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The Settler
The Settler
I
THE PARK LANDS
The clip of a cutting axe flushed a heron from the bosom of a reedy lake and sent him soaring in slow spirals until, at the zenith of his flight, he overlooked a vast champaign. Far to the south a yellow streak marked the scorched prairies of southern Manitoba; eastward and north a spruce forest draped the land in a mantle of gloom; while to the west the woods were thrown with a scattering hand over a vast expanse of rolling prairie. These were the Park Lands of the Fertile Belt – a beautiful country, rich, fat-soiled, rank with flowers and herbage, once the hunting-ground of Cree and Ojibway, but now passed to the sterner race whose lonely farmsteads were strewn over the face of the land. These presented a deadly likeness. Each had its log-house, its huge tent of firewood upreared against next winter's drift, and the same yellow strawstacks dotted their fenceless fields. One other thing, too, they had in common – though this did not lie to the eye of the heron – a universal mortgage, legacy of the recent boom, covered all.
At the flap of the great bird's wing a man stepped from the timber and stood watching him soar. He was a tall fellow, lean as a greyhound, flat-flanked, in color neither dark nor fair. His eyes were deep-set and looked out from a face that was burned to the color of a brick. His nose was straight and large, cheeks well hollowed; the face would have been stern but for the humor that lurked about the mouth. Taken together, the man was an excellent specimen of what he was – a young American of the settler type.
"Gone plumb out of sight," he muttered, rubbing his dazzled eyes. "An' he wasn't no spring chicken. Time to feed, I reckon."
A few steps carried him to his team, a rangy yoke of steers which were tied in the shade. Having fed them, he returned to his work and chopped steadily until, towards evening, his wagon was loaded with poplar rails. Then hitching, he mounted his load and "hawed" and "geed" his way through the forest. As he came out on the open prairie the metallic rattle of a mower travelled down the wind. Stopping, he listened, while a shadow deepened his tan.
"Comes from Morrill's big slough," he muttered, whipping up the oxen. "Who'll it be?"
Morrill, his near neighbor, was sick in bed, and the rattle could only mean that some one was trespassing on his hay rights – or rather the privilege which he claimed as such – for trespass such as he suspected was simply the outward sign of a change in the settlement's condition. In the beginning the first-comers had found an abundance of natural fodder growing in the sloughs, where, for lack of a water-shed, the spring thaws stored flood-waters. There was plenty then for all. But with thicker settlement anarchy ensued. New neighbors grabbed sloughs on unsettled lands, which old-timers had sealed to themselves, and so forced them to steal from one another. Morrill and the man on the wagon had "hayed" together for the last three seasons, which fact explained the significance he attached to the rattle of the alien mower.
"It's Hines!" he muttered when, five minutes later, he sighted the mower from the crown of a roll. "The son of a gun!"
The man was running the first swath around a mile-long slough which lay in the trough of two great rolls. It was a pretty piece of hay, thick, rank, and so long that one might have tied two spears together across a horse's back. Indeed, when the settler rattled down the bank and stopped his oxen they were hidden to the horns, which fact accounted for Hines not seeing them until his team brought against the load.
"Hullo!" he cried, startled. "Didn't expect to see you, Carter!"
"Don't reckon you did," the settler replied. The shadow was now gone from his face. Cool, cheerful, unconcerned, he sat in the mower's path, swinging an easy leg.