The Prairie Mother Part 20

_Thursday the First_

Lady Alicia has announced, I learn through a Struthers quite pop-eyed with indignation, that it's Peter and I who possibly ought to be tarred and feathered, if our puritanical community is deciding to go in for that sort of thing! It is to laugh.

Her ladys.h.i.+p, I also learn, has purchased about all the small-arms ammunition in Buckhorn and toted the same back to Casa Grande in her car. There, in un.o.bstructed view of the pa.s.sers-by, she has set up a target, on which, by the hour together, she coolly and patiently practises sharpshooting with both rifle and revolver.

I admire that woman's s.p.u.n.k. And whatever you may do, you can't succeed in bullying the English. They have too much of the bull-dog breed in their bones. They're always at their best, Peter declares, when they're fighting. "But from an Englishwoman trying to be kittenish," he fervently added, "good Lord, deliver us all!"

And that started us talking about the English. Peter, of course, is too tolerant to despise his cousins across the Pond, but he pregnantly reminded me that Lady Allie had asked him what sort of town Saskatchewan was and he had retorted by inquiring if she was fond of Yonkers, whereupon she'd looked puzzled and acknowledged that she'd never eaten one. For Peter and Lady Allie, it seems, had had a set-to about American map-names, which her ladys.h.i.+p had described as both silly and unsayable, especially the Indian ones, while Peter had grimly proclaimed that any people who called Seven-Oaks _Snooks_ and Belvoir _Beever_ and Ruthven _Rivven_ and Wrottesley _Roxly_ and Marylebone _Marrabun_ and Wrensfordsley _Wrensley_ had no right to kick about American p.r.o.nunciations.

But Peter is stimulating, even though he does stimulate you into opposition. So I found myself defending the English, and especially the Englishman, for too many of them had made me happy in their lovely old homes and too many of their sons, aeons and aeons ago, had tried to hold my hand.

"Your Englishman," I proclaimed to Peter, "always acts as though he quite disapproves of you and yet he'll go to any amount of trouble to do things to make you happy or comfortable. Then he conceals his graciousness by being curt about it. Then, when he's at his crankiest, he's apt to startle you by saying the divinest things point-blank in your face, and as likely as not, after treating you as he would a rather backward child of whom he rigidly disapproves, he'll make love to you and do it with a fine old Anglo-Saxon directness. He hates sw.a.n.k, of course, for he's a truffle-hound who prefers digging out his own delicacies. And it's ten to one, if a woman simply sits tight and listens close and says nothing, that he'll say something about her unrivaled powers of conversation!"

_Sunday the Fourth_

Peter, as we sat out beside the corral on an empty packing-case to-night after supper, said that civilization was a curse. "Look what it's doing to your n.o.ble Red Man right here in your midst! There was a time, when a brave died, they handsomely killed that dead brave's favorite horse, feeling he would course the plains of Heaven in peace.

Now, I find, they have their doubts, and they pick out a dying old bone-yard whose day is over, or an outlaw that n.o.body can break and ride. And form without faith is a mockery. It's the same with us whites. Here we are, us two, with--"

But I stopped Peter. I had no wish to slide on rubber-ice just for the sake of seeing it bend.

"Can you imagine anything lovelier," I remarked as a derailer, "than the prairie at this time of the year, and this time of day?"

Peter followed my eye out over the undulating and uncounted acres of sage-green grain with an eternity of opal light behind them.

"Think of LaVerendrye, who was their Columbus," he meditated aloud.

"Going on and on, day by day, week by week, wondering what was beyond that world of plain and slough and coulee and everlasting green! And they tell me there's four hundred million arable acres of it. I wonder if old Verendrye ever had an inkling of what Whittier felt later on:

'I hear the tread of pioneers, Of cities yet to be-- The first low wash of waves where soon Shall roll a human sea.'"

Then Peter went on to say that Bryant had given him an entirely false idea of the prairie, since from the Bryant poem he'd expected to see gra.s.s up to his armpits. And he'd been disappointed, too, by the scarcity of birds and flowers.

But I couldn't let that complaint go by unchallenged. I told him of our range-lilies and foxglove and buffalo-beans and yellow crowfoot and wild sunflowers and prairie-roses and crocuses and even violets in some sections. "And the prairie-gra.s.ses, Peter--don't forget the prairie-gra.s.ses," I concluded, perplexed for a moment by the rather grim smile that crept up into his rather solemn old Peter-Panish face.

"I'm not likely to," he remarked.

For to-morrow, I remembered, Peter is going off to cut hay. He has been speaking of it as going into the wilderness for meditation. But what he's really doing is taking a team and his tent and supplies and staying with that hay until it's cut, cut and "_collected_," to use the word which the naive Lady Allie introduced into these parts.

I have a suspicion that it is the wagging of tongues that's sending Peter out into his wilderness. But I've been busy getting his grub-box ready and I can at least see that he fares well. For whatever happens, we must have hay. And before long, since we're to go in more and more for live stock, we must have a silo at Alabama Ranch. Now that the open range is a thing of the past, in this part of the country at least, the silo is the natural solution of the cattle-feed problem. It means we can double our stock, which is rather like getting another farm for nothing, especially as the peas and oats we can grow for ensilage purposes give such enormous yields on this soil of ours.

_Tuesday the Sixth_

For the second time the unexpected has happened. Lady Alicia has gone.

She's off, bag and baggage, and has left the redoubtable Sing Lo in charge of Casa Grande.

Her ladys.h.i.+p waited until one full day after the time-limit imposed upon her by Whinstane Sandy in that barbarous armistice of his, and then, having saved her face, joined the Broadhursts of Montreal on a trip to Banff, where she'll be more in touch with her kind and her countrymen. From there, I understand, she intends visiting the Marquis of Anglesey ranch at Wallachie.

I don't know what she intends doing about her property, but it seems to me it doesn't show any great interest in either her crop or her cousin, to decamp at this particular time. Struthers protests that she's a born gambler, and can't live without bridge and American poker. Banff, accordingly, ought to give her what she's pining for....

But I'm too busy to worry about Lady Allie. The Big Drama of the year is opening on this sun-steeped plain of plenty, for harvest-time will soon be here and we've got to be ready for it. We're on the go from six in the morning until sun-down. We're bringing in Peter's crop of hay with the tractor, hauling three wagon-loads at a time. I make the double trip, getting back just in time to feed my babies and then hiking out again. That means we're all hitting on every cylinder. I've no time for either worries or wishes, though Peter once remarked that life is only as deep as its desires, and that the measure of our existence lies in the extent of its wants. That may be true, in a way, but I haven't time to philosophize over it. Hard work can be more than a narcotic. It's almost an anesthetic. And soil, I've been thinking, should be the symbol of life here, as it is with the peasants of Poland. I feel that I'm getting thinner, but I've an appet.i.te that I'm ashamed of, in secret.

d.i.n.ky-Dunk, by the way, is not back yet, and there's been no word from him. Struthers is resolute in her belief that he's in hiding somewhere about the mountain-slopes of Banff. But I am just as resolute in my scorn for all such suspicions. And yet, and yet,--if I wasn't so busy I'd be tempted to hold solemn days of feasting and supplication that Lady Alicia Elizabeth Newland might wade out beyond her depth in the pellucid waters of Lake Louise.

_Friday the Sixteenth_

Peter surprised me yesterday by going in to Buckhorn and bringing out a machinist to work on the windmill tower. By mid-afternoon they had it ready for hoisting and rebolting to its new anchor-posts. So just before supper the team and the block-and-tackle were hitched on to that attenuated steel skeleton, Whinnie took one guide rope and I took the other, and our little Eiffel Tower slowly lifted itself up into the sky.

Peter, when it was all over, and the last nut tightened up, walked about with the triumphant smile of a Master-Builder who beholds his work completed. So I said "h.e.l.lo, _Halvard Solness_!" as I stepped over to where he stood.

And he was bright enough to catch it on the wing, for he quoted back to me, still staring up at the tower-head: "From this day forward I will be a free builder."

Whereupon I carelessly retorted, "Oh, there's some parts of Ibsen that I despise."

But something in Peter's tone and his preoccupation during supper both worried and perplexed me. So as soon as I could get away from the shack I went out to the windmill tower again. And the small platform at the end of the sloping little iron ladder looked so tempting and high above the world that I started up the galvanized rungs.

When I was half-way up I stopped and looked down. It made me dizzy, for prairie life gives you few chances of getting above the flat floor of your flat old world. But I was determined to conquer that feeling, and by keeping my eyes turned up toward the windmill head I was able to reach the little platform at the top and sit there with my feet hanging over and my right arm linked through one of the steel standards.

I suppose, as windmills go, it wasn't so miraculously high, but it was amazing how even that moderate alt.i.tude where I found myself could alter one's view-point. I felt like a sailor in a crow's-nest, like a sentinel on a watch-tower, like an eagle poised giddily above the world. And such a wonderful and wide-flung world it was, spreading out beneath me in mottled patches of grape-leaf green and yellow and gold, with a burgundian riot of color along the western sky-line where the last orange rind of the sun had just slipped down out of sight.

As I stared down at the roof of our shack it looked small and pitiful, tragically meager to house the tangled human destinies it was housing.

And the fields where we'd labored and sweated took on a foreign and ghostly coloring, as though they were oblongs on the face of an alien world, a world with mystery and beauty and unfathomable pathos about it.

I was sitting there, with my heels swinging out in s.p.a.ce and an oddly consoling sense of calmness in my heart, when Peter came out of the shack and started to cross toward the corral. I couldn't resist the temptation to toss my old straw hat down at him.

He stopped short as it fell within twenty paces of him, like a meteor out of the sky. Then he turned and stared up at me. The next minute I saw him knock out his little briar pipe, put it away in his pocket, and cross over to the tower.

I could feel the small vibrations of the steel structure on which I sat poised, as he mounted the ladder toward me. And it felt for all the world like sitting on the brink of Heaven, like a blessed damozel the second, watching a sister-soul coming up to join you in your beat.i.tude.

"I say, isn't this taking a chance?" asked Peter, a little worried and a little out of breath, as he clambered up beside me.

"It's glorious!" I retorted, with a nod toward the slowly paling sky-line.

That far and lonely horizon looked as though a fire of molten gold burned behind the thinnest of mauve and saffron and purple curtains, a fire that was too subdued to be actual flame, but more an unearthly and ethereal radiance, luring the vision on and on until it brought an odd little sense of desolation to the heart and made me glad to remember that Peter was swinging his lanky legs there at my side out over empty s.p.a.ce.

"I find," he observed, "that this tower was sold to a tenderfoot, by the foot. That's why it went over. It was too highfalutin! It was thirty feet taller than it had any need to be."

Then he dropped back into silence.