Chapter VII: Saskatoon--Martha Trailey

The non-arrival of a thousand-pound draft from England was firmly anchoring William Trailey in Saskatoon. He was a moderately well-to-do man. He had piled up a little wealth in the insurance line, when securing new business was ridiculously easy--in the 'eighties and 'nineties of last century. His lawyers at Leeds, where he used to reside, were slowly but surely converting into cash and costs for him, some workmen's cottages in which he had invested a part of his savings. And he was sufficiently acute to be afraid that, unless he left Saskatoon as quickly as possible, he would be compelled to cable instruction to his solicitors to dispose of another row of houses.

Because of their promise to wait for the Traileys, the departure of Sam and Bert was postponed for more than a week.

Meanwhile, like the snowdrifts surrounding it, the camp slowly began to melt away. In small convoys--never alone--the colonists started off on their two-hundred-mile journey away from civilization. Blissfully unconscious of what lay before them, they bravely set out to discover a new North-west Passage into Utopia.

In the romantic Crusades, beneath the banner of the Cross, the mediæval conquerors used generally to ride at the head of their followers--both in advancing and retreating. Barr did not. In this respect he was a modern. His theory seemed to be, that, if anything went wrong, and he was first over the top, he might never come back; on the other hand, if he stuck to his dug-out, and switchboard, and dispatch-box, he might save himself a lot of messy travelling. A fraction of Peter the Hermit's naked courage and stark self-denial would have made the Rev. Dr. Robbins a much more useful leader, too.

In any case, there was a huge amount of work for the Rev. Isaac M. Barr to do at Saskatoon. There was a nondescript crew of freighters to recruit and instruct, and there was a small mountain of stores and supplies to be bought, for although later on the colonists almost learned to do without food, they were inclined to treat themselves rather well at the start. Also baggage had to be found, returning colonists to be heartened, subordinates to be watched, and a multitude of minor details to be attended to besides.

The party was brimming with queer characters. These made things very interesting for themselves, and Barr, and everybody. Puritans and free-thinkers; university and remittance men; ignoramuses and intellectuals; socialists and men of vision; ex-soldiers and ex-stay-at-homes; men who believed every word in the Bible was inspired by God, and men who believed everything in _The Daily Mail_ was the same; Methodists, Anglicans, Calvinists, Catholics, Unitarians, Agnostics, and men belonging to twenty other sects; niggards and spendthrifts; men with brothers who were officers in the Yeomanry, and men with not a single drop of blue blood in their veins at all; men with money and very little sense; men with sense and very little money; men with both and men with not much of either; all began to dribble westwards along the Battleford trail, their eyes turned wistfully towards the only, for them, ideal life--HOMESTEADING.

Four hundred wagons at the very least commenced the trip. A few speedy colonists, travelling light, reached their destination, hunted their land, scraped the top off a couple of acres, sowed them with wild oats--and wilder mustard--and were busy hacking some innocent trees down with which to build shacks, before some of the more helpless ones even thought of quitting Saskatoon.

Quite early--a week or more perhaps--the trek began to sort out the invertebrates. These came straggling back to Saskatoon with mossy chins and bedraggled looks, reciting fearful yarns about how they had been forced to leave pieces of their backbones in sloughs; the sheen of their lovely equipment in bottomless muskegs; shreds of nerve hanging on the almost perpendicular walls of yawning ravines; and, inferentially, their rapidly dwindling courage in the rapacious ooze of sticky alkali flats.

At that time, the West possessed (except nearer to Winnipeg) only the main line of the Canadian Pacific, the Calgary-Strathcona, and the Regina-Prince Albert branches, in the way of railways. The Canadian Northern transcontinental had been surveyed the previous summer, and the spot in the wilderness for which the colonists were bound was where this survey bisected the 110th meridian of longitude--almost exactly midway between the Battle and North Saskatchewan rivers.

The North-West Territories had not yet given birth to the charming twins, Alberta and Saskatchewan; but the cradle was bought, any amount of clothes were ready, and numerous attendants, in the shape of future government officials, waited round to be first with their congratulations.

Whatever induced Barr to venture so far, when there was any quantity of available land nearer, is not quite clear. Probably he was the law of survival's right-hand man; or he may have fancied himself as a second Moses. There is nothing to prove that the majority of the colonists would have refused to follow him into the Arctic Circle. All they desired was "a bit of land "--the land, the piece officially apportioned to the Colony, and to them.

During the time Trailey's belated draft was delaying them at Saskatoon, Sam and Bert amused themselves in various ways. The former decked himself out in a black, satiny shirt, an article of male apparel then greatly in vogue. These soot-hued garments were not supposed to show the dirt. Some of them didn't. The idea was a brilliant one, and the inventor of such a grand, labour-saving device Was doubtless well rewarded. A store-clerk in Saskatoon tried to sell Sam half a dozen of them.

"Look at this one I'm wearing myself," he said enthusiastically, pointing to his own shirt-collar, and then turning his coat-sleeve back so that Sam might see the wrist-band. "How long d'you think I've had this on?"

Sam was curious at first, then interested. He surveyed the store-clerk's collar, and cuff, then looked up in his face. The fellow was tall, with cadaverous features, and rather an oily skin.

"Dunno," said Sam, "but I should say abaht six months, p'raps."

The clerk laughed. He evidently enjoyed a joke.

"No," he said, "not that long; but I've had it on seven weeks. Ain't it a corker?"

Sam was awestruck. "Strike me pink!" he blurted out.

"How many d'you want?" asked the clerk.

Sam made a laborious mental calculation. "Give us four on 'em," he said. "An' 'ave yer got any black undershirts?"

"No," replied the clerk regretfully.

Sam was really grieved. He paid for his shirts and departed. The thoughts of wash-day hovered over the Barr Colonists, particularly the bachelors, like concentrated nightmares. Pioneering meant more than merely doing without tablecloths, and morning newspapers, and music, apparently. Keeping clean was a problem, too--one little problem among many much bigger ones.

Bert revolved happily round Esther Trailey, with whom he was now on speaking terms. He had mixed rather successfully with numbers of attractive girls in England, had even loved a few of them with a sort of deathless, polygamous, puppy-like fervour, but there was something infinitively more fascinating about having one's favourite girl in camp with one, in a far-off land, to protect from unknown dangers.

It is doubtful whether at home in England Bert would have come within Esther's orbit. He, as a blossoming lawyer, and she, as merely an insurance-man's daughter, would almost certainly have been separated by two distinct divisions of caste, perhaps by more. But Bert was already succumbing to the democratic Canadian spirit which despises snobbishness. He was now in a country where Mrs. Tom, and Mrs. Dick, and Mrs. Harry are all equal; and where social distinctions are almost unknown; and where janitors' wives, and the wives and daughters of farmers, and policemen, and small shopkeepers are welcomed in the luxurious drawing-rooms of high government and municipal officials, bankers, brokers, and others of the highly-educated classes.

In any event, Esther's beauty would have bridged the social gulf pretty efficiently. She was a glorious blonde, and built as symmetrically as the Medici Venus, only not quite so robustly. She was easily the loveliest girl among the colonists. All the men under sixty were unanimous about it. Even some of the women had been heard to remark that "she certainly would be rather nice if she didn't spoil herself by being so forward."

Bert thought her anything but forward. She was as tantalizing as a mirage to him. Actually, Esther was almost as bold as a swan, and pretty nearly as brazen as a flower. An exceedingly dutiful daughter, she adored her mother, against whose somewhat nagging disposition she hardly ever openly rebelled.

"Really," she used to think when she was alone sometimes; "I don't wonder at mamma being so irritable, when she sees how fearfully helpless dad is. Fancy him sacrificing all the comfort of our dear little home in England to drag us out here to live on a ranch--or whatever it is they call it! Why, he... Poor old dad!" and she would smile to herself as she recollected how pitifully pathetic he had looked when one of the horses one morning had stood on his foot, the one with the corn on it. "Ranching!" she often mused contemptuously. "Dad should have rented one of the allotment-gardens on the Headingley Road and tried his hand at that first."

It was the third or fourth morning after her father's inspiring temperance lecture in Bert's tent that Esther laughed outright at her thoughts, which had been running along lines like those just mentioned.

"What are you laughing at?" her mother demanded peevishly. Mrs. Trailey was rinsing a couple of towels in the wash-hand-basin just outside the entrance to their tent. "I don't see anything to laugh at," she went on; "especially now your father has taken to drink."

"Drink! Father!" cried Esther in astonishment. "What on earth do you mean, mamma?"

"What I say--silly," snapped Martha Trailey. "He's gone and broken my poor heart," and she twisted and wrenched at a helpless towel in the extremity of her grief.

"I can't believe it, mamma. Why, father used to lecture at the Band of Hope meetings at chapel!"

"Don't I know it! And now he's brought us down to this! Mind you don't marry a man who lectures at Band of Hope meetings--they're all alike, you may depend. The Rev. Jeremiah Sittingbourne's words are coming true--every one of 'em. The very day you were christened, when he came for tea, and I hadn't any cake made, and I had to give him bread and butter and jam, and he asked a blessing just the same as if it had been one of my best plum cakes, 'Yes, my dear Mrs. Trailey,' he said, after he'd drunk four cups of tea, and then wiped his whiskers on his pocket-handkerchief--you remember his white whiskers all stained yellow round his mouth, don't you, Esther? 'Yes,' he said----"

"Of course, I don't remember, mamma. I was only a baby. But where did dad get the drink?"

"How do I know where he got it? He's saturated with it yet. He smells like that low public-house at the top of the High Street, where that cat, Mrs. What's-her-name, the one the chapel-folks said did away with her first husband; you know the one I mean--'The Woman in Black'--or is it Pink?--the public-house is called. Oh, dear me! what will become of us now? What with a drunken husband; and a daughter that should have been a son---and would have been if my prayers had been answered--but it's like the Rev. Mr. Sittingbourne----"

"Sh-h, 'sh-h, mamma! here's dad coming now. One of the horses is bringing him on the end of its rope. Don't for goodness' sake let him hear you carrying on so. Perhaps he was worrying about our long journey, and----"

"Worrying! Your father worrying! Would to God--Oh! that ever I should say such a thing!--and me with two brothers missionaries--or would have been if they hadn't both been taken to heaven in their infancy when your grandmother Bickering was having children too fast. Mind you never have children too----"

"Mamma! Stop it! Do please remember that I'm grown up now, and may understand some of the things you are talking about."

"Ah, my girl, you'll understand well enough if you ever get a drunkard for a husband. And you'd better watch yourself with that young fellow next door but one. Those flighty young men who wear velvet corduroy breeches generally come to a bad end. I remember the Rev.----"

"Mamma! I won't listen. Here are Sam and Mr. Tressider coming this way now.... How do I look in this old blouse?"

Esther hurriedly disappeared within the Trailey tent, where, among many other things, a mirror was conveniently kept.

The two young men were indeed approaching. Bert, ignoring formalities, commenced chatting with Mrs. Trailey. Sam, who had noticed the sparks falling from the good lady's eyes, went and assisted her husband to tie his horse to the wagon. Tying knots in halter-shanks was a problem in advanced mathematics for Trailey, and one which threatened everlastingly to remain as much of a mystery. He had tied hundreds of men to annual insurance premiums for the rest of their lives--making a neat job, too; but when it came to tying a horse to a wagon-wheel with a bit of rope, well, that was not so easy.

"I trust the howling didn't upset you the other night," Bert was saying. "It was rather an unearthly row, wasn't it?"

"Yes; and they say those animals are ferocious and will attack women and children when they are in packs and famished."

Mrs. Trailey was inclined to sacrifice everything to fluency. She turned towards Sam, who with Trailey had strolled up to the tent. She was just going off into another reminiscent flight, when the little man broke in:

"Them animals are skulkin' cowards, missis." He had evidently overheard Mrs. Trailey's last remark. "They ain't got no more nerve nor a sixpenny rabbit. That one the uvver night shut up when me an' yore good 'usband 'ere went ahtside an' made a noise like a dyin' sheep."

Mrs. Trailey went for Sam as though she had known him for years. Her face reddened, and her greenish eyes flashed fire.

"So you were with my husband, were you? And you're the serpent in his garden, are you?--tempting him, and leading him away from the narrow path. Then perhaps you can inform me where he got his drink from?"

Sam was not the slightest bit discomfited by Martha Trailey's anger. "I only brought 'im 'ome, ma'am," he said, with his customary good-humour. "My pal 'ere, Mr. Tressider, gev 'im a little snifter--ter keep aht the cold hair, as yer might say. 'E'd bin fer a walk dahn ter the river, ter communicate wiv 'is thoughts."

Mrs. Tressider now faced Bert, whom for some inexplicable reason she liked much less than she did Sam.

"You ought to be downright ashamed of yourself, Mr. Tressider. You've ruined my life--wheedling my poor, weak-minded husband away from the fold. Never since he signed the pledge the year we were married, and then started speaking at the Band of Hope, has he touched a drop of drink, and that's twenty-two years come June quarter-day. I remember it well, because the Rev. Duncan Mc--Mc--dear me, what was his name now, William?--McWhipple, was it? No--it must have been McNoddy, or McTavish, or some name like that. Never mind, though. I remember when he filled in the form for my husband to sign, I asked him if he knew of a public-house where we could sell the barrel of ale we had in the cellar. My husband wanted to empty it down the drain, but that seemed such a sinful waste. 'I really don't know of such a public-house, Mrs. Trailey,' the Rev. McWheesey said---Ah! that was his name; I remember now! And then he told us to try The Flying Horse on the corner, because, he said, the proprietor was Church of England, and would most likely allow us half what we'd paid for the ale, and so--

"So the Rev. McWhat's-his-name was a bit of a lad, eh?" interposed Bert laughingly.

"He was sixty, if he was a day; and as good a preacher as ever came to our chapel. He was a saint, young man--if ever there was one. That's why we got him to marry us. My husband gave him four shillings for himself--two two-shilling pieces. I remember it all just as if it were yesterday. But he died soon after, poor creature."

"Ah-h," sighed Trailey, "so he did." That sleepy-eyed rancher was seated on a box of evaporated apples which stood conveniently just without the tent. "So he did," he repeated absently to himself, being careful to turn well away from his wife's challenging eyes.

Martha Trailey was a smallish woman with faded, yellow hair; and she was a scold. Also she carried the worship of cleanliness to the point where it becomes a nuisance. The husbands of such women never know the glory of dropping cigar-ash on their own carpets, neither do they experience the joy of paddling through the house in muddy boots. They slink about their own homes like lodgers three months in arrears with their board-bill, and unless they go into the furniture-removing business, so that they may with impunity upset other women's rooms, they are likely to look henpecked and soured, and soon begin secretly to wish they were either unmarried or dead, whichever strikes them as being the more preferable state.

Presently Esther emerged from the tent, looking as lovely as the sparkling, spring morning itself. Smiling a greeting at Bert and Sam, she stood listening to the conversation. She wore a white silk blouse, short grey tweed skirt and polished brown shoes. Her hair of burnished gold was drawn back loosely and tied low on her neck. The light from a glittering sun played hide-and-seek in its folds, while tiny currents of breeze wafted a few stray wisps of silken splendour about her face.

Bert was lost in admiration, and showed it, and, not being buried under six feet of earth, Esther rather enjoyed the sensation. Even Sam was constrained to mutter to himself--"Gawd! wot 'air!"

Esther had heard her mother's prolix reminiscences from within the tent. Thinking to make some sort of excuse for them, she said:

"Mamma is a bit harassed. She doesn't sleep very well in the tent."

"And how do you know, young lady?" Mrs. Trailey retorted, eyeing her daughter from golden crown to shining shoes in one swift glance of appraisal tinged with pride. "I notice you sleep well enough--and long enough, too; even if we are pigging it in a beastly tent--leaving your mother to wash and worry and battle with this everlasting dirt. Why, when I was younger than you are by three years and more, and long before I ever dreamt of marrying a drunkard"--and Martha Trailey cast a scorching glance at her husband, who was dreamily surveying a fluffy bit of cloud which hung in the crystal air like a tiny puff of white smoke--"I was scrubbing and washing and darning my finger-ends off from morn till night--H'm! there goes that dolly who was in our cabin on the boat, Mrs. What's-her-name--the one who was always pulling people to pieces--never did her hair in the morning; only half washed herself; shoes all undone; her bodice where it showed above her blouse as black as Sam's shirt there; just lolled about and talked and talked till I thought sometimes I should scream. I pity that husband of hers. Just look at the poor fellow perched on top of that load!"

"Anuvver rarncher," commented Sam, as they all turned to watch a city-bred colonist, in white collar and cuffs, driving an ox-team, which waddled past with a ludicrous, swaying gait.

"I suppose we shall look something like that in a day or two," said Esther--"mother and I balanced on top of the load, and dad driving the horses."

Mrs. Trailey snorted disgust and flung a towel across a tent-rope where she left it to dry.

Trailey withdrew his vacant stare from the speck of fleecy cloud and let it rest for a moment upon the passing oxen.

"Ah-h," he sighed, but whether with regret, resignation, sublime content, or indigestion, it is difficult to say. It was his favourite expression, and one equally applicable to all situations. It seemed to denote a sort of fatalism, a passive "amen" to everything.

"Would you care to come for a stroll through the camp, Miss Trailey?" said Bert, apparently anxious to ease the tension obviously existing in the Trailey family.

Esther smiled consent, whereupon the couple walked off in the direction of Saskatoon, which was about a quarter of a mile away. They were a splendid-looking pair. Both were bare-headed. Esther's hair glistened gloriously in the sun. Many an admiring glance was cast in their direction as they slowly threaded their way through the camp. Youth, that incomparable ally, was heavily in league with them both.

"Did you really give father some drink, Mr. Tressider?" Esther asked presently.

Bert smiled and looked down at his lovely companion. She didn't appear to be the least bit annoyed.

"Yes--a drop. Why?"

"Mother will never forgive you. She has such a horror of the drink."

"So has your father, I assure you. He took quite a lot of persuading at first; but after he'd drowned his conscience in the preliminary gulp, he became quite partial to it. What is your own standpoint on the drink question?"

"I'm not rabidly prejudiced. In fact, I think a good spree would do some temperance fanatics good."

"For a Band of Hope lecturer's daughter you are a trifle advanced, aren't you?"

"Oh, I don't know. Even the daughters of temperance lecturers can have opinions, I suppose--not to say tolerant ones. Some people are so occupied with their neighbours' failings that they entirely overlook their own. I don't for the life of me see what right anyone who is full of envy, and spite, and cant, and who eats as much as a pig, has to talk about a man who occasionally drinks a drop too much."

"By Jove! you're something of a philosopher. That's rather unusual for a woman, isn't it?--a young, good-looking one, at any rate."

"Am I good-looking then?" laughed Esther carelessly.

"No, you're not. You are the most beautiful----"

"Just look at the sky. Did you ever see it so far away in England?"

Bert looked at his companion's upturned face, which was rosy with blushes.

"No, I didn't. It's too dashed far away. This country would be a lot cosier if it weren't so big. But coming back to----"

"----And this air," interposed Esther; "surely it is blowing from off a frozen sea of wine," and she opened her pretty mouth slightly, inhaling deeply.

"You evidently hate compliments," said Bert.

"I detest them. Talk about something else. What are you intending to do when you get to your land?"

Bert paused a little while before replying. The change of subject was too sudden, too much of a flop from the heights of playful badinage with a lovely young woman, to the sordid depths of reality.

"Jolly well get married--that is if I can persuade some charming girl to have me," and as Esther turned and looked at him, probably to see how earnest he was, his eyes twinkled, half humorously, half seriously.

"Some nice girl you know in England, I suppose?"

"Quite likely," returned Bert seriously--then all at once thinking of something, he abruptly extracted a photograph from his inside jacket-pocket, and passed it to his companion.

"What d'you think of that young lady--for a rancher's wife?" he asked.

Esther examined the picture with careful interest.

"I think she is a very strong-minded girl," she said coolly, as she returned the portrait.

"You are absolutely right--she is. She's my cousin."

Esther requested another glimpse of the photograph.

"Hasn't she lovely features?" she said. "And her eyes are simply wonderful. Married, I suppose?--but I think you said so, or----"

"Yes, married, thank God! the day before we left Liverpool."

Esther returned the picture to its owner. All at once she felt generously inclined towards the original.

"She's the loveliest girl I've ever seen--in a photograph, of course. How lucky her husband must think himself!"

Bert, who was only twenty-one, whereas Esther was at least getting on for twenty, was a shade baffled by this sudden display of enthusiasm.

"Thanks!" he said, returning the photograph to his pocket. "He must. But haven't we gone far enough? Let's wander back; or, better still, let's stroll down by the river and watch the logs and trees go floating by; we can circle into camp that way."

"I should love to, but we must go straight home. Mamma will be awfully vexed if I'm not there to pretend to help her with dinner."

"Very well. Have you enjoyed the walk?"

"It's been lovely."

They strolled back. Esther was radiant. She was full of piquant remarks regarding the curious sights surrounding them. With an adorable mixture of ingenuousness and shrewdness she asked Bert innumerable questions, which he, in his tremendously superior wisdom, took great joy in answering.

When they had almost reached their tents again, Bert commented on Esther's high spirits. "You are evidently looking forward to our trip to the Colony, Miss Trailey?"

"Yes, I am. It will be so amusing to watch dad driving the horses, and mamma sitting on top of the packing-cases giving a thousand orders."

"And you--what shall you be doing?"

"Oh, I shall walk most of the time. I love walking."

"So do I. Perhaps we can arrange to----" but just then, annoyingly, Esther excused herself, and ran off into the tent.

Bert joined Sam, who was busily engaged with William Trailey, teaching him how to steer a team by pulling an imaginary left rein to go to the left, and an imaginary right one to go to the right.

"We s'll make a rarncher of yer yet, guv'ner," said Sam, as the intricate problem slowly percolated into his pupil's intelligence.

Trailey didn't seem at all sure about it. At the close of the lesson, he said: "Thank you very much, Sam. I think I shall be able to manage it after a few years."