Neighbours Part 5

"As plain as day, coming up the hill. I pulled on him, steady and low like you said, but it wouldn't go off."

Even as he spoke a dim form slowly hove in sight. I stood back with my heart thumping. It did not come fast, but its approach out of the darkness was the more terrifying for its deliberation. He was almost upon us before, evidently scenting Jake, the buckskin whinnied.

Jack was almost in collapse from excitement and mortification, but Jake rolled and doubled on his blanket with loud guffaws of merriment.

"But tell me, jokes aside," said Jack, at length, "why wouldn't the rifle go off? Suppose it had been Sitting Crow? Why wouldn't it go off?"

"Well, fer one reason," Jake explained when he could speak calmly, "I've no notion fer walkin' back to Regina, nor fer drivin' with one nag, neither. So when I took the hobbles off one o' the buckskins, figgerin'

he'd likely work up here durin' the night, I also took the cartridges out o' the rifle. Can't afford to have no horse like that plunked low down, careful, in the middle."

"But suppose it really had been Sitting Crow," Jack persisted. "A nice mess we'd have been in."

"Can't suppose that," said Jake; "simply can't suppose it. Because, you see, there ain't no Sittin' Crow. Yep, some of 'em is awful green," he added.

CHAPTER V.

When daylight came we had breakfast and started on our journey again in rather sheepish silence. The strain lasted for perhaps half an hour; then Jake gave a great guffaw, smothering his face in his hands.

"Yep, some of 'em is awful green," he quoted again, proving for himself a good memory as well as a sense of satire. "Jupiter!" and there was another outburst of hilarity. "Sittin' Crow!" and more guffaws.

"To-night we'll be in the haunts of Roostin' Turkey! Giddap! You danged old buckskin, it's good fer you I emptied the magazine!"

Under my seat I found a tent peg. Stealthily I raised it in the air, and joyously I walloped Jake on something solid beneath his slouch felt hat.

He rubbed his head ruefully, but without taking offence.

"Well, that's over," he said at length, heaving a great sigh, as though he had just been relieved of some big responsibility. "It's all in a life-time. Giddap, you piebald flyin' ants!" and Jake made a strange clucking noise in his throat which encouraged the buckskins into a temporary lope.

The day was much the same as the one before, except that we were now well out on "the bald-headed." Once in a while, at great distances, we could see a homesteader's shack, a little isolated sentinel-box of the vanguard of settlement. Once we were intercepted by another team and democrat, much like our own, which cut across our trail. The driver asked if we could spare any water. We gave him half of what was in our keg, and he extended his plug of chewing tobacco all round. We chatted a few minutes, and then with mutual friendly shouts and waving of our arms we were off again.

During the afternoon, Jake's mind having apparently cleared of all other matters, he began to sing. It was some little time before we detected the origin of the strange sound; different times I looked down at our wheels, or glanced about to see if someone were approaching. But the volume of sound grew as Jake developed his theme, and presently there was no doubt that he was singing. We soon discovered that Jake had two songs, "Sweet Marie" and "Clementine", and he used both words and music interchangeably. As we were able to a.n.a.lyze it more closely we found his rendering ran something like this:

"As I clasp your hand in mine, Sweet Marie-e-e,

"A feelin' so divine comes to me, comes to me-e. Giddap, you danged buckskin, fallin' over your feet. Goin' to sleep? Cluck, cluck!

"Lived a miner, a forty-nin-er,

"An' his daughter, Clementine."

But we were to discover that singing was not Jake's only forte. He had the most amazing eyes. They were always half asleep, and in the heat of the day they seemed more than half asleep, but he saw things long before they hove into our vision, and, I have no doubt, he saw many things that we did not see at all. In the middle of the afternoon he suddenly broke off with "Lived a min-er," and brought his horses to a stop.

"Like to try a shot at that coyote?" he said to Jack.

"What coyote?" asked Jack, looking hurriedly in all directions.

"Over there," indicating a section of the horizon with a sweep of his arm.

"Can't place him," Jack confessed.

"Beside that little mound of dirt--badger-hole, I reckon; there's a tuft of gra.s.s in front of him; he's lookin' straight at us, wonderin' who the h.e.l.l----"

"Oh, I got him, I got him!" Jack shouted in a loud whisper, and began to get out of the wagon, but Jake's arm restrained him.

"Don't do that. He'll run the moment you get out. Take him from here."

He slipped the rifle over Jack's arm. "She's loaded," he said, with a grin. "Set 'er fer two hundred yards."

Jack aimed long and carefully, and even as he aimed the coyote turned his broadside deliberately, as though to give him a better target. Then he fired, and a whiff of dust puffed up three hundred yards away. The coyote, however, had taken notice; perhaps the bullet didn't pa.s.s so far above him, at that. He stretched himself like a tawny ribbon and bolted with amazing speed into the wilderness. Jack sent two more wild shots into s.p.a.ce.

"Toler'ble safe," was Jake's comment as he laid the rifle away.

"Toler'ble safe."

Half an hour later he pulled up again. "How about you?" he said, turning to me.

I could see nothing until, following the line of his arm and finger, I at length detected an object behind a little whitish willow bush, appropriately called the wolf willow. Even then I could see only a pair of sharp ears and the triangular outline of a head; there was nothing else visible.

"You better take him, Jake," I said. "You're a real shot." I felt I owed him that much for that wallop with the tent peg.

He was nothing loath to take up the rifle, and I began to realize how big a courtesy it was to offer us the first shot. He drew the gun to his shoulder, craned his neck down along the stock, steadied the barrel an instant, and fired. The coyote leaped in the air, fell on his back, kicking and pawing in the wolf willow. We drove over to him, but already his lips had curled back in a death-snarl from his gleaming teeth.

Jake drove on in silence while we meditated upon his amazing marksmans.h.i.+p. Any comment on our part would have been superfluous, a fact which no doubt our driver understood. But his thought was evidently running along some course similar to ours, although skirting into wider fields.

"If ever there's a big war," he remarked at length, "an' I reckon there will be some day, the chaps from these prairies will sure give 'em h.e.l.l."

It was a strange speech for Jake. Jake, short and fat-waisted, guiltless of coat or waist-coat, his coa.r.s.e blue s.h.i.+rt flying open at the neck, little streams of tobacco juice meandering down his stubby chin, his slouch hat pulled low on his head and his brown, tangled hair tufted out about the ears; most of all, his pudgy feet, which would not reach the floor of the wagon box--surely here was as unmilitary looking an individual as one could picture. And yet, his amazing keenness of eyesight, his quick, accurate, uncanny marksmans.h.i.+p, and his calm a.s.surance in which there was no word of boasting, but a mere statement of fact, that if ever there were a big war the boys from the prairies would "give 'em h.e.l.l!"

We camped that night by a stream of which Jake knew, because there was little water on the prairies, even at the first of May. Next day we drove all day, and later into the evening than usual; it was quite dark when we stopped.

"This is the place," Jake said, "but you can't see it to-night. Have a good sleep and we'll size 'er up in the mornin'."

We tried to eat breakfast without concern, but we were hurried and nervous, and eager to see how our judgment would tally with Jake's. On the road he had tried to explain to us the system of survey, and we had a general idea of it in our heads. Now he took a towns.h.i.+p map from his pocket and showed us in detail where we were.

"This is us," he said, pointing with a thick, stubby finger, "right on the north-west quarter o' Fourteen. Immedjut west of us is a road allowance, runnin' north an' south. Immedjut west of that again is section Fifteen, which is railroad land, an' can't be took up free. But immedjut north-west, cornerin' right against this quarter, 'cept fer the road allowance, is the south-east quarter of Twenty-two, which is open.

Now these two quarters, north-west Fourteen an' south-east Twenty-two, is as good as any land that lays out o' doors, an' better than most.

There's a bit of a gully here--you'll see it in a minute--runs down from the north-east an' cuts off to the south-west, an' runs right between these two quarters. There's springs in that gully somewhere, an' runnin'

water practical the year round, an' shelter fer stock an' all that kind o' thing, an' you get the benefit of it all, an' it don't take two acres off'n your land. It's a plumb Paradise an' you can't beat it nowhere."

"How far is it to a railroad?" Jack asked.

"Plumb down that road allowance, thirty-two miles, straight as the crow flies, when it ain't Sittin'," he threw in with a little snicker.

"Thirty-two miles!" Jack exclaimed. "Pretty well in the wilderness, isn't it?"

"Wilderness nothin'! This is suburban prop'rty. This is close in. I take some of 'em back sixty an' seventy an' eighty miles. Thirty-two miles is jus' right, an' I'll tell you why. When a new railroad comes its likely to come about thirty miles from the other; that's about a sensible distance apart. An' here you are, in the middle of the right-of-way, an' may be cuttin' your homestead into town lots; ten lots to an acre an' two hundred dollars a lot. Can you beat it? The Lord sure has been good to you, fer no special reason that I can notice. 'Tain't your good looks"--we were badly sun-blistered, in spite of the axle-grease--"an'

'tain't your good sense, excep' in selectin' me as your financial advisor, so to speak. I reckon it's all account o' those girls--_sisters_, you said."