Neighbours Part 10

"I just brought the bullocks for exercise," he explained, when he drew up before our shack. "I could have walked much easier, and much quicker, but they keep my arms and voice in form."

Even while Spoof was speaking, his oxen, attracted by the smell of fresh hay at our stable, moved down over the bank of the gully and upset the wagon _en route_. We disentangled them with some difficulty.

"I begin to lose sympathy with them; I really do," said Spoof, when we found that the reach of his wagon was broken. "Now I shall have to bind this bally thing together. Yesterday they balked in the hay meadow; in the hay meadow, mind you, where, if at all, an ox should be in an amiable mood. I argued with them for an hour, without effect, and then I went home and read a magazine. It's an ill wind, you know. They followed me about supper time."

"I'll tell you how to fix them," Jack remarked. "Next time they balk----"

"But if I fix them they won't be able to move at all," Spoof protested.

"'Fix' is to make fast, to render immovable, and they're too much that way already."

"No doubt that is what fix means in England," Jack admitted, "but in Canada, to 'fix' a balky ox means, when everything else fails, to put an armful of hay under him and set fire to it. It does the trick."

"By Jove, that's a ripping idea! Now why couldn't I think of that? I suppose because I'm a greenhorn. I shall try it at the first opportunity."

Spoof retrieved a bundle of papers which had fallen out of his wagon box, and together we went up to the house. The girls were waiting in the shade at the eastern side of the shack; in their Sunday dresses of flimsy stuff appropriate to the hot weather they looked very sweet and charming.

"Ah, here are the ladies," said Spoof, and in his manner there was a touch of gallantry that in some way seemed foreign to either Jack or me.

"Real prairie roses, and no mistake," as he took their hands in his.

"It's jolly decent to ask a stranger over. All this out-of-doors; dawns, sunsets, sky, distance--all very fine, but it isn't good to be too much alone with it. Rather overwhelms one, don't you think?"

"I have felt that," said Jean, while Marjorie was fumbling for words.

"It's too grand; it oppresses one. It's--it's all soul; no body."

"That's it--that's it!" Spoof agreed. "All soul--no body. I shall write that to the Governor. The Governor, dear old chap, thinks this country is rather a bit off the map. I have promised to shoot him a polar bear for Christmas, and he's quite looking forward to it. He writes to know if I find the native labor satisfactory, and can my man mix a decent whisky and soda. I must set his mind at rest. I let him think I run quite an establishment, you understand; he sends a cheque now and again, which, of course, bears a relations.h.i.+p to the position I am supposed to occupy in local society."

"Doesn't your conscience trouble you?" Marjorie queried, the conversation having swung into her orbit.

"Not at all. I am doing the Governor a kindness. He spends rather too much money on whisky and soda--particularly the former--so I am merely getting him interested in another kind of extravagance. A Younger Son is a very successful form of extravagance, don't you think? What is it Kipling says--'By the bitter road the Younger Son must tread,' or something like that? So why shouldn't the Governor sweeten the bitter road a little, and drink less whisky to his soda?"

While we were busy thinking of some appropriate remark Spoof remembered his bundle of papers.

"I ventured to bring these over," he said, tendering them to Jean. "Just some old copies of _The Ill.u.s.trated London News_ and _The Graphic_.

There are some sketches by an artist showing his conception of homestead life. I rather suspect the Governor has let him read my letters."

Presently the conversation turned to agricultural topics, and we were more at ease.

"My plowing," Spoof explained, "has gone better since I discarded my compa.s.s. The bullocks never took kindly to the compa.s.s. No doubt it was a foolish notion of mine that a furrow should run either east and west or north and south, seeing that the whole farm has to be plowed anyway.

I now let them veer and tack as they please, and we are making considerable headway."

"Any crop in?"

"Not this year. A chap in Regina advised me to plant a sack of rolled oats and raise my own porridge, but, thank Heaven, I'm not Scotch. No reflection on the Scotch," he added hurriedly, noting a warning flash in Marjorie's eyes. "They are a very wonderful people. They eat oatmeal, and thrive on it. A very wonderful people."

"No garden either?"

"Only a few sunflowers. They should be up presently."

"Sunflowers? Why sunflowers?"

"A chap in Regina--Jake, the land guide--you know Jake, don't you?--he told me to be sure and plant some sunflowers. They are invaluable in winter. They stand up through the snow, and the sunlight beating on their bright, yellow faces enables a settler to locate his shack when otherwise the country is all a white blanket of snow. Jake a.s.sured me that many a settler had been frozen to death through neglect of this simple precaution."

"It's simple, all right," Jack agreed. "Our friend Jake seems to be a good adviser. Did he give you any other hints?"

"Lots of them, but I'm afraid he's a bit of a spoofer. Told me to catch four gophers and tie them by the hind legs to the four corners of my farm, and their squealing would warn all the other gophers off. I tried it but it didn't make a bit of difference. In fact, gophers seem to be about all I'm raising this year--gophers and sunflowers. His wild duck trap was no success, either. Jake showed me how to make a trap for wild ducks, and told me to put some buffalo bones in it and I would catch all the ducks I could eat. Said the ducks had to have the bone material for sh.e.l.ls for the eggs, and would go anywhere to get it. I set two traps, but so far I haven't caught a duck."

"But did you put any tiger lilies in with the bones?" Jack inquired, with a face that had its struggles to keep straight.

"Tiger lilies? No, he didn't mention that."

"Oh, that's a serious oversight," said Jack, who was rapidly taking on the ways of the West. "Tiger lilies are the main part of the trap. You see, the ducks cannot see the bones at night, and so they are guided by the scent of the tiger lilies, which always grow around deposits of buffalo bones. Just gather a few fresh lilies every evening and lay them on the bones and you'll be surprised at the result."

In following this discussion I had not been observing Jean, or I should have seen the gathering storm in time, perhaps, to have averted it. Now she sprang in front of us like a mother bird at bay. If Jean, pa.s.sive, was beautiful, Jean, aroused, was magnificent. I sensed _that_ even while swept off my feet by the blast of her indignation.

"It's a lie!" she exclaimed. "It's all a pack of lies! They're--they're 'spoofing' you, as you call it." She turned her withering glance particularly upon her brother, but I did not quite escape it. "They take advantage of your strangeness to the country to make you appear foolish--they, who don't know Rembrandt from Mozart, or----or----"

Jean paused in her tirade, stuck for a figure that would express her contempt for us. It was the first time I had seen Jean in the grip of a righteous and belligerent indignation. She had revealed a new side of her nature that was wonderful, adorable; perhaps a bit dangerous. The poignancy of her beauty was not lessened by the knowledge that I had fallen a number of degrees in her estimation, and that Spoof had doubtless ascended a proportionate distance.

Spoof was the first to get his balance. "Why, why--that's all right," he exclaimed. "Quite all right. A ripping good joke, I call it. I must work that on the Governor when he comes to visit me. I shall have him pulling tiger lilies for my duck traps,--see if I don't!"

"That will be when he comes for the polar bear you have promised him,"

said Jack, slyly. "You see, Jean, Spoof is a bit of a spoofer himself."

"I don't care if he is!" Jean flared back. "It isn't fair to-- to----"

Jean was very close to tears. "You too, Frank!" she exclaimed, suddenly turning her wrath upon me, "You sat there like a mummy never saying a word----"

"Well, that should let me out, I had nothing to do with----"

"Yes, you did! I saw you snicker! You're as bad as Jack, and you would have said the same things, if you had been bright enough."

That was a body blow, but Spoof came to my rescue.

"Oh, I say!" he exclaimed, "can't we have some tea? Beastly dry business, homesteading; no afternoon tea. I must speak to my man about that. He's the same man as mixes my whisky and sodas, according to the Governor's idea of it," Spoof explained.

The suggestion of tea confronted the girls with work, which, in proper doses, is the universal restorer of good humor. They went inside, and when in a short while they brought out tea and sandwiches the storm had swept by, with only a dash of color in Jean's cheeks, like a rainbow in an afternoon sky, to mark its pa.s.sing.

"Do you know," said Spoof, when the girls had cleared up the tea things and were out of hearing, "the thing of which I stand most in need at the present moment--that thing which is so essentially English, and from which I have been divorced for more days than I care to number--that thing for which I would gladly give half of my kingdom, meaning the north-west quarter of section Two? No? Observe the blushes beneath my sunburned cuticle as I admit that for weeks I have not had a bath. For weeks, literally. If my poor Governor could know that, not even the hide of a polar bear would reconcile him to leaving me to live the life of a savage."

"We can soon fix that--I mean, we can furnish the wherewithal," said I, "and I will expect the deed of eighty acres in return." So we led Spoof down to the pond, which the sun, now well over to the west, was burnis.h.i.+ng with hues of burnt-orange and amber. Along its gra.s.sy sh.o.r.e on the northern side a score or more wild ducks were feeding, some of them tail-tilted in the air as they grubbed the roots in the shallow water. Their only notice of us was to move a little closer to the bank, while two or three worried mothers gathered their broods in little fluffy phalanxes behind them.

"My word, my word!" said Spoof. "Why didn't Jake tell me about this? I will have that land guide's gizzard for this omission! . . . And how tame they are!"

"No shooting yet," I explained. "It isn't fair to the youngsters; but there's a great day coming. But the water is fine, and deep enough toward the middle."

"My word, if only I had a bathing suit! I say, do you think there would be any great danger--any danger at all, that is--of an interruption?"

"Not a bit. We have that all organized," and I showed him a red handkerchief tied to a stick. "When the pond is in use we fly this banner on the bank of the gully, and we're as safe as Sunday. The girls usually have their plunge in the middle of the afternoon, for that matter, and leave us undivided possession in the evening."

Spoof was already half undressed. "My word, and do the young ladies swim?"