The Prairie Wife
a yellow sheet in his hand. And Duncan looked worried as he read it, and
stopped talking to his man called Olie, who was there beside the
platform, in a big, sweat-stained Stetson hat, with a big team hitched
to a big wagon with straw in the bottom of the box.
Olie, I at once told myself, was a Swede. He was one of the ugliest men
I ever clapped eyes on, but I found out afterward that his face had been
frozen in a blizzard, years before, and his nose had split. This had
disfigured him--and the job had been done for life. His eyes were big
and pale blue, and his hair and eyebrows were a pale yellow. He was the
most silent man I ever saw. But Dinky-Dunk had already told me he was a
great worker, and a fine fellow at heart. And when Dinky-Dunk says he'd
trust a man, through thick and thin, there must be something good in
that man, no matter how bulbous his nose is or how scared-looking he
gets when a woman speaks to him. Olie looked more scared than ever when
Dinky-Dunk suddenly ran to where the train-conductor was standing beside
his car-steps, asked him to hold that "accommodation" for half a minute,
pulled his suit-case from under my pile of traps, and grabbed little me
in his arms.
"Quick," he said, "good-by! I've got to go on to Calgary. There's
trouble about my registrations."
I hung on to him for dear life. "You're not going to leave me here,
Dinky-Dunk, in the middle of this wilderness?" I cried out, while the
conductor and brakeman and station-agent all called and holloed and
clamored for Duncan to hurry.
"Olie will take you home, beloved," Dinky-Dunk tried to assure me.
"You'll be there by midnight, and I'll be back by Saturday evening!"
I began to bawl. "Don't go! Don't leave me!" I begged him. But the
conductor simply tore him out of my arms and pushed him aboard the
tail-end of the last car. I made a face at a fat man who was looking out
a window at me. I stood there, as the train started to move, feeling
that it was dragging my heart with it.
Then Dinky-Dunk called out to Olie, from the back platform: "Did you get
my message and paint that shack?" And Olie, with my steamer-rug in his
hand, only looked blank and called back "No." But I don't believe
Dinky-Dunk even heard him, for he was busy throwing kisses at me. I
stood there, at the edge of the platform, watching that lonely last
car-end fade down into the lonely sky-line. Then I mopped my eyes, took
one long quavery breath, and said out loud, as Birdalone Pebbley said
Shiner did when he was lying wounded on the field of Magersfontein:
"_Squealer, squealer, who's a squealer?_"
I found the big wagon-box filled with our things and Olie sitting there
waiting, viewing me with wordless yet respectful awe. Olie, in fact, has
never yet got used to me. He's a fine chap, in his rough and
inarticulate way, and there's nothing he wouldn't do for me. But I'm a
novelty to him. His pale blue eyes look frightened and he blushes when I
speak to him. And he studies me secretly, as though I were a dromedary,
or an archangel, or a mechanical toy whose inner mechanism perplexed
him. But yesterday I found out through Dinky-Dunk what the probable
secret of Olie's mystification was. It was my hat. "It ban so dam'
foolish!" he fervently confessed.
That wagon-ride from Buckhorn out to the ranch seemed endless. I thought
we were trekking clear up to the North Pole. At first there was what you
might call a road, straight and worn deep, between parallel lines of
barb-wire fencing. But this road soon melted into nothing more than a
trail, a never-ending gently curving trail that ribboned out across the
prairie-floor as far as the eye could see. It was a glorious afternoon,
one of those opaline, blue-arched autumn days when it should have been a
joy merely to be alive. But I was in an antagonistic mood, and the
little cabin-like farmhouses that every now and then stood up against
the sky-line made me feel lonesome, and the jolting of the heavy wagon
made me tired, and by six o'clock I was so hungry that my ribs ached. We
had been on the trail then almost five hours, and Olie calmly informed
me it was only a few hours more. It got quite cool as the sun went down,
and I had to undo my steamer-rug and get wrapped up in it. And still we
went on. It seemed like being at sea, with a light now and then, miles
and miles away. Something howled dismally in the distance, and gave me
the creeps. Olie told me it was only a coyote. But we kept on, and my
ribs ached worse than ever.
Then I gave a shout that nearly frightened Olie off the seat, for I
remembered the box of chocolates we'd had on the train. We stopped and
found my hand-bag, and lighted matches and looked through it. Then I
gave a second and more dismal shout, for I remembered Dinky-Dunk had
crammed it into his suit-case at the last moment. Then we went on again,
with me a squaw-woman all wrapped in her blanket. I must have fallen
asleep, for I woke with a start. Olie had stopped at a slough to water
his team, and said we'd make home in another hour or two. How he found
his way across that prairie Heaven only knows. I no longer worried. I
was too tired to think. The open air and the swaying and jolting had
chloroformed me into insensibility. Olie could have driven over the edge
of a canyon and I should never have stopped him.
Instead of falling into a canyon, however, at exactly ten minutes to
twelve we pulled up beside the shack door, which had been left unlocked,
and Olie went in and lighted a lamp and touched a match to the fire
already laid in the stove. I don't remember getting down from the wagon
seat and I don't remember going into the shack. But when Olie came from
putting in his team I was fast asleep on a luxurious divan made of a
rather smelly steer-hide stretched across two slim cedar-trees on four
little cedar legs, with a bag full of pine needles at the head. I lay
there watching Olie, in a sort of torpor. It surprised me how quickly
his big ungainly body could move, and how adept those big sunburned
hands of his could be.
Then sharp as an arrow through a velvet curtain came the smell of bacon
through my drowsiness. And it was a heavenly odor. I didn't even wash. I
ate bacon and eggs and toasted biscuits and orange marmalade and coffee,
the latter with condensed milk, which I hate. I don't know how I got to
my bed, or got my clothes off, or where the worthy Olie slept, or who
put out the light, or if the door had been left open or shut. I never
knew that the bed was hard, or that the coyotes were howling. I only
know that I slept for ten solid hours, without turning over, and that
when I opened my eyes I saw a big square of golden sunlight dancing on
the unpainted pine boards of the shack wall. And the funny part of it
all was, Matilda Anne, I didn't have the splitting headache I'd so
dolorously prophesied for myself. Instead of that I felt buoyant. I
started to sing as I pulled on my stockings. And I suddenly remembered
that I was terribly hungry again.
I swung open the window beside me, for it was on hinges, and poked my
head out. I could see a corral, and a long low building which I took to
be the ranch stables, and another and newer-looking building with a
metal roof, and several stacks of hay surrounded by a fence, and a row
of portable granaries. And beyond these stretched the open prairie,
limitless and beautiful in the clear morning sunshine. Above it arched a
sky of robin-egg blue, melting into opal and pale gold down toward the
rim of the world. I breathed in lungfuls of clear, dry, ozonic air, and
I really believe it made me a little light-headed, it was so
exhilarating, so champagnized with the invisible bubbles of life.
I needed that etheric eye-opener, Matilda Anne, before I calmly and
critically looked about our shack. Oh, that shack, that shack! What a
comedown it was for your heart-sore Chaddie! In the first place, it
seemed no bigger than a ship's cabin, and not one-half so orderly. It is
made of lumber, and not of logs, and is about twelve feet wide and
eighteen feet long. It has three windows, on hinges, and only one door.
The floor is rather rough, and has a trap door leading into a small
cellar, where vegetables can be stored for winter use. The end of the
shack is shut off by a "tarp"--which I have just found out is short for
tarpaulin. In other words, the privacy of my bedroom is assured by
nothing more substantial than a canvas drop-curtain, shutting off my
boudoir, where I could never very successfully _bouder_, from the larger
living-room.
This living-room is also the kitchen, the laundry, the sewing-room, the
reception-room and the library. It has a good big cookstove, which burns
either wood or coal, a built-in cupboard with an array of unspeakably
ugly crockery dishes, a row of shelves for holding canned goods, books
and magazines, cooking utensils, gun-cartridges, tobacco-jars,
carpenter's tools and a coal-oil lamp. There is also a plain pine table,
a few chairs, one rocking-chair which has plainly been made by hand, and
a flour-barrel. Outside the door is a wide wooden bench on which stands
a big tin wash-basin and a cake of soap in a sardine can that has been
punched full of holes along the bottom. Above it hung a roller towel
which looked a little the worse for wear. And that was to be my home, my
one and only habitation, for years and years to come! That little
cat-eyed cubby-hole of a place!
I sat down on an overturned wash-tub about twenty paces from the shack,
and studied it with calm and thoughtful eyes. It looked infinitely worse
from the outside. The reason for this was that the board siding had
first been covered with tar-paper, for the sake of warmth, and over this
had been nailed pieces of tin, tin of every color and size and
description. Some of it was flattened out stove-pipe, and some was
obviously the sides of tomato-cans. Even tin tobacco-boxes and Dundee
marmalade holders and the bottoms of old bake-pans and the sides of an
old wash-boiler had been pieced together and patiently tacked over those
shack-sides. It must have taken weeks and weeks to do. And it suddenly
impressed me as something poignant, as something with the Vergilian
touch of tears in it. It seemed so full of history, so vocal of the
tragic expedients to which men on the prairie must turn. It seemed
pathetic. It brought a lump into my throat. Yet that Joseph's Coat of
metal was a neatly done bit of work. All it needed was a coat of paint
or two, and it would look less like a crazy-quilt solidified into a
homestead. And I suddenly remembered Dinky-Dunk's question called out to
Olie from the car-end--and I knew he'd hurried off a message to have
that telltale tinning-job painted over before I happened to clap eyes on
it.
As Olie had disappeared from the scene and was nowhere to be found, I
went in and got my own breakfast. It was supper over again, only I
scrambled my eggs instead of frying them. And all the while I was eating
that meal I studied those shack-walls and made mental note of what
should be changed and what should be done. There was so much, that it
rather overwhelmed me. I sat at the table, littered with its dirty
dishes, wondering where to begin. And then the endless vista of it all
suddenly opened up before me. I became nervously conscious of the
unbroken silence about me, and I realized how different this new life
must be from the old. It seemed like death itself, and it got a strangle
hold on my nerves, and I knew I was going to make a fool of myself the
very first morning in my new home, in my home and Dinky-Dunk's. But I
refused to give in. I did something which startled me a little,
something which I had not done for years. I got down on my knees beside
that plain wooden chair and prayed to God. I asked Him to give me