Chapter VIII: Part IV (4)

I took a roll of bank notes from my trousers' pocket and with my back to the gang counted out ten tens. I always carry a good wad with me with a view to convenience if I have to make a hurried exit from the scene of my operations.

He shook his head and stood away. "Not till I've earned it, McLeod."

What fools very young men make of themselves sometimes. The girl arose, folding her damp shawl over her head, and made towards the door; but he intercepted her, saying it was late and as their ways lay in the same direction, he would take her home. She shot a quick glance at him and went out. Some little uneasy action of his caught my notice. In a second my suspicions were aroused; the meeting had been arranged, and I knew from what I had seen him to be that the girl was doomed.

It was all very well for me to do up Cayuga Joe--he was the Indian whose hundred dollars' worth of cordwood I owned in lieu of six quarts of bad whiskey--but his women-folks were entitled to be respected at least while I was around. I looked at my watch; it was past midnight. I suddenly got boiling hot clean through.

"Look here, Tom Barrett," I said, "I ain't a saint, as everybody knows; but if you don't treat that girl right, you'll have to square it up with me, d'you understand?"

He threw me a nasty look. "Keep your gallantry for some occasion when it's needed, Dan McLeod," he sneered, and with a laugh I didn't like, he followed the girl out into the rain.

I walked some distance behind them for two miles. When they reached her father's house and went in, I watched her through the small uncurtained window put something on the fire to cook, then arouse her mother, who even at that late hour sat beside the stove smoking a clay pipe. The old woman had apparently met with some accident; her head and shoulders were bound up, and she seemed in pain. Barrett talked with her considerably and once when I caught sight of his face, it was devilish with some black passion I did not recognize. Although I felt sure the girl was now all right for the night, there was something about this meeting I didn't like; so I lay around until just daylight when Jackson and Lige Smith came through the bush as pre-arranged should I not return to Jake's.

It was not long before Elizabeth and Tom came out again and entered a thick little bush behind the shanty. Lige lifted the axe off the woodpile with a knowing look, and we all three followed silently. I was surprised to find it a well beaten and equally well concealed trail. All my suspicions returned. I knew now that Barrett was a bad lot all round, and as soon as I had quit using him and his coat, I made up my mind to rid my quarters of him; fortunately I knew enough about him to use that knowledge as a whip-lash.

We followed them for something over a mile, when--heaven and hell! The trail opened abruptly on the clearing where lay my recently acquired cordwood with my five barrels of whiskey concealed in its midst.

The girl strode forward, and with the strength of a man, pitched down a dozen sticks with lightning speed.

"There!" she cried, turning to Tom. "There you find him--you find him whiskey. You say you spill. No more my father he's drunk all day, he beat my mother."

I stepped out.

"So, Tom Barrett," I said, "you've played the d----d sneak and hunted it out!"

He fairly jumped at the sound of my voice; then he got white as paper, and then--something came into his face that I never saw before. It was a look like his father's, the old missionary.

"Yes, McLeod," he answered. "And I've hunted _you_ out. It's cost me the loss of a whole term at college and a considerable amount of self-respect, but I've got my finger on you now!"

The whole infernal trick burst right in on my intelligence. If I had had a revolver, he would have been a dead man; but border traders nowadays are not desperadoes with bowie knives and hip pockets--

"You surely don't mean to split on me?" I asked.

"I surely don't mean to do anything else," he cheeked back.

"Then, Tom Barrett," I sputtered, raging, "you're the dirtiest cad and the foulest liar that ever drew the breath of life."

"I dare say I am," he said smoothly. Then with rising anger he advanced, peering into my face with his foxy eyes. "And I'll tell you right here, Dan McLeod, I'd be a hundred times a cad, and a thousand times a liar to save the souls and bodies of our Indians from going to hell, through your cursed whiskey."

I have always been a brave man, but I confess I felt childishly scared before the wild, mesmeric power of his eyes. I was unable to move a finger, but I blurted out boastfully: "If it wasn't for your preacher's hat and coat I'd send your sneaking soul to Kingdom Come, right here!"

Instantly he hauled off his coat and tie and stood with clenched fists while his strange eyes fairly spat green fire.

"Now," he fumed, "I've discarded my cloth, Dan McLeod. You've got to deal with a man now, not with a minister."

To save my immortal soul I can't tell why I couldn't stir. I only know that everything seemed to drop out of sight except his two little blazing eyes. I stood like a fool, queered, dead queered right through.

He turned politely to the girl. "You may go, Elizabeth," he said, "and thank you for your assistance." The girl turned and went up the trail without a word.

With the agility of a cat he sprang on to the wood-pile, pitched off enough cordwood to expose my entire "cellar;" then going across to Lige, he coolly took the axe out of his hand. His face was white and set, but his voice was natural enough as he said:

"Now, gentlemen, whoever cares to interrupt me will get the blade of this axe buried in his brain, as heaven is my witness."

I didn't even curse as he split the five barrels into slivers and my well-fought-for whiskey soaked into the slush. Once he lifted his head and looked at me, and the mouth I didn't understand revealed itself; there was something about it like a young Napoleon's.

I never hated a man in my life as I hated Tom Barrett then. That I daren't resist him made it worse. I watched him finish his caddish job, throw down the axe, take his coat over his arm, and leave the clearing without a word.

But no sooner was he out of sight than my devilish temper broke out, and I cursed and blasphemed for half an hour. I'd have his blood if it cost my neck a rope, and that too before he could inform on us. The boys were with me, of course, poor sort of dogs with no grit of their own, and with the axe as my only weapon we left the bush and ran towards the river.

I fairly yelled at my good luck as I reached the high bank. There, a few rods down shore, beside the open water sat Tom Barrett, calling something out to his folks across the river, and from upstream came the deafening thunder of the Onondaga Jam that, loosened by the rain, was shouldering its terrific force downwards with the strength of a million drunken demons.

We had him like a rat in a trap, but his foxy eyes had seen us. He sprang to his feet, hesitated for a fraction of a moment, saw the murder in our faces, then did what any man but a fool would have done--ran.

We were hot on his heels. Fifty yards distant an old dug-out lay hauled up. He ran it down into the water, stared wildly at the oncoming jam, then at us, sprang into the canoe and grabbed the paddle.

I was murderously mad. I wheeled the axe above my shoulder and let fly at him. It missed his head by three inches.

He was paddling for dear life now, and, our last chance gone, we stood riveted to the spot, watching him. On the bluff across the river stood his half-blood mother, the raw March wind whipping her skirts about her knees; but her strained, ashen face showed she never felt its chill. Below with his feet almost in the rapidly rising water, stood the old missionary, his scant grey hair blowing across his eyes that seemed to look out into eternity--amid stream Tom, paddling with the desperation of death, his head turning every second with the alertness of an animal to gauge the approaching ice-shove.

Even I wished him life then. Twice I thought him caught in the crush, but he was out of it like an arrow, and in another moment he had leapt ashore while above the roar of the grinding jam I heard him cry out with a strange exultation:

"Father, I've succeeded. I have had to be a scoundrel and a cad, but I've trapped them at last!"

He staggered forward then, sobbing like a child, and the old man's arms closed round him, just as two heavy jaws of ice snatched the dug-out, hurled it off shore and splintered it to atoms.

Well! I had made a bad blunder, which I attempted to rectify by reaching Buffalo that night; but Tom Barrett had won the game. I was arrested at Fort Erie, handcuffed, jailed, tried, convicted of attempted assault and illicit whiskey-trading on the Grand River Indian Reserve--and spent the next five years in Kingston Penitentiary, the guest of Her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria.

Mother o' the Men

A Story of the Canadian North-West Mounted Police

The commander's wife stood on the deck of the "North Star" looking at the receding city of Vancouver as if to photograph within her eyes and heart every detail of its wonderful beauty--its clustering, sisterly houses, its holly hedges, its ivied walls, its emerald lawns, its teeming streets and towering spires. She seemed to realize that this was the end of the civilized trail; that henceforth, for many years, her sight would know only the unbroken line of icy ridge and sky of the northernmost outposts of the great Dominion. To her hand clung a little boy of ten, and about her hovered some twenty young fellows, gay in the scarlet tunics, the flashing buffalo-head buttons, that bespoke the soldierly uniform of the Canadian North-West Mounted Police. They were the first detachment bound for the Yukon, and were under her husband's command.

She was the only woman in the "company." The major had purposely selected unmarried men for his staff, for in the early nineties the Arctic was no place for a woman. But when the Government at Ottawa saw fit to commission Major Lysle to face the frozen North, and with a handful of men build and garrison a fort at the rim of the Polar Seas, Mrs. Lysle quietly remarked, "I shall accompany you, so shall the boy," and the major blessed her in his heart, for had she not so decided, it would mean absolute separation from wife and child for from three to five years, as in those days no railways, no telegraph lines, stretched their pulsing fingers into the Klondyke. One mail went in, one mail came out, each year--that was all.

"It's good-bye, Graham lad," said one of the scarlet-coated soldiers, tossing the little boy to his back. "Look your longest at those paved streets, and the green, green things. There'll be months of just snow away up there," and he nodded towards the north.

"Oh, but father says it won't be lonely at all up there," asserted the child. "He says I'll grow _terribly_ big in a few years; that people always grow in the North, and maybe I'll soon be able to wear buffalo buttons and have stripes on my sleeve like you;" and the childish fingers traced the outline of the sergeant's chevrons.

"I hope, dear, that you shall do all that, soon," said Mrs. Lysle; "but first you must _win_ those stripes, my boy, and if you win them as the sergeant did, mother shall be very proud of you."

At which, the said sergeant hastily set the boy down, and, with confusion written all over his strong young face, made some excuse to disappear, for no man in the world is as shy or modest about his deeds of valor as is a North-West "Mounted."

"Won't you tell me, mother, how Sergeant Black got those stripes on his sleeve?" begged the boy.

"Perhaps to-night, son, when you are in bed--just before mother says good-night--we'll see. But look! there is the city, fading, fading." Then after a short silence: "There, Graham, it has gone."

"But isn't that it 'way over there, mother?" persisted the boy. "I see the sun shining on the roofs."

Mrs. Lysle shook her head. "No, dearie; that is the snow on the mountain peaks. The city has--gone."

But far into the twilight she yet stood watching the purple sea, the dove-gray coast. Her world was with her--the man she had chosen for her life partner, and the little boy that belonged to them both--but there are times even in the life of a wife and mother when her soul rebels at cutting herself off from her womenkind, and all that environment of social life among women means, even if the act itself is voluntary on her part. It was a relief, then, from her rather sombre musing at the ship's rail, when the major lightly placed both hands on her shoulders and said, "Grahamie has toddled off to the stateroom. The sea air is weighting down his eyelids."

"Sea air?" laughed Mrs. Lysle. "Don't you believe it, Horace. The young monkey had been just scampering about the deck with the men until his little legs are tired out. I'm half afraid our 'Mounted' boys bid fair to spoil him. I'll go to him, for I promised him a story to-night."

"Which you would rather perish than not tell him, if you promised," smiled the major. "You govern that boy the same way I do my men, eh, dear?"

"It's the only way to govern boys or soldiers," she laughed back from the head of the companionway. "Then both boy and soldier will keep their promises to you."

The Major watched her go below, then said to himself, "She's right--she's always right. She was right to come north, and bring him, too. But I am a coward, for I daren't tell her she'll have to part from him, or from me, some day. He will have to be sent to the front again; he can't grow up unlearned, untaught, and there are no schools in our Arctic world, and she must go with him, or stay with me; but I can't tell her. Yes, I'm a coward." But Major Lysle was the only person in all the world who would have thought or said so.

"And will you tell me how Sergeant Black won his stripes, mother, before I go to sleep?" begged Graham.

"Yes, little 'North-West,'" she replied, using the pet name the men in barracks frequently called the child. "It's just a wee story of one man fighting it out alone--just alone, single-handed--with no reinforcements but his own courage, his own self-reliance."

"That's just what father says, isn't it, mother, to just do things yourself?" asked the boy.

"That's it, dear, and that is what Sergeant Black did. He was only corporal then, and he was dispatched from headquarters to arrest some desperate horse thieves who were trying to drive a magnificent bunch of animals across the boundary line into the United States, and then sell them. These men were breaking two laws. They had not only stolen the horses, but were trying to evade the American Customs. Your father always called them 'The Rapparees,' for they were Irish, and fighters, and known from the Red River to the Rockies as plunderers and desperadoes. There was some trouble to the north at the same time; barracks was pretty well thinned; not a man could be spared to help him. But when Corporal Black got his instructions and listened to the commanding officer say, 'If that detachment returns from the Qu'Appelle Valley within twenty-four hours, I'll order them out to assist you, corporal,' the plucky little soldier just stood erect, clicked his heels together, saluted, and replied, 'I can do it alone, sir.'

"'I notice you don't say you _think_ you can do it alone,' remarked the officer dryly. He was a lenient man and often conversed with his men.

"'It is not my place to _think_, sir. I've just got to _do_,' replied the corporal, and saluting again he was gone.

"All that night he galloped up the prairie trail on the track of the thieves, and just before daybreak he sighted them, entrenched in a coulee, where their campfires made no glow, and the neighing horses could not be heard. There were six men all told, busying themselves getting breakfast and staking the animals preparatory to hiding through the day hours, and getting across the boundary line the next night. Both men and beasts were wearied with the long journey, but Corporal Black is the sort of man that _never_ wearies in either brain or body. He never hesitated a second. Jerking his rat-skin cap down, covering his face as much as possible, he rode silently around to the south of the encampment, clutched a revolver in each hand, and rode within earshot, then said four words:

"'Stand, or I fire!' If a cyclone had swooped down on them, the thieves could not have been more astounded. But they stood, and stood yards away from their own guns. Then they demanded to know who he was, for of course they thought him a thief like themselves, probably following them to capture their spoil. Then Corporal Black unbuttoned his great-coat and flung it wide open, displaying the brilliant scarlet tunic of our own dear Mounted Police. They needed no other reply. At the point of his revolver he ordered them to unstake the horses. Then not one man was allowed to mount, but, breakfastless and frenzied, they were compelled to walk before him, driving the stolen animals ahead, mile upon mile, league after league.

"Father says it was a strange-looking procession that trudged into barracks. Twenty beautiful, spirited horses, six hangdog-looking thieves, with a single exhausted horse in the rear, on which was mounted an alert, keen-eyed and very hungry young soldier who wore a scarlet tunic and buffalo-head buttons. The next day Corporal Black had another stripe on his sleeve." [The foregoing story is an actual occurrence. The author had the honor of knowing personally the North-West Mounted Policeman who achieved his rank through this action.]

Her voice ceased, and she looked down at her son. The child lay for a moment, wide-eyed and tense. Then some indescribable quality seemed to make him momentarily too large, too tall, for the narrow ship's berth. Then:

"And he fought it out _alone_, mother, just alone--single-handed?"

"Yes, Grahamie," she said, softly.

"Fought alone!" he said almost to himself. Then aloud: "Thank you, mother, for telling me that story. Perhaps some day I'll have to fight it out alone, and when I do, I'll try to remember Sergeant Black. Good-night, mother."

"Good-night, my boy."

* * * * *

The long, long winter was doing its worst, and that was unspeakable in its dreariness and its misery. The "Fort" was just about completed before things froze up--narrow, small quarters constructed of rough logs, surrounded by a stockade--but above its roof the Union Jack floated, and beneath it flashed the scarlet tunics, the buffalo-head buttons, the clanking spurs of as brave a band of men, "queened over" by as courageous a woman, as ever Gibraltar or the Throne Room knew.

As time went on the major's wife began to find herself "Mother o' the Men" (as an old Klondyker named her), as well as of her own boy. Those blizzard-blown, snow-hardened, ice-toughened soldiers went to her for everything--sympathy, assistance, advice--for in that lonely outpost military lines were less strictly drawn, and she could oftentimes do for the men what would be considered amazingly unofficial, were those little humane kindnesses done in barracks at Regina or Macleod or Calgary. She nursed the men through every illness, preparing the food herself for the invalids. She attended to many a frozen face and foot and finger. She smoothed out their differences, inspirited them when they grew discouraged, talked to them of their own people, so that their home ties should not be entirely severed because they could write letters or receive them but once a year. But there were days when the sight of a woman's face would have been a glimpse of paradise to her, days when she almost wildly regretted her boy had not been a girl--just a little sweet-voiced girl, a thing of her own sex and kind. But it always seemed at these moments that Grahamie would providentially rush in to her with some glad story of sport or adventure, and she would snatch him tightly in her arms and say, "No, no, boy of mine, I don't want even a girlie, if I may only keep you." And once when her thoughts had been more than usually traitorous in wishing he had been a girl, the child seemed to divine some idea of her struggle; for a moment his firm little fingers caught her hand encouragingly, and he said in a whisper, "Are you fighting it out alone, mother--just single-handed?"

"Just single-handed, dearest," she replied.

Then he scampered away, but paused to call back gravely, "Remember Sergeant Black, mother."

"Yes, Grahamie, I'll try to," she replied brightly. At that moment he was the lesser child of the two.

And so the winter crept slowly on, and the brief, brilliant summer flitted in, then out, like a golden dream. The second snows were upon the little fort, the second Christmas, the second long, long weeks and months of the new year. An unspoken horror was staring them all in the face: navigation did not open when expected, and supplies were running low, pitifully low. The smoked and dried meats, the canned things, flour, sealed lard, oatmeal, hard-tack, dried fruits--_everything_ was slowly but inevitably giving out day upon day. Before and behind them stretched hummocks of trailless snow. Not an Indian, not a dog train, not even a wild animal, had set foot in that waste for weeks. In early March the major's wife had hidden a single package of gelatine, a single tin of dried beef, and a single half pound of cornstarch. "If sickness comes to my boys" (she did not say boy), "I shall at least have saved these," she told herself, in justification of her act. "A sick man cannot live on beans." But now they were down to beans--just beans and lard boiled together. Then a day dawned when there was not even a spoonful of lard left. "Beans straight!"--it was the death knell, for beans straight--beans without grease--kill the strongest man in a brief span of days. Oh, that the ice bridges would melt, the seas open, the ships come!

But that night the men at mess had beans with unlimited grease, its peculiar flavor peppered and spiced out of it. Life, life was to be theirs even yet! What had renewed it?

But one of the men had caught something on his fork and extracted it from the food on his plate. It was an overlooked _wick_. The major's wife had begun to boil up the tallow candles. [Fact.] But the cheer that shook that rough log roof came right from hearts that blessed her, and brought her to the door of the men's mess-room. The men were on their feet instantly. "A light has broken upon us, or rather _within_ us, Mrs. Lysle!" cried a self-selected spokesman.

"Illuminating, isn't it, boys?" She laughed, then turned away, for the cheers and tears were very close together.

Then one day when even starving stomachs almost revolted at the continued coarse mixture, a ribbon of blue proclaimed the open sea, and into those waters swept the longed-for ship. Yet, strangely enough, that night the "Mother o' the Men" wept a storm of tears, the only tears she had yielded to in those long five years. For with its blessing of food the ship had her hold bursting with liquors and wines, the hideous commerce that invades the pioneer places of the earth. Should the already weakened, ill-fed and scurvy-threatened garrison break into those supplies, all the labor and patience and mothering of this courageous woman would be useless, for after a bean diet in the Northern latitudes, whiskey is deadly to brain and body, and the victim maddens or dies.

"You are crying, mother, and the ship here at last!" said Grahamie's voice at her shoulder. "Crying when we are all so happy."

"Mother is a little upset, dear. You must try to forget you ever saw her eyes wet."

"I'll forget," said the boy with a finality she could not question. "The ship is so full of good things, mother. We'll think of that, and--forget, won't we?" he added.

"_All_ the things in the ship are not good, Grahamie, boy. If they were, mother would not cry," she said.

"I see," he said, but stole from her side with a strained, puzzled look in his young eyes.

Outside he was met by a laughing, joyous dozen of men. One swung the child to his shoulder, shouting, "Hurrah, little 'North-West'! Hurrah! we are all coming to pay tribute to your mother. Look at the dainties we have got for her from the ship!"

"I'm afraid you can't see mother just now," said the boy. "Mother is a little upset. You see, the ship is so full of good things--but then, _all_ the things in the ship are not good. If they were, mother would not cry." In the last words he unconsciously imitated his mother's voice.

A profound silence enveloped the men. Then one spoke. "She'll never have cause to cry about anything _I_ do, boys."

"Nor I!" "Nor I!" "Nor I!" rang out voice after voice.

"Run back, you blessed little 'North-West,' and tell mother not to be scared for the boys. We'll stand by her to a man. She'll never regret that ship's coming in," said the gallant soldier, slipping the boy to the ground. And to the credit of the men who wore buffalo-head buttons, she never did.

And in all her Yukon years the major's wife had but one more heartache. That agonizing winter had taught her many things, but the bitterest knowledge to come to her was the fact that her boy must be sent "to the front." To be sure, he was growing up the pet of all the police; he was becoming manlier, sturdier, more self-reliant every day. But education he _must_ have, and another winter of such deprivation and horror he was too young, too tender, to endure. It was then that the battle arose in her heart. The boy was to be sent to college. Was it her place to accompany him to the distant South-east, to live by herself alone in the college town, just to be near him and watch over his young life, or was it here with her pioneer soldier husband, and his little isolated garrison of "boys" whom she had mothered for two years?

The inevitable day came when she had to shut her teeth and watch Grahamie go aboard the southward-bound vessel alone, in the care of a policeman who was returning on sick leave--to watch him stand at the rail, his little face growing dimmer and more shadowy as the sea widened between them--watch him through tearless, courageous eyes, then turn away with the hopelessness of knowing that for one entire endless year she must wait for word of his arrival. [Fact.] But his last brave good-bye words rang through her ears every day of that eternal year: "We'll remember Sergeant Black, won't we, mother? And we'll each fight it out alone, single-handed, and maybe they'll give us a chevron for our sleeves when it's over."

But that night when the barracks was wrapped in gloom over the loss of its boy chum, the surgeon appeared in the men's quarters. "Hello, boys!" he said, none too cheerfully. "Dull doings, I say. I'm busy enough, though, keeping an eye on Madam, the major's lady. She's so deadly quiet, so self-controlled, I'm just a little afraid. I wish something would happen to--well, make her less calm."

"_I'll_ 'happen,' doctor," chirped up a genial-looking young chap named O'Keefe. "I'll get sick and threaten to die. You say it's serious; she'll be all interest and medicine spoons, and making me jelly inside an hour."

The surgeon eyed him sternly, then: "O'Keefe," he said, "you're the cleverest man I ever came across in the force, and I've been in it eleven years. But, man alive! what have you been doing to yourself? Overwork, no food--why, man, you're sick; look as if you had fever and a touch of pneumonia. You're a very sick man. Go to bed at once--at once, I say!"

O'Keefe looked the surgeon in the eye, winked meaningly, and O'Keefe turned in, although it was but early afternoon. At six o'clock an orderly stood at the door of the major's quarters. Mrs. Lysle was standing on the steps, her eyes fixed on the far horizon across which a ship had melted away.

"Beg pardon, madam," said the orderly, saluting, "but young O'Keefe is very ill. We have had the surgeon, but the--the--pain's getting worse. He's just yelling with agony."

"I'll go at once, orderly. I should have been told before," she replied; and burying her own heartache, she hurried to the men's quarters. Her anxious eyes sought the surgeon's. "Oh, doctor!" she said, "this poor fellow must be looked after. What can I do to help?"

"Everything, Mrs. Lysle," gruffed the surgeon with a professional air. "He is very ill. He must be kept wrapped in hot linseed poultices and--"

"Oh, I say, doctor," remonstrated poor O'Keefe, "I'm not that bad."

"You're a very sick man," scowled the surgeon. "Now, Mrs. Lysle has graciously offered to help nurse you. She'll see that you have hot fomentations every half hour. I'll drop in twice a day to see how you are getting along." And with that miserable prospect before him, poor O'Keefe watched the surgeon disappear.

"I simply _had_ to order those half-hour fomentations, old man," apologized the surgeon that night. "You see, she must be kept busy--just kept at it every minute we can make her do so. Do you think you can stand it?"

"Of course I can," fumed the victim. "But for goodness' sake, don't put me on sick rations! I'll die, sure, if you do."

"I've ordered you the best the commissariat boasts--heaps of meat, butter, even eggs, my boy. Think of it--_eggs_--you lucky young Turk!" laughed the surgeon.

Then followed nights and days of torture. The "boys" would line up to the "sick-room" four times daily, and blandly ask how he was.

"How _am_ I?" young O'Keefe would bellow. "How _am_ I? I'm well and strong enough to brain every one of you fellows, surgeon included, when I get out of this!"

"But when _are_ you going to get out? When will you be out danger?" they would chuckle.

"Just when I see that haunted look go out of her eyes, and not till then!" he would roar.

And he kept his word. He was really weak when he got up, and pretended to be weaker, but the lines of acute self-control had left Mrs. Lysle's face, the suffering had gone from her eyes, the day the noble O'Keefe took his first solid meal in her presence.

Even the major never discovered that worthy bit of deception. But a year later, when the mail went out, the surgeon sent the entire story to Graham, who, in writing to his mother the following year, perplexed her by saying:

"....But there are three men in the force I love better than anyone in the world except you, mother. The first, of course, is father, the others, Sergeant Black and Private O'Keefe."

"Why O'Keefe?" she asked herself.

But loyal little "North-West" never told her.

The Nest Builder

"Well! if some women aren't born just to laugh!" remarked the station agent's wife. "Have you seen that round-faced woman in the waiting-room?"

"No," replied the agent. "I've been too busy; I've had to help unload freight. I heard some children in there, though; they were playing and laughing to beat the band."

"_Nine_ of them, John! _Nine_ of them, and the oldest just twelve!" gasped his wife. "Why, I'd be crazy if I were in her place. She's come all the way from Grey or Bruce in Ontario--I forget which--with not a soul to help her with that flock. Three of them are almost babies. The smallest one is a darling--just sits on the bench in there and dimples and gurgles and grins all the time."

"Hasn't she got a husband?" asked John.

"Of course," asserted his wife. "But that's just the problem now, or rather he's the problem. He came to Manitoba a year ago, and was working right here in this town. He doesn't seem to have had much luck, and left last week for some ranch away back of Brandon, she now finds out; she must have crossed his letter as she came out. She expected to find him here, and now she is in that waiting-room with nine children, no money to go further, or to go to a hotel even, and she's--well, she's just good-natured and smiling, and not a bit worried. As I say, some women are born just to laugh."

"Have they anything to eat?" asked the agent, anxiously.

"Stacks of it--a huge hamper. But I took the children what milk we had, and made her take a cup of good hot tea. She _would_ pay me, however, I couldn't stop her. But I noticed she has mighty little change in her purse, and she said she had no money, and said it with a round, untroubled, smiling face." The agent's wife spoke the last words almost with envy.

"I'll try and locate the husband," said the agent.

"Yes, she'll get his address to-night, she says," explained the wife; "but no one knows when he will get here. Most likely he's twenty miles away from Brandon, and they will have to send out for him."

Which eventually proved to be the case; and three days elapsed before the husband and father was able to reach the little border town where his wife and ample family had been installed as residents of the general waiting-room of a small, scantily-equipped station. No beds, no washing conveniences, no table, no chairs; just the wall seats, with a roof above them and the pump water at the end of the platform to drink from and dabble in. The distressed man arrived, harrassed and anxious, only to be met by a round-faced, laughing wife and nine round-faced, laughing children, who all made sport of their "camping" experience, and assured him they could have "stood it" a little longer, if need be.

But they slept in beds that night--glorious, feathery beds, that were in reality but solid hemp mattresses--in the cheapest lodging-house in town.

Then began the home-building. Henderson had secured a quarter section of land and made two payments on it when his wife and children arrived, with all their "settlers' effects" in a freight car, which, truth to tell, were meagre enough. They had never really owned a home in the East, and when, with saving and selling, she managed to follow her husband into the promising world of Manitoba, she determined to possess a home, no matter how crude, how small, how remote. So Henderson hired horses and "teamed" out sufficient lumber and tar-paper to erect a shack which measured exactly eighteen by twelve feet, then sodded the roof in true Manitoba style, and into this cramped abode Mrs. Henderson stowed her household goods and nine small children. With the stove, table, chairs, tubs and trunks, there was room for but one bed to be put up. Poor, unresourceful Henderson surveyed the crowded shack helplessly, but that round-faced, smiling wife of his was not a particle discouraged. "We'll just build in two sets of bunks, on each end of the house," she laughed. "The children won't mind sleeping on 'shelves,' for the bread-winners must have the bed."

So they economized space with a dozen such little plans, and all through the unpacking and settling and arranging, she would say every hour or two, "Oh, it's a little crowded and stuffy, but it's _ours_--it's _home_," until Henderson and the children caught something of her inspiration, and the sod-roof shack became "home" in the sweetest sense of the word.

There are some people who "make" time for everything, and this remarkable mother was one. That winter she baked bread for every English bachelor ranchman within ten miles. She did their washing and ironing, and never neglected her own, either. She knitted socks for them, and made and sold quantities of Saskatoon berry jam. When spring came she had over fifty dollars of her own, with which she promptly bought a cow. Then late in March they made a small first payment of a team of horses, and "broke land" for the first time, plowing and seeding a few acres of virgin prairie and getting a start.

But her quaintest invention to utilize every resource possible was a novel scheme for chicken-raising. One morning the children came in greatly excited over finding a wild duck's nest in the nearby "slough." Mrs. Henderson told them to be very careful not to frighten the bird, but to go back and search every foot of the grassy edges and try to discover other nests. They succeeded in finding three. That day a neighboring English rancher, driving past on his way to Brandon, twenty miles distant, called out, "Want anything from town, Mrs. Henderson?"

"Eggs, just eggs, if you will bring them, like a good boy," she answered, running out to the trail to meet him.

"Why, you _are_ luxurious to-day, and eggs at fifty cents a dozen," he exclaimed.

"Never mind," she replied, "they're not nearly so luxurious as chickens. You just bring me a dozen and a half. Pay _any_ price, but be sure they are fresh, new laid, right off the nest. Now just insist on that, or we shall quarrel." And with a menacing shake of a forefinger and a customary laugh, she handed him a precious bank note to pay for the treasures.

The next day Mrs. Henderson adroitly substituted hen's eggs for the wild ducks' own, and the shy, pretty water fowls, returning from their morning's swim, never discovered the fraud. [Fact.]

"Six eggs under three sitters--eighteen chicks, if we're lucky enough to have secured fertile eggs," mused Mrs. Henderson. "Oh, well, we'll see." And they _did_ see. They saw exactly eighteen fluffy, peeping chicks, whose timid little mothers could not understand why their broods disappeared one by one from the long, wet grasses surrounding the nest. But in a warm canton flannel lined basket near the Henderson's stove the young arrivals chirped and picked at warm meal as sturdily as if hatched in a coop by a commonplace barnyard "Biddy." And every one of those chicks lived and grew and fattened into a splendid flock, and the following spring they began sitting on their own eggs. But the good-hearted woman, in relating the story, would always say that she felt like a thief and a robber whenever she thought of that shy, harmless little wild duck who never had the satisfaction of seeing her brood swim in the "slough."

All this happened more than twenty years ago, yet when I met Mrs. Henderson last autumn, as she was journeying to Prince Albert to visit a married daughter, her wonderfully youthful face was as round and smiling as if she had never battled through the years in a hand-to-hand fight to secure a home in the pioneer days of Manitoba. She is well off now, and lives no more in the twelve-by-eighteen-foot bunk-house, but when I asked her how she accomplished so much, she replied, "I just jollied things along, and laughed over the hard places. It makes them easier then."

So perhaps the station agent's wife was really right, after all, when she remarked that "some women were just born to laugh."

The Tenas Klootchman

[In Chinook language "Tenas Klootchman" means "girl baby."]

This story came to me from the lips of Maarda herself. It was hard to realize, while looking at her placid and happy face, that Maarda had ever been a mother of sorrows, but the healing of a wounded heart oftentimes leaves a light like that of a benediction on a receptive face, and Maarda's countenance held something greater than beauty, something more like lovableness, than any other quality.

We sat together on the deck of the little steamer throughout the long violet twilight, that seems loath to leave the channels and rocky of the Upper Pacific in June time. We had dropped easily into conversation, for nothing so readily helps one to an introduction as does the friendly atmosphere of the extreme West, and I had paved the way by greeting her in the Chinook, to which she responded with a sincere and friendly handclasp.

Dinner on the small coast-wise steamers is almost a function. It is the turning-point of the day, and is served English fashion, in the evening. The passengers "dress" a little for it, eat the meal leisurely and with relish. People who perhaps have exchanged no conversation during the day, now relax, and fraternize with their fellow men and women.

I purposely secured a seat at the dining-table beside Maarda. Even she had gone through a simple "dressing" for dinner, having smoothed her satiny black hair, knotted a brilliant silk handkerchief about her throat, and laid aside her large, heavy plaid shawl, revealing a fine delaine gown of green, bordered with two flat rows of black silk velvet ribbon. That silk velvet ribbon, and the fashion in which it was applied, would have bespoken her nationality, even had her dark copper-colored face failed to do so.

The average Indian woman adores silk and velvet, and will have none of cotton, and these decorations must be in symmetrical rows, not designs. She holds that the fabric is in itself excellent enough. Why twist it and cut it into figures that would only make it less lovely?

We chatted a little during dinner. Maarda told me that she and her husband lived at the Squamish River, some thirty-five miles north of Vancouver City, but when I asked if they had any children, she did not reply, but almost instantly called my attention to a passing vessel seen through the porthole. I took the hint, and said no more of family matters, but talked of the fishing and the prospects of a good sockeye run this season.

Afterwards, however, while I stood alone on deck watching the sun set over the rim of the Pacific, I felt a feathery touch on my arm. I turned to see Maarda, once more enveloped in her shawl, and holding two deck stools. She beckoned with a quick uplift of her chin, and said, "We'll sit together here, with no one about us, and I'll tell you of the child." And this was her story:

She was the most beautiful little Tenas Klootchman a mother could wish for, bright, laughing, pretty as a spring flower, but--just as frail. Such tiny hands, such buds of feet! One felt that they must never take her out of her cradle basket for fear that, like a flower stem, she would snap asunder and her little head droop like a blossom.

But Maarda's skilful fingers had woven and plaited and colored the daintiest cradle basket in the entire river district for his little woodland daughter. She had fished long and late with her husband, so that the canner's money would purchase silk "blankets" to enwrap her treasure; she had beaded cradle bands to strap the wee body securely in its cosy resting-nest. Ah, it was such a basket, fit for an English princess to sleep in! Everything about it was fine, soft, delicate, and everything born of her mother-love.

So, for weeks, for even months, the little Tenas Klootchman laughed and smiled, waked and slept, dreamed and dimpled in her pretty playhouse. Then one day, in the hot, dry summer, there was no smile. The dimples did not play. The little flower paled, the small face grew smaller, the tiny hands tinier; and one morning, when the birds awoke in the forests of the Squamish, the eyes of the little Tenas Klootchman remained closed.

They put her to sleep under the giant cedars, the lulling, singing firs, the whispering pines that must now be her lullaby, instead of her mother's voice crooning the child-songs of the Pacific, that tell of baby foxes and gamboling baby wolves and bright-eyed baby birds. Nothing remained to Maarda but an empty little cradle basket, but smoothly-folded silken "blankets," but disused beaded bands. Often at nightfall she would stand alone, and watch the sun dip into the far waters, leaving the world as gray and colorless as her own life; she would outstretch her arms--pitifully empty arms--towards the west, and beneath her voice again croon the lullabies of the Pacific, telling of the baby foxes, the soft, furry baby wolves, and the little downy fledglings in the nests. Once in an agony of loneliness she sang these things aloud, but her husband heard her, and his face turned gray and drawn, and her soul told her she must not be heard again singing these things aloud.

And one evening a little steamer came into harbor. Many Indians came ashore from it, as the fishing season had begun. Among others was a young woman over whose face the finger of illness had traced shadows and lines of suffering. In her arms she held a baby, a beautiful, chubby, round-faced, healthy child that seemed too heavy for her wasted form to support. She looked about her wistfully, evidently seeking a face that was not there, and as the steamer pulled out of the harbor, she sat down weakly on the wharf, laid the child across her lap, and buried her face in her hands. Maarda touched her shoulder.

"Who do you look for?" she asked.

"For my brother Luke 'Alaska,'" replied the woman. "I am ill, my husband is dead, my brother will take care of me; he's a good man."

"Luke 'Alaska,'" said Maarda. What had she heard of Luke "Alaska?" Why, of course, he was one of the men her own husband had taken a hundred miles up the coast as axeman on a surveying party, but she dared not tell this sick woman. She only said: "You had better come with me. My husband is away, but in a day of two he will be able to get news to your brother. I'll take care of you till they come."

The woman arose gratefully, then swayed unsteadily under the weight of the child. Maarda's arms were flung out, yearningly, longingly, towards the baby.

"Where is your cradle basket to carry him in?" she asked, looking about among the boxes and bales of merchandise the steamer had left on the wharf.

"I have no cradle basket. I was too weak to make one, too poor to buy one. I have _nothing_," said the woman.

"Then let me carry him," said Maarda. "It's quite a walk to my place; he's too heavy for you."

The woman yielded the child gratefully, saying, "It's not a boy, but a Tenas Klootchman."

Maarda could hardly believe her senses. That splendid, sturdy, plump, big baby a Tenas Klootchman! For a moment her heart surged with bitterness. Why had her own little girl been so frail, so flower-like? But with the touch of that warm baby body, the bitterness faded. She walked slowly, fitting her steps to those of the sick woman, and jealously lengthening the time wherein she could hold and hug the baby in her yearning arms.

The woman was almost exhausted when they reached Maarda's home, but strong tea and hot, wholesome food revived her; but fever burned brightly in her cheeks and eyes. The woman was very ill, extremely ill. Maarda said, "You must go to bed, and as soon as you are there, I will take the canoe and go for a doctor. It is two or three miles, but you stay resting, and I'll bring him. We will put the Tenas Klootchman beside you in--" she hesitated. Her glance travelled up to the wall above, where a beautiful empty cradle basket hung, with folded silken "blankets" and disused beaded bands.

The woman's gaze followed hers, a light of beautiful understanding pierced the fever glare of her eyes, she stretched out her hot hand protestingly, and said, "Don't put her in--that. Keep that, it is yours. She is used to being rolled only in my shawl."

But Maarda had already lifted the basket down, and was tenderly arranging the wrappings. Suddenly her hands halted, she seemed to see a wee flower face looking up to her like the blossom of a russet-brown pansy. She turned abruptly, and, going to the door, looked out speechlessly on the stretch of sea and sky glimmering through the tree trunks.

For a time she stood. Then across the silence broke the little murmuring sound of the baby half crooning, half crying, indoors, the little cradleless baby that, homeless, had entered her home. Maarda returned, and, lifting the basket, again arranged the wrappings. "The Tenas Klootchman shall have this cradle," she said, gently. The sick woman turned her face to the wall and sobbed.

It was growing dark when Maarda left her guests, and entered her canoe on the quest for a doctor. The clouds hung low, and a fine, slanting rain fell, from which she protected herself as best she could with a shawl about her shoulders, crossed in front, with each end tucked into her belt beneath her arms--Indian-fashion. Around rocks and boulders, headlands and crags, she paddled, her little craft riding the waves like a cork, but pitching and plunging with every stroke. By and by the wind veered, and blew head on, and now and again she shipped water; her skirts began dragging heavily about her wet ankles, and her moccasins were drenched. The wind increased, and she discarded her shawl to afford greater freedom to her arm-play. The rain drove and slanted across her shoulders and head, and her thick hair was dripping with sea moisture and the downpour.

Sometimes she thought of beaching the canoe and seeking shelter until daylight. Then she again saw those fever-haunted eyes of the stranger who was within her gates, again heard the half wail of the Tenas Klootchman in her own baby's cradle basket, and at the sound she turned her back on the possible safety of shelter, and forged ahead.

It was a wearied woman who finally knocked at the doctor's door and bade him hasten. But his strong man's arm found the return journey comparatively easy paddling. The wind helped him, and Maarda also plied her bow paddle, frequently urging him to hasten.

It was dawn when they entered her home. The sick woman moaned, and the child fretted for food. The doctor bent above his patient, shaking his head ruefully as Maarda built the fire, and attended to the child's needs before she gave thought to changing her drenched garments. All day she attended her charges, cooked, toiled, watched, forgetting her night of storm and sleeplessness in the greater anxieties of ministering to others. The doctor came and went between her home and the village, but always with that solemn headshake, that spoke so much more forcibly than words.

"She shall not die!" declared Maarda. "The Tenas Klootchman needs her, she shall not die!" But the woman grew feebler daily, her eyes grew brighter, her cheeks burned with deeper scarlet.

"We must fight for it now," said the doctor. And Maarda and he fought the dread enemy hour after hour, day after day.

Bereft of its mother's care, the Tenas Klootchman turned to Maarda, laughed to her, crowed to her, until her lonely heart embraced the child as a still evening embraces a tempestuous day. Once she had a long, terrible fight with herself. She had begun to feel her ownership in the little thing, had begun to regard it as her right to tend and pet it. Her heart called out for it; and she wanted it for her very own. She began to feel a savage, tigerish joy in thinking--aye, _knowing_ that it really would belong to her and to her alone soon--very soon.