The Settler

As the first quivering flushes shot through the grays of dawn Bender came out of his cabin. He intended to be at work on Merrill's big slough at sunrise. But as he rammed home the sickle into its place in the mower-bar a projecting rivet caused it to buckle and break. That spelled another journey to the blacksmith's, and the sun stood at noon before the sickle was in place. Falling to oiling with savage earnestness, that an ancient Briton might have exhibited in greasing his scythe-armed war-chariot, Bender then stuffed bread and meat into his jumper, hitched, and drove off north, looking for all the world like a grisly pirate afloat on a yellow sea.

Half an hour's easy jogging would carry him to Merrill's big slough, but on the way he had to pass two smaller ones. The first, which had a hundred-yard belt of six-foot hay ringing its sedgy centre, tempted him sorely, yet he refrained, having in mind a bigger prey. At the next he reined in, and stared at a dozen cut swaths and a mower with feeding horses tied to its wheels.

It was Molyneux's mower, and to Bender its presence could only mean that the settlement was rushing the sick man's sloughs. "Invasion of the British!" he yelled. "What 'll Carter say to this? Remember Yorktown!"

He was still laughing when a buck-board came rattling up the trail behind him. It was Hines.

"Cut that slough yet?" he asked.

"Just going there," Bender answered; then gave the reason of his delay, garnished with furious anathema on the maker of sickles. "But ain't that a joke?" he said, indicating Molyneux's mower.

Hines whinnied his satisfaction. "Didn't think it was in the Britisher. But my! won't that gall the long-geared son of a gun of a Yank? Drive on an' I'll follow up an' see you started – mebbe see some of the fun," he added to himself, "if Carter's there."

Quarter of an hour brought them to the big slough, which, on this side, was ringed so thickly with willow-scrub that neither could see it till they reined on its edge. Both stared blankly. When Hines went by that morning a mile of solid hay had bowed in sunlit waves before the breeze. Save a strip some twenty yards wide down the centre, it now lay in flat green swaths, while along the strip a dozen feeding teams were tied to as many mowers.

"A bee, by G – !" Bender swore.

"Hell!" Hines snarled even in his swearing. "Bilked, by the Almighty!"

For a moment they stood, staring from the slough to each other, the lumberman red, angry, foolish, Hines the personification of venomous chagrin. Presently his rage urged him to a great foolishness.

"You an' your casting!" he sneered. "Scairt, you was – plumb scairt!"

Astonishment, the astonishment with which a bull might regard the attack of an impertinent fly, obliterated for one moment all other expression from Bender's face. Then, roaring his furious anger, he sprang from his mower.

Realizing his mistake, Hines had already lashed his ponies, but even then they barely jerked the buck-board tail from under the huge, clutching fingers. Foaming with passion, Bender gave chase for a score of yards, then stopped and shook his great fist, pouring out invective.

"To-morrow," he roared, "I'll come over and cut on you."

"What's the matter? You seem all het up?" Carter's quiet voice gave Bender first notice of the buckboard that had come quietly upon him from the grassy prairie. With Carter were Flynn, Seebach, and two others. Not very far away a wagon was bringing others back from dinner.

"We're all giving Morrill a day's cutting," Carter went on, with a quiet twinkle. "I called at your place this morning with a bid, but you was away. We're right glad to see you. Who told you?"

Gradually a grin wiped out Bender's choler. "You're damn smart," he rumbled. "Well – where shall I begin?"

V

JENNY

Thus did the bolt which Hines forged for Carter prove a boomerang and recoil upon himself. For next morning Bender started his mower on a particularly fine slough which Hines had left to the last because of its wetness. Moreover, Hines had ten tons of cut hay bleaching near by in the sun and dare not try to rake it.

It was oppressively hot the morning that Bender hitched to rake the stolen slough; fleecy thunder-heads were slowly heaving up from behind the swart spruce forest.

"'Twon't be worth cow-feed if it ain't raked to-day," the giant remarked, as he overlooked his enemy's hay. Then his satisfaction gave place to sudden anger – a rake was at work on Hines's hay less than a quarter-mile away.

"Hain't seen me, I reckon," Bender growled. Leaving his own rake, he crouched in a gully, skulked along the low land, gained a willow thicket, and sprang out just as the rake came clicking by.

"Now I've got you!" he roared. Then his hands dropped. He stood staring at a thin slip of a girl, who returned his gaze with dull, tired eyes. It was Jenny Hines, Jed's only child.

"Well," Bender growled, "what d' you reckon you're doing?"

"Raking." Her voice was listless as her look. Just eleven when her mother died, her small shoulders had borne the weight of Jed's housekeeping. Heavy choring had robbed her youth, and left her, at eighteen, nothing but a faded shadow of a possible prettiness.

Bender coughed, shuffled. "Where's your dad?"

"Up at the house. He allowed you wouldn't tech me. But," she added, dully, "I'd liefer you killed me than not."

Bender's anger had already passed. Rough pity now took its place. His furious strength prevented him from realizing the killing drudgery, the lugging of heavy water-buckets, the milking, feeding of pigs, the hard labor which had killed her spirit and left this utter hopelessness; but he knew by experience that a young horse should not be put to a heavy draw, and here was a violation of the precept. Bender was puzzled. Had he come on a neighbor maltreating a horse, a curse backed by his heavy fist would have righted the wrong; but this frail creature's humanity placed her wrongs outside his rough remedial practice.

He whistled, swore softly, and, failing to invoke inspiration by these characteristic methods, he said, kindly: "Well, for onct Jed tol' the truth. Must have strained him some. Go ahead, I ain't agoing to bother you."

Having finished raking his own hay, he fell to work with the fork, stabbing huge bunches, throwing them right and left, striving to work off the pain at his heart. But pity grew with exertion, and, pausing midway of the morning, he saw that she also was plying a weary fork.

"You need a rest," he growled five minutes later. "Sit down."

She glanced up at the ominous sky. "Can't. Rain's coming right on."

Lifting her bodily, he placed her in a nest of hay. "Now you stay right there. I'm running this."

Picking up her fork, he put forth all his magnificent strength while she sat listlessly watching. It seemed as though nothing could banish her chronic weariness, her ineffable lassitude. Once, indeed, she remarked, "My, but you're strong!" but voice and words lacked animation. She added the remarkable climax, "Pa says you are a devil."

"Yes?" he questioned. "An' you bet he's right, gal. Keep a right smart distance from men like me."

"Oh, I don't know," she slowly answered. "I'd liefer be a devil. Angels is tiresome. Pa's always talking about them. He's a heap religious – in spells."

Pausing in his forking, Bender stared down on the small heretic. Vestigial traces of religious belief occupied a lower strata of his savage soul. Crude they were, anthropomorphic, barely higher than superstitions, yet they were there, and chief among them was an idea that has appealed to the most cultured of men – that woman is incomplete, nay, lost, without religion.

"Shore, child!" he protested. "Little gals shouldn't talk so. That ain't the way to get to heaven."

"D' you allow to go there?" she demanded, with disconcerting suddenness.

Bender grimaced, laughed at the ludicrousness of the question. "Don't allow as I'd be comfortable. Anyway, lumbermen go to t'other place. But that don't alter your case. Gals all go to heaven."

"Well!" For the first time she displayed some animation. "I ain't! Pa's talked me sick of it. I allow it's them golden streets he's after. He'd coin 'em into dollars."

Seeing that Hines had not hesitated in minting this, his flesh and blood, Bender thought it very likely, and feeling his inability to cope with such reasonable heresies he attacked the hay instead. Having small skill in women – the few of his intimate experience being as free of feminine complexities as they were of virtue – he was sorely puzzled. Looking backward, he remembered his own pious mother. Hines's wife had died whispering of religion's consolations; yet here was the daughter turning a determined back on the source of the mother's comfort. It was unnatural to his scheme of things, contrary to the law of his vestigial piety. He would try again! But when, the hay finished, he came back to her, he quailed before her pale hopelessness; it called God in question.

Limbering up her rake, he watched her drive away, a small, thin figure, woful speck of life under a vast gray sky. For twisting cloud masses had blotted out the sun, a chill wind snatched the tops from the hay-cocks as fast as Bender coiled them, blots of water splashed the dust before he finished his task.

Black care rode home with him; and as that night the thunder split over his cabin, he saw Jenny's eyes mirrored on the wet, black pane, and it was borne dimly upon him that something besides overwork was responsible for their haunting.

Bender had a friend, a man of his own ilk, with whom he had hit camp and log-drive for these last ten years. At birth it is supposable that the friend inherited a name, but in the camps he was known only as the "Cougar." A silent man, broad, deep-lunged, fierce-eyed, nature had laid his lines for great height, then bent him in a perpetual crouch. He always seemed gathering for a spring, which, combined with tigerish courage, had gained him his name. Inseparable, if Bender appeared on the Mattawa for the spring drive, it was known that the Cougar might be shortly expected. If the Cougar stole into a Rocky Mountain camp, a bunk was immediately reserved for his big affinity. Only a bottle of whiskey and two days' delay on the Cougar's part had prevented them from settling up the same section. However, though five miles lay between their respective homesteads, never a Sunday passed without one man riding over to see the other, and it was returning from such a visit that Bender next fell in with Jenny Hines.

It was night and late, but as Bender rode by the forks where Hines's private road joined on to the Lone Tree trail, a new moon gave sufficient light for him to see a whitish object lying in the grass. He judged it a grain-sack till a convulsion shook it and a sob rose to his ears.

"Good land, girl!" he ejaculated, when, a moment later, Jenny's pale face turned up to his, "what are you doing here?"

"He's turned me out."