected Ruth to do any farm work, not even to carry
water or fuel into the house.  Winter or summer, he rose at four in
the morning and started the fires.  He milked the cows and fed the
horses before he called her.  But that call in the morning!  In the
first year of their marriage Abe had entered the bedroom and sat
down on the edge of her bed, awakening her with a caress.  Now he
knocked at her door.

She was aware that he had begun to look critically at her.  She had
caught herself wishing that she could make herself invisible; she
was getting stout.  Not that Abe said a word about it; but she knew
he disliked stout women.  Abe was heavy himself; he weighed two
hundred and fifty pounds; but, being so tall, he did not look it.
Ruth had been slender at the time of their marriage; as she began
to put on weight, she had become shapeless as she called it.  She
suffered from it herself but resented Abe's disapproval.  Perhaps
he never meant to convey such a disapproval.  It was true that the
bed which they had so far shared was becoming uncomfortable; but
when Abe, in the fourth year, jestingly referred to the fact, his
very jest offended her, the more so since, ostentatiously, he spoke
only of his own increase in girth.  "By golly!" he said.  "Work
agrees with me.  It's about time we bought another bedstead so I
can turn around without bumping you."  A week later he brought that
new bedstead home; and henceforth they slept apart.  Ruth cried.

Nor was she unaware of her own shortcomings; she was getting less
and less careful with regard to the common amenities of life.  At
first, she had omitted the white tablecloth only when Abe was
absent from a meal.  Why go to unnecessary trouble?  It was hard
enough to keep a house tidy which, with four children in it, was
much too small.  There was a kitchen cabinet; she had a good
dinner-set; but, when pieces were broken, she replaced them with
heavy white crockery, saving her better dishes for social occasions
which never came.  When Abe saw these substitutes for the first
time, he lifted a cup in his hand and weighed it; but he never said
a word.  Next, to save steps, she took to washing the dishes in the
dining and living room, leaving them on the table for the next
meal.  Then she left the white table-cloth out altogether,
preferring oilcloth.  The room took on a dingy appearance.

In her dress, too, she became careless.  Her house-frocks were
ready-made, "out-size" garments bought from a catalogue.  Feeling
"driven," she ceased changing her aprons at meal-time.

Abe noticed all this.  The more lordly his own domain grew to be,
the less in keeping was his house.  For weeks he never said a word,
till his distaste reached an explosive pressure.  He knew that it
was dangerous to let a grievance rest till it has become impossible
to discuss it in a pleasant way.  But time and energy were lacking;
he closed his eyes while he could.  When calling on his sister at
Morley, he scanned everything and compared the way in which Mary,
with the help of a servant, ran her house.  Mary rarely mentioned
her husband; the doctor rarely mentioned his wife; but when they
did so, they spoke of each other with a great considerateness; not
exactly tenderly, but with an unvarying mutual respect which showed
that they were at one on every question of importance.  The great
secret in the doctor's life, the reason why he had given up his
flourishing practice, lay between them as something jealously
guarded from others' eyes.  Abe, presuming on his twinship, had one
day half asked Mary about it; she had at once withdrawn.  Abe
wondered whether Ruth would be as reticent, as loyal as Mary.  He
himself never even hinted to Mary of his criticism of Ruth.

Every now and then he tried to get Ruth to call on his sister.
Mary had been at the farm; the doctor kept pony and buggy for her.
But between the two women yawned an abyss.  Neither could utter a
word which found the other's approval.  Abe had hoped that Ruth
would enter into neighbourly relations with Mrs. Nicoll, a huge,
talkative, and pathetic woman who made him laugh.  But Ruth was
consciously isolating herself, making that a point of pride which
had been a grievance.  Abe mentioned it to her as a duty that she
must call on the new-comer.  "That woman and I have nothing in
common," she said.  And this led to a "scene" between husband and
wife.

"Listen here," Abe said.  "You blame me for your isolation--"

"Who says I do?"

"Nobody needs to tell me.  I feel it.  You make me feel it."

"How, if you please?"

Abe stood helpless, uncomfortably aware that Charlie's eyes were on
him from a corner of the dusky room.  He paced up and down on the
far side of the dining-table, Ruth standing in the door of the
kitchen.  Things pent up in his breast cried to be let out.  He
knew that this was the moment to shut them away in the depth of
his heart; but he was consumed by the desire to revel in his
misfortune.  He also knew that, if he went over to Ruth and kissed
her or patted her cheek, making her feel that she was something to
him, he might easily win her co-operation in the endeavour to
remove what was keeping them apart.  He could not do so.  "Oh!" he
exclaimed, shrugging his powerful shoulders and raising his hands,
"by a thousand little things, insignificant in themselves, that I
can't lay my hand on.  You know."

"Perhaps I do," she said, a white line around her lips.  "But how
about you?  Don't you show me every hour, every minute we spend
together that you disapprove of me, of all I am?"

Abe veered to face her, stung to the quick.  What if she was right?
He must conciliate her, or an abyss would open and swallow them.
"Listen here," he said, shaken, and his voice betrayed him.

She sank into a chair by the door, covering her face with an apron.
"Listen here," he repeated, steadied.  "I have my work.  It takes
every ounce of my strength; it takes every thought I am capable
of."

She looked up, her eyes dry and red.  "What is it all for?"

He looked puzzled.  "What is what all for?"

"That work.  _I_ don't know.  To me it seems senseless, useless, a
mere waste.  Work, work, work!  What for?"

He was thunderstruck.  SHE disapproved of HIM, of all he was.  But
his voice was even.  "Don't you know?"

"I don't.  I had my misgivings.  Farming!  There are farms all over
the country, down east.  But I never dreamt of anything like this.
It's like being in prison, cast off by the world.  Don't hold Mary
up to me.  She despises me and thinks you a sort of half-god or
hero.  She looks at this shack and wonders how I can exist in it.
She is right.  I wonder myself.  What can _I_ do about it?  This
isn't a country fit to live in."

"Exactly," Abe said with rising anger.  "I am making it into a
country fit to live in.  That is my task.  The task of a pioneer.
Can't you see that I need time, time, time?  In six years I've
built a farm which produces wealth.  Give me another six years, and
I'll double it.  Then I'll build you a house such as you've never
dreamt of calling your own."

"I know,  I know. . . ."

"If you know, what's the fuss about?  You said you didn't know what
the work was for.  That's it.  To build up a place any man can be
proud of, a place to leave to my children for them to be proud of."

Ruth looked up.  "Where do I come in?"

"Aren't you going to profit by my labours?"

"Profit!  You probably pride yourself on being a good provider.
You are.  I've all I want except what I need: a purpose in life."

"Don't you have the children?"

She burst into tears.

Abe drew a chair to the table and sat down by her side.  Thence he
caught sight of the boy.  "Where is Jim?" he asked.

"I don't know, daddy."

"Go.  Run along.  Find Jim and play with him."

Obediently the child slipped from his chair and left the room,
passing through the door into the dusk.

"Listen here," Abe said for the third time.  "I am willing to do
anything in my power.  Do you want to read?  Buy books or
magazines?  Whatever you wish.  Why don't you spend money on
clothes, on pretty things such as girls and young women want?"

"What for?  For whom should I doll myself up?  I am ugly.  What's
the use?  I am getting stout."

"I'll tell you," Abe went on.  "Next time I go to Somerville, I'll
open an account for you at the new bank.  I'll deposit a couple of
hundred.  I'll give you that much or more every year.  To do with
as you please.  What you need, for yourself or the children, I'll
pay for.  This is to be yours.  I don't want you to feel that you
have to give an account of what it's spent on.  I won't ask.  I
promise you that.  Use it in any way you please.  I know it's hard,
living that way, all by yourself.  It will get better.  The
children will be company soon.  That right?"

Ruth did not answer; but she was drying her tears with her apron.

Abe went to the door.  "Charlie, Jim!" he called.  "Bedtime."

And the children, who were only too well aware that something was
or had been wrong, came in at once, casting furtive glances at
their parents.  They went straight to the bedroom.

Abe returned to the barn where Bill Crane was milking.

For a while things remained normal between man and wife.  No more
than normal; they kept swinging about the neutral point, with only
one change, namely that both made an endeavour to smooth matters
over by a mutual show of tolerance and consideration.

But the essential difficulty was not removed.  Abe was uncomfortably
aware of the fact that, at the decisive moment, he had evaded the
issue.  But he had his hands full.  The weed problem was becoming
acute.  As soon as the plough had done its work, the cultivator had
to be started, followed by the drag; or the weeds would choke the
wheat next year.

Then came the harvest.  It was a good year, but the work was not
easy.  The rains had been ample; the straw was heavy; and a new
weed had made its appearance: wild buckwheat, commonly called bind-
weed.  Its long, tough vines wound themselves about wheels and
sickles of the binder till the horses could no longer pull the
machine.  Ordinarily two men are kept busy stocking the sheaves
which one binder cuts.  This year, what with the delays met by the
machine, that proportion was reversed: one good man could have kept
up with two binders.  But since Abe had fallowed a quarter section,
he could not afford to buy new implements.  He fretted when, a
dozen times a day, he saw Bill and Nicoll going idle while he stood
between horses and sickles and furiously cut and slashed at the
choking weeds.  At last, in order to keep two men busy where there
was work only for one, he made them haul the sheaves from the west
of the field to the east, to clear the stubble for ploughing.  Even
so, he knew he would be crowded for time.

Summer and fall went by.  Night after night Abe came home after
dark--hot, dusty, exhausted.  There was no time, no energy left to
devote to his household; and the fact that he knew he was
neglecting a thing of fundamental importance made him cross and
monosyllabic.  He began to have glimpses of the truth that his
dream of economic success involved another dream: that of a family
life on the great estate which he was building up.  At the early
age of thirty-six he had moments of an almost poignant realization
of "the futility of it all."

When he threshed--rather late, for no thresherman cared to come
into this district till the work in more settled areas was done--he
was disappointed; in spite of heavy sheaves the crop averaged only
nineteen bushels to the acre, with an acreage of only a quarter
section.  His income from this source was below two thousand five
hundred dollars.

Yet he deposited two hundred dollars in Ruth's bank; and eight
hundred he set aside for building.  By the time he had paid his
debt to the implement dealer and his taxes, reducing his
indebtedness at the bank by half, he had nothing left.  He told
Ruth of his deposit to her credit and the sum set aside for
enlarging the house; but he withheld the fact that he had been
unable to balance his accounts.  He expected her to express
satisfaction at the growth of her account--or was it growing?  But
she received the announcement with a mere nod and, on the doubtful
point, volunteered no information.

Winter came.  It had been Abe's intention to use coal for fuel;
but, being determined not to touch that eight hundred dollars, he
made up his mind to haul wood once more.  To do so, he had to go a
distance of forty miles, for timber of a size sufficient to make
the trip worth while could no longer be found at any point nearer
than that.  He had to stay out overnight.  He left Bill at home to
look after feeding and milking; for he did not trust him with any
but routine work.

Altogether, this was the most anxious winter he had spent on the
farm.  He resented it that he, a man farming three quarter
sections, should have to make these long, tiring drives to save a
hundred and fifty dollars.  He never spent money unreasonably; yet
he had to effect petty economies.  He MUST have more land!  He MUST
get to a point where he farmed on a scale which would double his
net income from a decreasing margin of profit.  Nicoll's way was
not his.  He could not be satisfied with the fact that, if he
killed a pig and a calf in the fall, there was meat in the house.
To him, farming was an industry, not an occupation.

Spring came.  He was planning to add two rooms to the house.  Yet,
since it was a makeshift--for never would he be satisfied with a
patchwork house--he was unwilling to go to the expense involved.
Still, Ruth must be considered.

One day, just before it was time to overhaul the implements needed
for the spring work, he stopped in town and called on his sister.
The doctor was at the store, to which a fully equipped dispensary
and drug department had just been added, an extension of the
business urgently needed since the necessity of getting prescriptions
filled still diverted a good deal of trade to Somerville.

As Abe entered, Mary mentioned the fact of her husband's absence.

"That's all right.  It was you I wanted to see."

"Sit down, Abe."

"How does it look to you, Mary?  Am I making progress?"

Mary laughed.  "You are the talk of the neighbourhood.  Never was
there a farmer like you, they say."

Abe felt comforted and encouraged.  "Sometimes I am getting
despondent.  I am everlastingly short of money."

"Is not that very natural?  You are always buying land and
equipment."

"Not always. . . .  I suppose it is foolish to worry."

"Look at what you have done.  You have three quarter sections,
clear, paid for.  And such a barn."

"I have the money to add two bedrooms to the house.  It does seem
necessary, does it not?"

"Well--"

"There isn't room for Ruth to turn around in."

"Does she complain?"

"No, no . . . I believe she resents the fact that Bill's wife has a
better place to live in than she.  It's only temporary, of course.
The fact is, I hate to spend money on a makeshift which I'll tear
down in a year or two.  I need an additional seeder and binder and
God knows what."

Mary pondered.  "I've always feared it.  She doesn't cooperate."

"I don't say that," Abe forestalled her hurriedly.

"I know.  I see what I see.  Suppose I make another attempt?"  She
looked at Abe out of friendly eyes, from behind heavy-rimmed
glasses.

Abe mused dejectedly.  Then he rose.  "Perhaps--"

"I'll go to-morrow."

"Day after.  I'll have to go to Somerville.  I've got to have that
additional seeder before the work starts." . . .

On the last of March--there was still snow on the ground--Mary, in
fur coat and close-fitting hat, alighted in the yard where Bill was
sawing wood.  He came to take horse and cutter.  The three older
children were playing about the granary.  Frances, no doubt, was
asleep.

When Ruth opened to the knock, her lips tightened.  She stepped
back, inviting her sister-in-law by a gesture to enter; her very
movement declined the other woman's kiss.

"Bill tells me Abe went away," Mary said.

"I believe he did.  He isn't in."

With a glance Mary had swept the interior of the room.  Plates were
inverted on the oilcloth of the table; cups in their saucers.  It
WAS a small room for the family of four children.  Ruth seemed
enormous in girth.  Mary removed her glasses to wipe them.  It was
hard to begin.  She had planned to admire things to find the way to
Ruth's heart.  But there was nothing to admire.  She resolved upon
perfect frankness.

"Ruth, I know it is hard.  The fact is, Abe is living through a
crisis."

Ruth stiffened.  "He has told you, has he?"

"You may think I have no right to interfere."

"I do.  Why does he not speak for himself?  Why send you?"

"It isn't as simple as all that.  He doesn't send me.  He came to
speak of his difficulties."

"He went to discuss his wife with his sister."

"Not at all.  He never mentioned you.  I'm afraid you don't quite
understand Abe.  He has a dream which is all-in-all to him.  He is
in financial troubles.  As I said, he is living through a crisis."

"He has been living through one crisis after another."

"It's the pioneer's lot.  The pioneer used to live through periods
of actual starvation.  To-day, with settled districts all around,
distress takes the form of financial stringency.  It was bound to
come.  Perhaps you don't give him full credit for what he has
achieved."

"Who says I don't?  But why buy more and more machinery and land?"

"It's the way of the west."

"But that isn't the point."

"What is, Ruth?"

"I can't discuss it."

Mary shrugged her shoulders.  "Frances asleep?" she asked at last.

Ruth rose and opened the door to the bedroom.  That room, no larger
than the dining-room, held four beds and a wardrobe.  On one of the
beds the little girl was lying, her head surrounded by yellow
curls, damp with sleep.  She was two years old.

Mary entered, bent down, and kissed the child without waking her.
Strongly moved, she turned back to the dining-room.  She had no
children of her own, much as she longed for them; and her emotion
made her forget that Ruth had shown her the child only in order to
let her see the crowded condition of the house.

"I am more than sorry, Ruth," she said as the door was closed.

Ruth went with her into the yard, wrapping her apron about her bare
arms.  She called the other children; she could afford to be
generous; her victory over her sister-in-law was but too apparent.

"This is your Aunt Mary," she said as in formal introduction.

The boys held out their hands; but Marion hid behind the skirts of
her mother.

Mary bent down, a pained look in her eyes.  "I am not only your
aunt, I am your godmother too."

But the child remained shy, and escaped.  Bill came with horse and
cutter.

"I am more than sorry, Ruth," Mary repeated, holding out her hand,
which Ruth touched with her finger-tips, a triumphant smile on her
lips. . . .

Just as Mary who had been crying, turned the corner into Main
Street on her way home, she caught sight of Abe coming from the
east and stopped to wait for him.

Abe, in the cutter drawn by his bronchos, sat erect and stern.  As
he saw her, he drew up his eyebrows in a questioning way.

Mary shook her head.  "I am afraid, Abe, Ruth is right."

Abe nodded.  "So long then."  And he proceeded on his way.

It did not matter!  Was Mary against him too?

Arrived at home, he went straight to the house.  What he had to say
had only been made harder by that ill-judged mission of Mary's.

The children were sitting at table, having their supper.  That
discomposed him; he must wait.  He entered the bedroom and changed
into overalls.  Then he went to the barn to keep himself busy.

When he returned, Ruth was waiting for him.  He spoke at once.

"Look here, Ruth.  I want you to help me.  I can't build this
spring."

"Was that the news your sister was to break to me?"

"It was not.  She didn't know.  Listen here.  I've got to have more
land.  That fellow Fairley who owns the northeast quarter saw me in
town.  I didn't know he lived there.  He wants to sell and had a
buyer offering a thousand dollars.  I couldn't afford to let the
land go into other hands.  It's vital for me to have it.  I offered
eleven hundred.  That's what he was waiting for.  I had to use the
eight hundred set aside for the new rooms.  You will consider that
a breach of faith.  I AM breaking faith with you.  But I'll add at
least one room to this shack in the fall; that's the best I can do.
I am not my own master."

Ruth laughed.  "Do you notice it at last?"

"Notice what?"

"That you are not your own master?"

Abe stared.  This extension of his meaning might be just or unjust
as you looked upon it.  "Can't be helped.  I've got to have the
land."

Again Ruth laughed.

"Ruth," Abe said stormily, "don't you see how I'm fixed?  It took
all I could do last fall to make both ends meet.  I had to use
cream cheques to pay off part of my loan at the bank.  Once I get
that quarter broken, things will ease up.  My hand was forced.  It
would be a waste of money anyway to enlarge this shack beyond
what's absolutely necessary.  In a year or two I'll build a real
house.  Surely I should be able to ask my wife to put up with
things for a while."

"If you asked her.  But you send your sister instead.  Besides,"
she added, rising and trembling with the audacity of what she was
going to say, "you could ask me if in other things you treated me
as your wife.  With strangers one keeps one's word."

"With strangers?"

"What else am I?  I am living alongside of you.  What do I know of
your dream as Mary calls it?  What do you know of me?"

Abe raised his hands and moved to leave the room.  "For goodness'
sake!" he said.  "Don't let's have another scene!  If you can't
understand, you can't understand.  I am doing my best."

When, that night, Abe had finished such chores as, in the division
of labour, fell to his share, he found the dining-room empty, which
had never happened before.  Ruth had gone to bed.



FIVE

The School


Shilloe proved an exceedingly shy but accommodating neighbour who,
once propitiated, would have gone to any length to help Nicoll or
Abe.  He had a large family, but nobody ever saw anything of the
children except their backs, when they were running away.  His wife
seemed to have the gift of making herself invisible.

In the fall of that year Abe went out of his way to secure an old
French-Canadian thresherman with his crew, his name being Victor
Lafontaine.  He lived at St. Cecile, a village along the
international highway to the city, sixteen miles north of
Somerville.  To get there, Abe went east over trackless prairie.
Twice the man was out; but, being determined, Abe made a third
trip.  Shilloe was always in the field when he passed, laboriously
breaking land with a hand-plough drawn by two pinto ponies much too
light for the work.  Abe had the queer feeling that eyes were
peering at him from behind corners or through the curtains veiling
the diminutive windows of the clay-plastered house.

But on the last of his trips he saw, on the prairie north of
Shilloe's claim, a man who, in outline, resembled his onetime
neighbour, Hall.  An old plough horse, a dirty blanket on his back,
was grazing near the ditch.  At sight of Abe the stranger made for
the trail; and Abe stopped his horses.  It was a bright, crisp
morning of the early fall.

The man who approached, medium-sized, pot-bellied, spindle-legged,
with a dirt-grey moustache dividing his face, was clad in a
multitude of successive ragged coats which increased the bulk of
his upper body and made him look even more disproportioned than he
was.

"You Spalding?" he asked when within speaking distance.

"Spalding's my name."

"I've filed on this yere homestead.  Filed on it yesterday.  Name's
Hartley.  You don't happen to have some secondhand lumber to sell?"

"No I haven't."

"Nor a horse or two?"

"I have some colts."

"No good," Hartley said.  "What I want is nags, gentle and aged.
And I want them cheap and on time."

"No," Abe said.  "I have nothing in that line."

"What's the name of the feller there at the corner?"

"Nicoll."

"How 'bout him?"

"I don't think so.  He keeps only four horses."

"Hm. . . ."

"Well," Abe said, none too favourably impressed with the stranger,
"if there is nothing else I can give you information on--"

The man eyed him in a curious way.  Then, "Don't think so.
However, seeing as I'm going to move in here, I guess I'll meet you
again."

Abe nodded and moved on.

During the next few weeks he often saw a one-horse team drawing a
little spring wagon along the road from Morley.  On top of a load
of old boards and joists, among boxes and packing crates, perched
that grotesque figure of a man who had spoken to him.

On these drives Abe found that there was, nearer the highway,
between his trail and the Somerville Line, at least one other
settlement, and a rather compact and considerable one.  He could
count a dozen farmsteads, while from the Somerville Line only two
or three could be seen.  He began to be interested in municipal
affairs; and the councillor representing Ward Six--the ward in
which Abe lived--a man called Davis, had his domicile in that
district which went by the name of Britannia.

On one occasion Abe turned farther north.  A cluster of grain
elevators came into view in line with Morley.  That was the town of
Arkwright, twelve miles west of St. Cecile where a railway branched
off from the main line, running via Arkwright and other towns to
Torquay, to describe a loop there and to return via Ferney, Morley,
and Somerville; from Morley one could go to the city by starting
either east or west.  Why was there no settlement south of the
Arkwright Line?  Some three miles north of Nicoll's Corner the
slope of the land began to change, towards a tributary of the river
which bounded the prairie in the east.  Large stretches of country,
there, consisted of an impenetrable swamp which could be crossed in
winter only.  Thus, by the mere chance of his having gone east for
a thresherman instead of south, Abe's horizon was suddenly widened.

He was beginning to worry about the slowness with which settlers
moved into the district, for his children were approaching school
age.  Already he had been amazed to hear of the frequent changes of
teachers at Morley.  These teachers were invariably young girls;
and he doubted their ability to handle a school.  That was why,
when one day he was taking his dinner at the hotel at St. Cecile,
he was much interested to find that a bearded old man who sat down
at his table proved to be a teacher who, for many years, had been a
schoolmaster in various districts near Arkwright.  His name was
Blaine.  Abe was so much interested that he gave the man his exact
location and asked him to call.

"I see you ride a bicycle," he said when the other man rose.  For
his trousers were held by steel clamps around his ankles.

"I do," said Mr. Blaine.  "But you can't cross from Arkwright
except in winter, when the bicycle is useless."

"Well," Abe added and rose to shake hands, "the snow may hold off."

Mr. Blaine was small and slender, with a head disproportionately
large for his body, and a sandy beard streaked with grey
disproportionately large for his head.  When he turned, one was
oddly reminded of a lion turning in a cage.  He wore a dark suit of
heavy cloth, his trousers hanging about his legs like curtains.

Abe heard more of him.  He was seventy years old and had come from
Ontario; he had been a high-school teacher and had married a pupil
of his.  For her he had built a small house at Arkwright where he
had been teaching at the time; but his married life had been short,
his young wife dying in childbirth and taking her baby with her
into the grave.  He had returned to rural life and now had the
distinction of being the teacher with the longest record in the
Canadian west.

One day Abe met the local school inspector at his sister's house
where he had had dinner; for Morley boasted only a fifth-rate
boarding house.  Abe heard high praise of Blaine's work, his only
trouble being that, with increasing age, he found it difficult to
secure a school.  Westerners hold experience and expertness in
small esteem; they prefer the young girl who will dance and gad
about.  "Too bad," the inspector said.  "There isn't a better man
to be found for rural work."

Abe made up his mind there and then that Mr. Blaine was to be the
teacher of his children.

But so far there was no school.  The district must have at least
five settlers before he could move in the matter.

As winter came, Hartley built a two-roomed shack on his claim, of
old, half-rotten lumber, some of it mere box-lumber, half an inch
thick.  He put no foundation under it, but propped the corners up
on railway ties placed at an angle.  There the structure perched
precariously through the winter, the wonder being that the February
winds did not blow it over.  In the spring of 1907 he covered the
outside with tar paper tacked to the walls with a network of lath.
He had brought a stove and put a flue-pipe through the roof.

Soon after, Nicoll came to Abe's one day, about seed-oats.  Abe and
Bill were at work, filling the loft of the barn with hay against
the spring work.  Nicoll at once climbed up, reached for a fork,
and helped for an hour or so.

"Say, Abe," he said after a while, "I'm going to have a new
neighbour."

Abe, who stood on top of the load, looked up.  "Who's that?"

"Fine, upstanding sort of man.  Name's Stanley.  He's got only one
arm; the other was caught by the belt of a threshing machine and
torn clean out.  They took him twenty miles to the hospital.  A
wonder he lived.  A big fellow, your build, though not so tall."

"Great news," Abe said.  "Where is he going to locate?"

"A mile north of my line.  East of the trail."

"Any children?"

"Six.  One boy, five girls.  The boy's thirteen."

"Nicoll," Abe said in sudden elation, "we'll get that school!"

"We surely shall."

Again the blessing did not come singly.  East of the new Stanley
homestead, where building operations began at once, another
Ukrainian settled down, a small, determined man with a reddish-
brown moustache on his Slavic face, his name Nawosad.  More, two
miles south of Nicoll's Corner somebody was building a sod-hut.
This proved to be a young Mennonite by name of Hilmer, a quiet,
well-built, almost handsome lad, so far unmarried.  His clothes
were black, down to his shirt.  He fenced a small corral for the
two oxen with which he started to break land.  He lived in complete
isolation, though, when spoken to, he answered with a ready
courtesy which sat quaintly on his broken English.

At once Nicoll's Corner became the social centre of the settlement.
Nicoll had drawn a shallow ditch along the south line of his yard,
bridged, in front of his gate, by a culvert.  North of the fence, a
wind-break was beginning to grow.  There, of an evening or a Sunday
afternoon, the settlers would assemble, sitting on the culvert,
their feet dangling in the ditch; and all affairs that concerned
the district were discussed, besides many questions concerning God
and the universe.  Only two men appeared rarely: Abe Spalding and
Jack Hilmer.

And there, in the summer of 1908, the school district was formed.

By that time it was known that Abe planned to buy the section north
of his holdings; rumour had it that he was getting wealthy.  He had
had a bumper crop last year and was building concrete pig-pens.
That Hudson's Bay section, then, must form the north-west corner of
the district; which placed the south line at the "first" ditch,
half-way between Nicoll's Corner and the Somerville Line.  Hilmer's
claim would be just within the district.  According to law they
could include twenty square miles.  That brought the east line to a
point just beyond Hartley's and Shilloe's claims.  It looked as
though all these settlers had picked their location with that very
thing in view.

What, next, was to be the name of the district?  Various more or
less far-fetched proposals came from Hartley, who never missed a
meeting; but whenever he mentioned some new impossibility it was
greeted by a silence which condemned it.

One evening, late in June, Stanley rose and addressed the others in
a brief, formal speech.  All except Abe were present: Shilloe and
Nawosad were sitting nearest the road, both resting elbows on their
knees and looking at the ground.  Hartley, a willow-switch which he
used as a whip in his hand, sat in the centre of the group.
Stanley had had the place next to him; and, nearest the gate,
Nicoll was squatting on his heels.  Hilmer was standing behind them
all, ready to eclipse himself.

It was a warm night, with no stars visible; and a fine haze had
overspread the sky: the only sort of night which is ever warm on
the prairie, where radiation is swift.  A slight breeze wafted the
scent of fresh-mown hay from the west: as usual, Abe had been the
first to start haying.  No doubt that was why he was absent; he was
always busy.

"Gentlemen," Stanley said, "why is the town of Morley called by
that name?  Where does the name Arkwright come from?  I could
easily multiply instances.  It is a time-honoured custom on these
prairies to attach the name of the first permanent settler to town,
station, or district."

"Hear, hear!" Nicoll said without moving.  "Just what I had in
mind.  There's only one name fitting for this school we are going
to build.  If there's a man among you who hasn't had help or advice
from that first permanent settler, he hasn't asked for it, that is
all."

"Well, now," Hartley began, "I don't see that we should be so
doggone obsequious as to bow down before wealth--"

"Gentlemen," Stanley exclaimed, raising his one arm to impose
silence, "are you ready for the question?  It has been moved by
myself and seconded by Mr. Nicoll that the district be called
Spalding School District.  I can't see much in the dark; so I'll
ask those in favour to stand."

All but Hartley and Hilmer rose; the latter was standing already.

"Contrary?"

Hilmer squatted down; and Hartley did not rise.

"Carried."

Nicoll, who helped Abe next day in haying, brought him the news.

Abe listened in silence; but he experienced a thrill.  That moment
his aspirations underwent an extension which embraced the whole
district.  He suddenly felt it to be inevitable that, in the long
run, he should enter municipal politics and look after the district
which bore his name.  There was the matter of roads; with
increasing traffic the trail to town had become almost impassable;
with deep ruts cut into it in spring, it held water till late in
summer and remained a mire for months on end; and was it not
intolerable that during the flood the district should be cut off
from the rest of the world?

Since that spring when he had been confronted with what he
considered the necessity of buying the fourth quarter of his
section, Abe had recovered his economic balance.  He might have
built a house this year.  But, having added the fourth room to the
old building, he had postponed more ambitious changes till he would
be in a position to "do things right."  Ruth's opposition had put
him on his mettle; to justify what he had done so far, he must
carry out his plans, which were ever extending in scope.  He would
have to acquire the Hudson's Bay section; nor would it do to wait
too long; land values were rising.  For that purchase he would have
to prepare in other ways: he must have at least one tractor of the
most powerful type, to speed up the work in the spring and the
fall; perhaps he would have to build another shack for a second
man.  In spite, then, of his undoubted prosperity, he was as much
preoccupied with things to be done as ever; his life lay in the
future; for the sake of that future he slaved from dawn till dark.
What he had achieved was little compared with what remained to be
done.

All the more did he feel flattered by the recognition which was
coming from the later settlers.  As matters proceeded and took
definite shape, he even felt a twinge of jealousy at the thought
that the moving spirit in these things was Nicoll, not he.

Yet that was natural.  Abe had already suggested that Nicoll be the
secretary-treasurer of the district.  It was generally taken for
granted that the school was to stand on the corner opposite
Nicoll's place, south of the ditch.  Nicoll would be the one most
available if teacher or inspector wished to communicate with the
school board.

Two weeks later the organization meeting took place.  If the school
was to be opened in the fall, there was need for hurry.

This meeting had been called by the school inspector for two
o'clock in the afternoon.  Every settler attended.  From the moment
when Abe appeared on the porch of Nicoll's house, where a table and
a few chairs had been placed, he had the curious feeling that
nothing really needed to be discussed: it had all been agreed upon
beforehand.  A loan of two thousand dollars was to be taken up,
secured by debentures; three trustees were to be elected; and
Stanley proposed that they be the first three settlers of the
district.  Even when Shilloe, in confusion, declined for his part
and suggested Hartley, it seemed as though this had been
prearranged.

The election over, the inspector proposed that the new board hold
its first meeting at once, in his presence, to elect chairman and
secretary.  Shilloe, Nawosad, Hilmer, and Stanley retired to the
culvert; the board meeting was adjourned five minutes later.  Abe
had been elected chairman for the year, Nicoll secretary-treasurer.
The inspector took his departure in a great hurry; all this was
mere routine to him; and Abe and others felt defrauded of that
formality and ceremony in the proceedings which they had felt
entitled to expect.

Somewhat grimly, as the inspector drove through the gate in his
buggy; Abe said, "Well, that's that."

A moment later, Stanley was shaking him by the hand, congratulating
him on his election.  "Nobody," he said, "expected anything else.
We know you'll do the right thing by the district."

In the background, on the porch of the house, Mrs. Nicoll appeared,
huge, smiling, overflowing her clothes, and surrounded by half a
dozen of her younger children.  Her head seemed lost in upper
shadows; and her smile poured a blessing on the finished
proceedings.  Abe nodded to her; Stanley lifted his wide straw hat;
Hartley stared; and the other three shifted uneasily on their feet.

Henceforth all school business proceeded automatically.  Plans
arrived, and one of them was recommended by the inspector.  The
board met and endorsed the inspector's choice.  Abe never spoke; he
sat in his chair, feeling oddly that they were tools through which
others worked their will.  The matter of the debenture issue was
attended to by the provincial government; and they were told that
they might proceed with construction, arranging for credit at one
of the Somerville banks.  Law and usage prescribed all proceedings.
Tenders were asked for.  A single bid was necessarily accepted.
Twice Abe and Nicoll had to go to Somerville to sign papers at the
municipal office.  Matters took their course.

At home, Abe broke the news one night at the supper table.  "Well,"
he said, assuming an air of importance which he did not feel,
"we're going to have a school at last.  No loafing next winter."

"Good," exclaimed Charlie, nearly eight years old; though he spoke
as if sitting in the council of grown-ups, he fidgeted with
excitement.

"Where's the school going to be?" Jim asked pertly.

"All settled," Abe replied with that assumption of irony with which
he invariably treated the children.  "Opposite Nicoll's Corner."

Ruth stared, not so much because she objected to the site as
because she resented Abe's way of communicating accomplished facts.
"That is over two miles to go.  How about the winter when the snow
is deep?"

Abe did not answer at once.  He resented the sharp tone in which
the objection was raised.  "It's the centre of the district," he
said at last.  "Somebody has to be on the outskirts.  Most of us
are.  Hartley and Shilloe are as far away.  Stanley and Nawosad a
mile and a half.  Hilmer nearly two."

"Hilmer has no family."

"That can be remedied by and by.  I can best afford to be far away.
The Hartley and Shilloe kids will have to walk, I suppose."

"And we, daddy?"  This from Marion who, in a coltish way, was
growing into a particularly pretty little girl.

"I'll get you a pony and buggy for fall and spring; and a box-
cutter for winter.  When it storms, you'll go in the bob-sleigh."

"Hurrah!" Jim crowed.

"Have you a teacher yet?" Charlie asked pensively.

"No.  But I've one in mind. . . ."

During the rest of the summer three carpenters worked on the school
site; and occasionally Hartley put in what he called a day's work.
This arrangement was made on Abe's suggestion; Hartley had hinted
that Nicoll was "making a fortune out of the thing"; for the
carpenters boarded at this place.

Meanwhile the summer's work was proceeded with; and late in August
harvest began.  Nicoll and his oldest boy Tom worked for Abe; and
so did Shilloe, Nawosad, and Hilmer; for Abe had two binders going
at last.

On one occasion, when Abe was resting his horses, Nicoll, having
finished his round, came over to chat for a moment.

"Some crop!" he said admiringly.

"Too many weeds," Abe replied.

But Nicoll laughed.  "If you go on like that, you'll be knighted
one day.  Sir Abe of Spalding Hall."

"Some Hall!"  And Abe waved his arm toward the patchwork house.

"That'll come."

With an emphasis which seemed uncalled for, Abe replied, "You bet
it'll come.  You bet your life!"  And he reached for the lines.
When he returned to the spot, he called Nicoll.

"About that school," he said.  "It's time to engage a teacher.
This is a meeting of the board.  There's a quorum present."

"A meeting must be duly called," Nicoll objected.

"Nonsense.  Unless you and I run that school, they're going to make
a mess of it."

Nicoll scratched his greying head.  "Thinking of any one, Abe?"

"Yes.  I've got him picked."

"Him?  Is it a man?"

"It is.  Old man Blaine, from up north, Arkwright way."

Nicoll stroked his beard.  "Tell you frankly, Abe, we'll have
trouble over that.  I'd rather have a girl myself for the little
tots."

"Blaine's all right.  Ask the inspector.  An old bachelor's as good
as a girl.  And he'll keep the boys in order."

"I don't know," Nicoll said doubtfully.

But Abe cut him short by reaching for his lines.  He was a power in
his district.  Yet--

Even in his own house he met opposition.  Once more Charlie asked
one evening at supper, "Have you a teacher yet, daddy?"

"You bet."  At this time Abe often used slang phrases.

"Who is it, daddy?"

"Old man by the name of Blaine."

"A man?" Ruth exclaimed, stiffening.

"Mighty good man at that."

"If it's to be a man, I won't send Frances."

"Suit yourself.  I want the boys kept in order.  No slip of a girl
for me!"  He was so angry that he rose and left the house.

Yet, when he saw Nicoll again, he condescended to argue.  "You know
as well as I do that we can't keep a girl in the district.  Talk it
over with my brother-in-law.  Most of the time children spend in
school they are readjusting themselves.  Every new teacher brings
new methods."

Nicoll hesitated.  "We'll have to have a meeting over it, Abe."

"Have that meeting if you must.  But not till we're agreed."

"I guess you know best, Abe."

"I do.  I've thought this over from every angle.  You ride the
binder tomorrow.  I'll get Hartley to stook.  I'll go and see
Blaine."

It was the first time that Abe left his work for the sake of public
business; it showed Nicoll how important the matter seemed to him.

Two weeks later a special meeting was held.  It took less than five
minutes, but it gave Abe a foretaste of what public business might
be.  As before, the scene was Nicoll's porch; the next meeting
would be held in the school which was nearing completion.

"The matter before the board is the engagement of a teacher."

"Move we advertise," said Hartley.

"Well," Nicoll drawled uncomfortably, "there is an application
supported by a recommendation from the inspector."

For a minute or so there was silence.  They made a strange group
under the lamp.  Nicoll was stout, Abe stouter, Hartley fat.
Hartley, quite at his ease, glanced from Abe to Nicoll, from Nicoll
to Abe.

"Move we advertise," he repeated doggedly.

"Let's deal with the application first," Abe said at last.  "Just
read it, Nicoll."

Nicoll did so.

"We'll dispense with the formal motion," Abe went on.  "Those in
favour signify in the usual way."

Nicoll raised his hand.

"Contrary?"

Hartley raised his.

"I've the casting vote."  Abe said.  "I'm for accepting."

Again Hartley, ragged and cynical, glanced from one to the other.

"That's settled, then.  Motion to adjourn?"

A minute later Abe and Nicoll rose.  Hartley kept his seat.

Abe knew what this man was going to say to Stanley and the rest;
but he felt he was doing what was best for the district, as time
would show.  He was content to force his better judgment on them if
need be.

What Hartley said was this:  "By golly!  If that wasn't cut and
dried!  I'll be hanged if it wasn't!"



SIX

The Great Flood


With the last year of the decade a series of three wet seasons
began, bringing momentous developments.

Hilmer had built a frame shack of three rooms, a long, shed-like
building facing the road.  His mother, a woman of sixty or so, had
joined him, bringing two children of ten and eleven respectively
and a man much younger than herself to whom she had recently been
married.  This man, Grappentin by name, did not settle down on the
place but appeared and disappeared periodically.  Mrs. Grappentin
owned another farm, in trust for the two children of her second
marriage, south of the Somerville Line.  This farm her third
husband was supposed to work; but it was said that he allowed it
"to go to the devil"; that, when the spirit moved him, he went and
fetched horse or cow or a piece of equipment to sell and to spend
the proceeds on drink or intercourse with loose women.  Mrs.
Grappentin became a frequent visitor to most farms in the district.
Vigorously she strode over the prairie, a grotesque sight, for she
was lean and ugly and resembled the idea which children have of a
witch in the woods.  She would sit about and gossip in broken
English till she was given a trilling something--a piece of meat, a
small bag of grain, or a handful of eggs; when, with fantastic
praises of the givers, she would promptly take her leave.  All of
which she did, under protest of her son, as a means of paying for
"her keep."  There was only one place where she never called, and
that was Abe's.

Abe, early in 1910, surprised the district by acquiring the whole
of the Hudson's Bay section north of his place, for which he was
variously reported to have paid from four to eight thousand dollars
"spot cash."  As a matter of fact, he paid three thousand six
hundred--four hundred dollars more than the price quoted to him
when he had made the first inquiry regarding the land.  With values
rising, he could not wait.

Spring opened with heavy rains.  Just as the first great thaw had
begun to honeycomb the deep snow which covered the prairie, a
blinding snowstorm turned into a washing downpour--a thing unusual
for the latitude.  As a rule, the thaw proceeded by stages,
interrupted by sharp frosts which stayed the waters; and the land
would be bare of snow before the flood came from the hills.  This
year the rain condensed a process which ordinarily took a month
into the short space of a week.  The winter's snow melted within a
few days; and the rain added to the flood.  The sky remained
clouded; and no check retarded the thaw.

Nor did the water seem to move for a day or two except in the
ditches, whose presence was indicated by dirty-white foam-lines
streaking the otherwise mud-coloured expanse.  Underneath, the
ground remained frozen.  Nobody could leave his house except in
hip-boots of rubber.

The first twenty-four hours Abe remained at home.  Although the
foundation of the barn was raised well above the ground, the flood
stood two inches deep on its floor.  One of the granaries still
held grain.  Throughout the first day Abe worked with Bill at the
task of raising it, going from corner to corner, jacking the
building up by a few inches, and forcing pieces of planking under
it.  The cellar of the house brimmed with water.

The second day, he walked over to Nicoll's, in hip-boots; and there
he found a crowd assembled in the yard: Stanley, Nawosad, Shilloe,
and Hartley.  He heard of much damage done.

The bridge had been carried away; Hartley's shack had been swept
from the railway ties and tilted up; wife and children were
climbing about on a slanting floor; Shilloe had had to abandon his
place; Blaine, who had converted what was meant to be a teacher's
office in the school into a small bedroom, was a prisoner there,
without food, for he had been boarding at Nicoll's.

"Where did you go?" Abe asked of Shilloe.

"To Mr. Stanley's.  I am staying in his granary."

Stanley and Nicoll had no damage to report except that their
cellars were flooded and the floors of their stables covered with
water.

Abe assumed command.  "We must get Blaine out."

"By golly!" Hartley exclaimed.  "This isn't a country fit to live
in, what with no roads--"

"We'll get the roads," Abe said briefly, and, turning to Shilloe,
"Take one of Nicoll's horses and go to my place.  Tell Bill to
hitch up the Percherons and bring them along, with a wagon.  Tie
Nicoll's horse behind.  You take the Clyde team.  Put some eveners
into the wagon, an