The Settler

"I've got her!"

A choked gurgle, snarl of rage, as Glaves fastened onto his throat, explained his mistake. "Hell! has no one a match?" His strangled voice issued from a dark whorl, crash of splintering furniture, as they swung and staggered in that pit of gloom. The struggle could have but one ending. Healthy, Glaves would have been no match for Shinn, and, as a match scratched, came the soft thud of his body as he was thrown with brutal force against the wall.

Flaring up, the flame revealed Helen, white, trembling, sick with that paralysis of fear that a mouse must feel in the claws of a cat. From the bedroom came the hysterical whooping, terrible in its sameness. Wide-eyed, she stared, fascinated, at Shinn, but he also was staring at a body spread-eagled before the door, its face turned down in a black, viscid, spreading pool. The match went out.

"My God!" a man cried. "It's Hines!"

But Helen did not hear that or a cry from outside warning of approaching hoofs. Throughout the frenzy of noise, horror of darkness, suspense, the attack, she had carried herself bravely; but this swift death, following on all, broke her shaken nerves, deprived her of consciousness.

The trustee, however, heard and saw the house vomit its black life, the dark figures streaming under the moonlight out to the bluff where the horses were tied, panic-stricken by sudden death and uneasy memories of outraged law. Leaning in his doorway, bent and bruised, he saw also Flynn and Danvers thunder by with a score of remittance-men, a wild cavalcade hard on their heels. In the Irishman's hand a neck-yoke swung with ominous rattle of iron rings; Danvers carried a cavalry sabre he had snatched from his wall; the others brandished clubs. Looming an instant in the steam of their sweating beasts, they shot on with a glad hurrah.

"Yoicks! Tally-ho!" young Poole shrilled as he passed. "Sic 'em, Flynn!"

"A Flynn! A Flynn!" Danvers squeaked as Shinn crumpled under the neck-yoke.

Wild lads, under wilder leadership, they fought – as Mrs. Flynn had predicted – none the worse for a smell at the whiskey. Those of the enemy who made a slow mounting were ridden down, fell under the clubs, or achieved uncomfortable leaps into briers and scrub, to be afterwards caught and drubbed, while such as escaped were run down and brought to bay by twos and threes. In a running fight over miles of moonlit prairie the grudges of years were settled; jeers, gibes, many a cheating received payment in full, with arrears of interest. Thus Cummings received from Danvers the "boot" due on the mare that Carter once described as being "blind, spavined, sweenied, an' old enough to homestead," payment being slapped down upon the spot where most pain may be inflicted with least structural damage. In like manner Poole settled with Peter Rodd for a cannibalistic sow; Perceval with MacCloud, arrears not due on a quarter-section of scrub; Gray with Seebach for forty bushels of heated seed wheat. Leaving them to their rough auditing, the story returns with Flynn to the cabin after the dropping of Shinn.

After relighting the lamp, Glaves had carried his sore bones back to the lounge, and when Flynn entered he found the terrible old fellow glowering upon the dead. His wife's hysteria had slackened to a strained sobbing, and, answering Flynn's question, he tartly replied: "No, 'tain't Mrs. Carter. Had her fainting-spell an' kem to without any fuss, like a sensible girl. She's in there tending to that old fool." Then, beetling again on the dead, he forecast the verdict of the sheriff's jury. "Ye'll bear witness, Flynn, that this man kem to his death through running into a charge of buckshot after my winder 'd been shot in an' door battered down."

XXIV

WITHOUT THE PALE

"I really believe that I ought to resign!"

When, one morning a week later, Helen delivered herself of certain secret misgivings at breakfast, the trustee looked up, startled, from his eggs and mush, then proceeded to fish for motives.

"Scairt? You needn't to be. We've got this settlement by the short hairs at last."

His rude metaphor roughly set forth the truth. Without ties, the bachelors of the charivari party had scattered west through the territories, while Shinn, MacCloud, and other married men had gone into such close hiding that the sheriff had been unable to subpoena one for the inquest. But though she neither feared nor anticipated further violence, Helen now knew that she never would be able to live down the settlers' prejudice; and without the children's love, parents' confidence, her day of usefulness was past.

Glaves snorted at this altruistic reason. "Love? Confidence? What's their market value? You kedn't hope to compete with a dollar note for the first; as for the second – Danvers hit it off exactly when he stuck that sign on his stable door – 'No more trading here!' Now, from my p'int of view, it isn't a question of love or confidence, but one of faith."

"Faith?" she echoed.

Nodding, he went on. "Me and Flynn backed you up – stood by you through all, didn't we?"

"Indeed you did!" She grew rosily red under warmth of feeling. "I shall never – "

"An' now you allow to throw us down? For Shinn and MacCloud will shorely tell how that they scared you an' beat us out."

It was bad argument, poor ethics – a bald statement of his grim intention of bending the stubborn settlers to his inflexible purpose. She felt, however, that it would be still poorer ethics for her to desert and disappoint these, her champions, defenders. It was one of these peculiar situations where any course seems wrong, and if she chose that which seemed most human, she did it with a mental reservation. She would resign just as soon as she could persuade him to look at things her way.

"Of course I'll stay – to please you. But – "

"No 'buts,'" he interrupted. "Haying begins Monday, an' by fall it'll all be ol' hist'ry."

But Monday brought justification of her doubt, proving that, if cowed, the settlers were by no means conquered. Only the young Flynns attended school, and the array of empty benches loomed in her troubled vision like a huge face, vacant, mulishly obstinate as a blank wall, vividly eloquent of the invincible determination that would have none of her. Her heart sank, and when the week passed without further attendance she gave up, handed her resignation to Flynn and Glaves in council at the latter's cabin.

Both, as might be expected, registered strenuous objections. "'Tain't your fault if they cut off their nose to spite their face," Glaves argued. And when she replied that the children would suffer, he rasped: "What of it? 'The sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children to the fourth generation.' Ye have Scripter for that."

"But not the sin of the stranger," she gently objected. "I have myself to blame for the prejudice."

Now, though neither trustee would admit her confession, both were afflicted with a sneaking consciousness of its truth. For not only had she offended by consorting with that public enemy, the remittance-man, but the cause of Carter's desertion had escaped from Elinor Leslie's indiscreet tongue. Every man, woman, and child in the country-side was informed as to the events which led up to and followed the Ravells' visit. Their denials, therefore, were negated by that profuseness of expression which accentuates the truth it seeks to conceal.

"You know it," she answered them, and opposed further argument with that soft feminine obstinacy which wears out masculine strength.

"But what else kin you do?" Glaves cried at last, in despair.

"Go to Winnipeg and take a place in an office or store."

Though she affected brightness, she could not altogether hide the dejection, homesickness that inhered in the thought. Now that she was to leave it, that rude cabin, with its log walls, legal patchwork, home-made furniture, glowed with the glamours of home. Even Mrs. Glaves's gaunt ugliness became suddenly dear in the light of an indefinite future among strangers.

Detecting her underlying sadness, Flynn exclaimed: "Phwat? Wurrk in a sthore? Sell pins, naydles, an' such truck while I've a roof over me head? Ye'd die in thim lonesome hotels. Ye 'll just come right home wid me."

"Likely, ain't it?" Glaves broke in, jealous for his prerogative. "In the first place, if she goes, she ain't agoing to stop at no hotel, but with my own sister that keeps a boarding-house on Main Street. An' if she stays, it'll be right here, with me – eh, old woman?"

His wife's warm assent brought Helen to tears without, however, affecting her resolution. For the settlement would be by the ears, she said, just as long as she stayed in it.

"Humph!" Glaves growled. "It'll have itself be the throat afore long. Yesterday Poole an' Danvers ran their mowers into Shinn's five-acre swamp, an' if that don't bring that big Injin a-kiting from the tall timber, I'm Dutch."

She was not, however, to be moved, and after an embarrassed pause Flynn said, hesitatingly: "Thim cities, now, is mighty ixpinsive. A lone girl without money – ye'll let me – "

Digging a shabby bill-book from the bottom depths of his overalls, he precipitated a second kindly quarrel. Glaring at it, Glaves snorted, "When she knows she kin draw on me for the vally of my last head of stock down to the dog!"

Having means for some months, this storm was more easily laid than that which burst when Flynn offered to drive her in to Lone Tree.

"An' her living with me?" Glaves stormed.

"'Tis meself that knowed her longest," Flynn argued.

"Humph!" Glaves sneered – "three days. Thursday she stopped at your house coming out from Lone Tree. Sunday I saw her at meeting – went a-purpose an' never tended sence. No, she goes with me."

"Anyway, I knowed her longest," Flynn persisted. "But 'tis herself shall say. Which shall it be, ma'am?"

"Both," she laughed; and so, with a grizzled champion on either hand, she rattled southward the following day.

By one of those strange coincidences of ironical fate, this, the day of her departure, occurred on the third anniversary of her first drive out with Carter, and all things, season, sight, sound, conspired to vividly recall that memorable occasion. Rank growths in uncut sloughs bowed under warm winds that freighted a distant metallic rattle of many mowers; beyond the settlements the Park Lands stretched to the Assiniboin with only the chimneys of the burned Cree village to break their spangled undulations. As before, they came suddenly upon the valley, rugged, riven, with its bald, buttressing headlands, timbered ravines; the river, writhing in giant convolutions along the level bottoms. As before, they dropped with jolts, jerks, skidding of wheels to the ford that now tuned its hoarse voice to a melancholy dirge in harmony with her mood; and from the door of the log mission Father Francis bowed his silver head in courtly farewell.

After the valley came the "Dry Lands," the tawny plains, barren of trees, cabin, or farmstead; finally Lone Tree impinged in that huge monochrome, its grain-sheds reminding her, as before, of red Noah's arks on a yellow carpet. To her the hour of departure restored the fresh, clear vision of the stranger. The town appeared as on that first occasion – its one scanty street of clapboard hotels and stores with false fronts fencing the railway tracks that came spinning out of the western horizon to flash on over the east; the wise ox-teams rolling along the street; the squaws with ragged ponies hitched in big-wheeled Red River carts; the cows pasturing amid tomato-cans that strewed vacant lots; the loafers, omni-present riffraff of the small frontier, holding down nail-kegs and cracker-boxes under store verandas.

It was a trying drive. Every turn of the trail brought its reminiscences; mud chimneys, the Indian graveyard, a lone coyote, recalled the beginnings of her love, and now that she was leaving she vividly realized how she had grown to this land of white silences, grave winds, vast, sunwashed spaces. But if she had need of the heavy veil that she pinned on that morning, that marvellous feminine restraint enabled her to turn a composed face to the doctor and Jenny, who came to the station to see her off.

As she passed up street, the riffraff exchanged nods and winks, but Lone Tree furnished still other champions. The store-keeper, he who had loaded Carter's buck-board with jams and jellies, came hurrying across the tracks with good wishes and protestations.

"Shinn, MacCloud, Cummings – the hull gang – go off my books," he swore to Glaves. "Not another cent's credit to keep 'em from starving."

"They can rot in their beds for me," the doctor added. "I strike Silver Creek from my practice." And though the train was even then whistling for the station, Hooper, the agent, stole time for friendly greetings.