Chapter X: Indian Freighters--Eagle Creek

Notwithstanding Mrs. Trailey's covert opinion to the contrary, Bertrand Paul Tressider was not entirely devoid of ideas. True, he had been educated at one of England's most ancient, and, therefore, most noted, preparatory schools, which, like all others of its kind, annually turned out droves of mediocrities. Sparring with the gods of Greek mythology, wrestling with the heroes of Roman history, and dabbling in other ancient and dead things, though ruining many good men's chances of excelling as first-rate stevedores, or potmen, hadn't spoiled Bert. The very fact of his cutting loose from the fustiness of English law in order to join in Barr's search for a prairie Elysium proves that. And his training among Yorkshire men, in a Sheffield solicitor's busy office, had taught him that indubitably five beans counted five. No one, no matter how finely educated, can mix for very long with Yorkshire men without learning that much. If the beans are represented by pounds, or even by halfpence, the knowledge is usually acquired very quickly.

All morning, on and off, Bert's mind had reverted to the unthankful task which lay before them of releasing the wagon from the slough. He quite realized that a good deal of wet, dirty, cold and laborious work would be involved in the job.

He soon broached a suggestion to Trailey. The ex-insurance superintendent had finished his breakfast, and was seated on the wagon-pole, absorbed in dislodging a refractory morsel of bacon from a hollow tooth by the aid of a stiff stalk of grass. Thoroughly imbued with gentlemanly instincts, he stopped toying with his teeth when Bert addressed him, and became dreamily attentive.

"How about paying some of these Indian chaps to pull your wagon out of the slough?" said Bert. "You don't feel like tackling the job yourself, I suppose?"

Trailey didn't exactly leap at the idea. He never leaped at anything. "Ah," he drawled, "that doesn't sound like a bad suggestion."

"Well," went on Bert, "it's your wagon, y'know; and getting it out may cost a trifle, and all that, but I'm sure it's the wisest thing to do." Bert's Yorkshire training cropped up here--making it perfectly clear that there must be no mistake about who would be liable for the cost of the work.

Esther overheard the proposal, and endorsed it very heartily. She said she thought the scheme was an exceptionally brilliant one, and conveyed to its originator, by means of a swift glance of admiration, her opinion of how absolutely unique she thought it was. This powerful stimulant sent the blood rollicking through Bert's body so fast that he remained silent for a little while so as better to enjoy the sensation.

Martha Trailey, full of memories of the previous evening's incidents, clinched the suggestion with a few appropriate remarks about "girls gadding off with wild young harum-scarums, while she was left to drown in a bog."

"You may as well decide to let the Red Indians do it," she said to her husband, after she had made several extraneous references to his past career, chiefly to do with his early married life. "At present," she continued, "you've more money than sense; but goodness knows what will happen to us when it's all gone. Oh, dear me! well might my Aunt Rebecca say the very day I was married, that, although she detested mentioning it, she had an idea I might possibly live to rue it."

Sam and Bert, noticing the finger of Mrs. Trailey's barometer moving rapidly round to "stormy," edged quietly away from the tent, outside of which the discussion was taking place.

"You shouldn't talk like that before strangers, mamma," Esther remonstrated gently; "it makes every one feel so uncomfortable."

"Strangers! Strangers, did you say? Well, what next, may I ask! Strangers!--and after we've been carried across the pond with our arms round their necks! Allow me to tell you that the very thought of it makes my blood boil; and so it would yours if you weren't so brazen. What young women are coming to these days, I don't know. And in broad daylight, too! Why, I remember when I was your age, no respectable young woman would dream of putting her arms round a man's neck till after it was dark. Please don't forget that, my girl."

Naturally, that settled the matter. Quite soon along came the usual tribe of Indian freighters--a whole string of them. Bert shouted across the slough to half a dozen of the men who were investigating the crossing. He motioned vigorously towards the mired wagon, and made pregnant signs indicative of dollars being counted out.

In a calmly stoical sort of way, the Indians seemed quite interested. Unhurriedly, they condensed a few thoughts into fewer words, which they communicated to each other, after which they made signs that--for Indians--they would be tickled to death to come to some arrangement. Seeing that the worship of money was one of the religions the natives had picked up from their white brethren, their consent was understandable enough. Two active young bucks jumped on a couple of spare ponies, numbers of which slunk about the convoy, and rode through the slough to negotiate terms.

Two or three dusky women of uncertain age and beauty gabbled away to each other, pointing at the bogged prairie schooner and laughing. The ladies seemed to take a much more humorous view of life than did their men-folk. They squatted atop of their loaded wagons like images of fat Buddhas togged out in green, purple and pink robes.

After much argument, during which the two dark-skinned ambassadors preserved a dignified reserve, contrasting strangely with the comical gesticulations of the civilized white men, the transaction was at last completed. The payment for extricating the wagon was to be ten dollars. The aboriginal votaries of materialism stuck out grimly for cash in advance. Possessing the whip hand, they got it.

"Give 'em the money," said Bert, addressing Trailey, who had wandered down to the water. Sam watched carefully whilst the transfer of the cash was made. "It's dirt cheap, guv'ner," he said, encouragingly. He was glad to be rid of a job which would have devolved mostly upon him.

Four teams of cayuses were hooked to the bogged wagon--two to the pole, and one on each side, to the box. Then, with a mixture of whoops and whips, chiefly the latter, about two-thirds of the ponies took it into their heads to pull the load--and the rest of the ponies--across the slough. The drivers splashed through the water alongside, apparently enjoying its coolness.

Some of the natives looked as solemn as though they had just drawn a hearse full of dead medicine-men through the water. Others cast sly grins at the white party. When they had all jumped on the bony backs of their ponies and returned to their own convoy, Sam and Bert, with a little assistance from Trailey, commenced to pack up.

That evening they reached the gash in the earth known as Eagle Creek.

Sam strolled to the edge of the ravine and stared into the shadowy depths. "It's too bloomin' late ter commit sewercide ter-night," he decided. "Gawd! 'ave we got ter go dahn there?" he mused, awed by the fearsome steepness of the trail.

So the little party camped for the night beside the coulee. Thanks to their outdoor exertions, the high, clear altitudes, the ever-changing scenes, and the freedom from the worries, both petty and large, of congested humanity, they all invariably slept like tops. Sam and Bert and Esther were enjoying to the full every second of their lives. They extracted pleasure from the fascinating novelty of everything, like bees do honey from flowers.

As for William Trailey, he was hardly on the earth at all, except for meals. "Ah," he would sigh whenever anything particularly startling or novel was pointed out to him, and then his big, dreamy, blue eyes, after taking in the object, would go soaring with his thoughts in long, wandering journeys through realms of abstraction. What really were his visions, and ideas, and ambitions, no man knew, even if he did himself.

Martha Trailey was perfectly contented to be discontented. She cooked, and washed, and rattled about in energetic storms of striving after a sort of super-cleanliness. Her pots and pans and utensils were all clean and polished as though they had been lined up in her kitchen back home in England. In return for this monumental efficiency, all she desired was to be able to make it impossible for her husband to forget that he was married.

Eagle Creek, whatever it is now, was in those days an awesome chasm on the Saskatoon-Battleford trail. Probably half a dozen lively recollections spring to the mind of each Barr Colonist as he searches the recesses of his memory for pictures of far-gone days. Dulled a little by distance, perhaps; made a trifle cobwebby by time; and, possibly, half-buried under a litter of subsequent experiences, but totally eclipsed by no other event, is the clear remembrance of the crossing of Eagle Creek.

Many Barr Colony legends originated here. Numerous foolish experiments for descending the slopes of a ravine as steep as a house-roof were attempted. The biggest wonder is that no one was killed. Not a few colonists strove to leave their bones there--unintentionally, of course, but none the less with considerable perseverance.

It has for years been widely broadcast, that, in an effort to defeat the gravitational urge of his thirty-hundredweight, top-heavy load, one chap hobbled his oxen. This is a gross distortion of fact. He hobbled only one of them.

Sam knew the fellow. He was a dark, sallow, melancholy-visaged man from Shropshire, which is a buffer county between England and Wales.

"Wot made you 'obble one of yer bloomin' hoxen when yer went dahn Eagle Creek?" Sam asked him several weeks later when they met at Headquarters camp (Britannia).

The Shropshire man pulled a wry face. He was very despondent--more so than usual. "I didn't care a hang what 'appened to me," he replied glumly.

Sam was very sympathetic. "Why?" he asked.

"Oh, I don't know. Somehow, everything seemed to be going wrong." Smiling a twisted smile, the Shropshire man went on: "You see, my blessed bulls were green, and you couldn't hold 'em back with the ropes on their horns. My wife wanted to turn back all the time. I'd been wet to the skin for three days. Two of my youngsters had the whooping-cough. Barr had one hundred and seventy-five pounds of my capital, which I'd said good-bye to, of course. And, then, blow me if I hadn't found out at Saskatoon that Barr had given the other three 'omesteads on our section to two Welshmen and a Lancashire man. I tell you, prospects looked none too rosy."

"So yer thought yer'd try an' do away wiv yerself--eh?"

"Ha-ha!" cackled the Shropshire man sardonically; "I may have been unlucky, and a trifle down-'earted, but I wasn't as far gone as that." His voice was very husky with talking to his bulls, which hadn't died yet.

There were runaways galore at Eagle Creek; but the stream at the bottom, and the steep rise beyond, stopped most of them. Inertia decrees that a body in motion shall tend to continue so. Some colonists attempted to outwit this law. They zig-zagged down the declivity. This was all right till one of the wheels on the high side hit a stone or a knoll, then over went the wagon, shooting its conglomeration of packing-cases, harrows, stove, and everything else down the bank like coals being tipped into a cellar.

Only six weeks previously, these colonists had been seated in offices pushing pens over paper; selling shirts across mahogany counters under the watchful eyes of lordly shop-walkers; teaching sleepy children in Sunday school the tale about the Israelites trekking into Egypt; catching the nine-fifteen to business every morning, with a weekly half-day for a football match, or a fish in the river; enjoying the numberless advantages of a cultured land, from the daily halfpenny newspaper to listening to the thunder of an organ in a five-hundred-year-old cathedral--and now here they were, gazing over an abyss which had to be crossed before they could arrive at the land of promise--Barr's promise. No wonder some of them, when they looked into the yawning depths of Eagle Creek, suffered an attack of faint-heartedness, and straightway turned back.

But the stimulating fact remains, that easily three hundred teams, driven by the greenest aggregation of men who ever came to the West, contrived somehow or another to cross the creek safely.

Early the following morning, Sam piloted each wagon in turn down the precipitous slope. The rear wheels of both vehicles were locked with heavy logging chains. Professional freighters, who also had camped at the creek, instructed him in the art of tying the chains so that, besides being non-slipping, they contributed their greatest braking effect.

The chains were allowed to become taut at a point which brought the half-hitch sufficiently near to the ground to dig into it. With both hind wheels gripped by such knots, which themselves were gouging into the trail, the descent was rendered comparatively simple. Both teams were free from the mysteries of breeching tackle. Only Sam really knew how to harness the horses properly with the leather puzzles they already possessed, though Bert and Trailey were slowly learning.

"Thank God for that!"

William Trailey uttered these words as he gazed at the awful declivity down which the wagons had been guided by the indispensable Sam. The little party was resting on the bridge which spanned the tiny stream gurgling along the bottom of the creek.

Esther, who lived much nearer to the earth than her father usually did, and whose gratitude on that account was inclined to be more practical, came along to Sam and, with a pretty gesture, half-serious, half-jesting, shook hands with him.

"And thank you, Sam," the beautiful girl said; "what ever we should do without you, God alone knows." The little Cockney blushed, and his eyes shone.