Physically, Abe was extraordinarily tall, measuring six feet four; the doctor was almost correspondingly small, for he
lacked an exact twelve inches of Abe's stature. Abe was built in proportion to his height, broad-shouldered and deep-chested; the doctor was slender and fine-limbed, and yet he stooped. Temperamentally, Abe was impulsive, bearing down obstacles by sheer impetuosity; the doctor was deliberate, hesitant even, weighing every aspect of a matter before aligning himself. Consequently, at the age of thirty, with his life a blank page before him, Abe was disinclined to seek the company of this man who, besides, was his senior by fifteen years, having lived his life.
The struggle between Abe's desire to let his sister help him over the next hour or so and his disinclination to meet his brother-in-law was plainly visible in his face, which, above any pair of shoulders but his, would have looked disproportionately large. And there was still another reason for his hesitancy. Before leaving Ontario Abe had married Ruth, against the, at least implied, advice of Mary and her husband. When, a year ago, he had mentioned his intention, neither had voiced any open disapproval; but, in the course of the few weeks which he had spent at Morley, they had somehow conveyed a lack of enthusiasm over it, now by a silence, now by a hesitant question. “Will she be able to adapt herself to rural conditions?” “Won't she suffer from the unavoidable isolation on a pioneer farm?” For Ruth was the daughter of small-town merchants; her father had a bake-shop at Brantford; her mother, a confectionery operated in conjunction. The worst of it was that Abe himself had his misgivings when he pondered the matter; to have his own unvoiced fears put forward by others, if ever so tentatively, disconcerted him. The conclusion could not be evaded that he had been in love with a face and a figure rather than a mind or soul.
Yet he strode impulsively forward at last, diagonally crossing the sleepy street of the ugly village and hoping that his brother-in-law would not be at home.
That hope was fulfilled. His sister met him in the door of the wide-spaced living-room in the white house which was surrounded by an extensive veranda. At sight of her brother, Mary exclaimed:
“Abe!â¦Why in the world did you not let me know?”
Abe shrugged his shoulders; but he bent down and kissed her cheek.
“Charles isn't in,” Mary said. “He went to the city on business.”
Mary, too, was tall, even somewhat large and rather heavy.
“I'm in town only for an hour or so,” Abe said as they were sitting downâAbe on the large, grey chesterfield, his sister in an arm-chair of the same colour and design. “I have my stuff in the train and I'm going out at once.”
“Surely not,” Mary said, scanning his face through her glasses. “Or do you intend to come back to-night?”
“I don't think so. I want to start work.”
“Not to-day, Abe?”
“Not to-day, perhaps. I have a tent along. I want to do as much breaking as I can this summer; and to build. Ruth will be out in a week or two.”
Mary gave him a quick look. “So you got married after all? Why did you not let us know?”
“It was all done so suddenly. I sold the place and didn't know where to go. We got married, and two days later I started west.”
“Why did you not bring her? She could have stayed with me.”
“I came by a freight train and had the horses to look after. I'll put up a shack at once.”
Mary nodded and rose. “I'll get you a cup of tea, shall I?”
“I won't decline.”
When Mary had left the room, Abe sat for a few minutes, looking straight ahead. Then he rose and walked about, stopping in the bay window which looked to the street, turning again and stepping over to a library table covered with books. Of these he picked up one or two, and, finding that they were poetry, dropped them again, resuming his walk.
“I had a late dinner,” Mary said when she returned. “I won't partake, if you don't mind.” She moved a small low table to her brother's side, placing the tray upon it, and went out again to fetch the tea.
When she brought it, Abe helped himself.
“Why not let Ruth come at once, Abe?” Mary asked shortly. “You know I'd be glad to have her.”
“Oh, wellâ” Then bluntly, “I believe she'd rather not.”
There was a pause.
“And the old farm is sold? I can hardly believe it.”
Abe, knowing that he was unjust, took that remark to hold a vague reproach. “What could I do? Eighty acres! And mortgaged at that.”
Seeing that the money raised by the mortgage had paid for her education, Mary might have been offended in turn. But she smoothed all occasion of offence away. “It was the logical thing to do. The same amount of work put in here is bound to bring better results. We have both gone west, after all. You will miss the trees, though.”
“I shall plant trees here.”
“I suppose. But no cedars.”
“No,” Abe said after a silence. “Nor hard maples.”
This addition to what his sister had said restored the inner understanding between them; they spoke of their old home for a while.
Then Abe rose.
“You won't return for the night?” Mary asked once more.
“No. I shall have to keep an eye on the horses.”
Half an hour later Abe was unloading his chattels at the platform, leading his horses out first and then manoeuvring his wagon into a position where he could pile it high with a minimum of lost motion. Having taken as much as he could, he hitched two horses in frontâBelgians theseâand tied a team of Percherons behind. Thence, driving along the trail between track and elevators, he went west till he was opposite the station building. There, leaving his teams, he crossed the right-of-way and spoke to the agent, to tell him he would return for the remainder of his goods next morning.
At last he climbed to the top of his load and started north for the six-mile trek over open prairie.
A few hundred yards from the Somerville Line, as the east-west road was called, he reached that flat and unrelieved country which, to the very horizon, seemed to be a primitive wilderness. North, east, and west, nothing showed that looked like a settlement, and the impression of an utter loneliness was perhaps even enhanced by the knowledge that somewhere it harboured at least one man by name of Hall, half-crazed with work and isolation, and destined to be Abe's neighbour. As for others, the two who, probably under an impulse to huddle close together in this immensity, had a decade ago filed on the two northern quarters of the same section, they were gone, and having “proved up” on their claims, had vanished again in the outer world.
Abe's brief call at his sister's had somewhat unsettled him. For a year he had mentally lived on that open, flat
prairie, planning and adjusting himself. He needed room; he needed a country which would give scope to the powers he felt within him. Forbidding as it looked, this was that country. But Mary's casual remark about the cedars had reawakened in him the vision of the old farm as a place to live in: the house in its cluster of cedars, with the gnarled apple trees in the orchard behind; with the old furniture in the roomsânot very comfortable perhaps, but harmonious in the half-light admitted by the scanty windows half closed with vines: mellowed into unity by being lived in through generations. Here, everything was of necessity new and raw. Ruth in the midst of this? She knew nothing of what she was going into except that Abe was to create some sort of home for her: Ruth, whom a year or so ago he had met casually when buying oranges in a storeâ¦.
Well, he would conquer this wilderness; he would change it; he would set his own seal upon it! For the moment, one hundred and sixty acres were going to be his, capable of being tilled from line to line!
He would conquer! Yet, as he looked about, he was strangely impressed with this treeless prairie under the afternoon sun. This utterly undiversified country looked flat as a table-top. Differences in level, small as they might be, must exist. Why, otherwise, should there be bare soil here and there, with the smooth and cracked surface of a dried mudhole in clay? Whereas elsewhere the greyish-green, silky prairie grass grew knee-high. Why should the spring floods which he had not yet seen drain away to the east, into the river which carried them to the great lake? Why should it have been observed by those who had preceded him that certain sections of this wilderness dried sooner in spring than others? There must be undulations in the soil.
A year ago, Abe had scanned the district from a purely utilitarian point of view. Apart from the bush land in the far north, this had been almost the last district where free land was still available. Within it he had looked for depth of topsoil, for nearness to possible neighbours, for a convenient distance from a shipping-point.
Nothing but such considerations had had any influence with him a year ago. That the general conformation of a landscape might have to be considered, such an idea he would have laughed at. Yet this prairie seemed suddenly a peculiar country, mysteriously endowed with a power of testing temper and character. But that was exactly what he had wanted: a “clear proposition” as he had expressed it, meaning a piece of land capable of being tilled from line to line, without waste areas, without rocky stretches, without deeply-cut gullies which denied his horses a foothold. He wanted land, not landscape; all the landscape he cared for he would introduce himself.
Yet, half unbeknown to him, there was a dream: of a mansion such as he had seen in Ontario, in the remnants of a colonial estateâa mansion dominating an extensive holding of land, imposed upon that holding as a sort of seigneurial sign-manual. Dominating this prairie.
Had he undertaken more than he could do?
So far he had allowed his horses to idle along the faint trail. At this thought he straightened on top of the tent which covered his household goods. There, just ahead of him, came the turn; so far he had gone north, covering four miles in that direction. Now two miles west; and then look out for the stake which marked his corner.
He shook the lines over the backs of the horses and looked up. There did not seem to be even birds about! But this immense and utter loneliness merely aroused him to protest
and contradiction: he would change this prairie, would impose himself upon it, would conquer its spirit!
At last he arrived on his claim and stopped just within his lines. Before he climbed to the ground, he scanned the quarter section immediately west. On close scrutiny the monotony of the flatness proved to be broken there by what, at this distance, looked like two blisters in the soil: sod-hut and sod-stable of his neighbour; built by cutting with a spade squares of the prairie turf, matted with ancient roots, and using them like enormous flat bricks. Not thus was he going to build his first abode!
He slipped to the ground and unhooked his horses, throwing the traces over their backs; then he hitched them all four abreast and, behind them, strode over to Hall's place.
Hall was at home: a short, fat man of forty. As he issued from the sod-shack, which had two small square windows and a plank door fitted into its shaggy wall, he betrayed no surprise.
“Well,” he said, “you got here, eh?”
“Yes,” Abe replied. “Can I water the horses?”
“Sure. Help yourself. Help yourself to anything you can find on the god-damn place.”
“Have a crop in, I suppose?”
“They's seed in the ground; an' it's up. Quite a height, too.”
“How much?”
“Thirty acres. But whether it's going to make a cropâ” And the man shrugged his shoulders and flung an arm which came naked out of a sleeve ripped from the shoulder down.
“What's wrong with it?”
“Put in too doggone late. Water didn't go till nearly June.” There the man stood, hardly raised, mentally and in his
aspirations, above the level of that prairie from which he had come to wrest a living. “Truth to tell, if you want to know, if it were to do over again, I wouldn't do it. That's flat.”
Abe nodded. “Well, I'll take the horses down to the pool.”
“Help yourself. Anything you can use, just help yourself.”
“I see you've a drag-shovel there.”
“Take it. Take it. It ain't mine. But the fellow what owns it ain't hardly going to come back for it. He's done and gone.”
Again Abe nodded. “Shall have to dig a pool myself.” And he turned away with his horses to where, behind the stable, a dam of yellow subsoil circled the waterhole in which a supply of the precious liquid remained from the previous thaw-up and the summer rains.
Half an hour later, back in the south-east corner of his own claim, Abe tied the horses to the wheels of his wagon, took a steel measuring-line from a pocket, and marked off a hundred and twenty yards to west and north. That was to be the site of his farmstead. It was done half in protest against a rising discouragement; and, yielding completely to that need for a protest, he returned to his wagon, threw the tail-gate out, and pulled from under the load a huge hand-plough, which he lowered to the ground with a supreme effort. For a while he was busy fitting evener and trees to the implement. Then, looking up at the sun, which was approaching the western horizon, he hitched his horses in front.
“Get up there!” he shouted; and, throwing the plough over, so that the share slipped smoothly along the ground, he went north, to the point where, from his measurements, the line of his yard was to be. Reversing the plough, he slanted the point into the virgin prairie and began to step out behind his team, throwing his weight now to right, now to left,
according as the plough threatened to be thrown out of the ground by such resistances as the soil afforded. Thus he drew a furrow around the site of the yard; and, having finished it, he returned once more to the point whence he had started and began the task of breaking his first field. He did shallow ploughing; for he knew that the prairie should be broken and back-set. As he stepped along, he did double work: he guided his plough and counted his steps; and when he had taken three hundred and eighty strides he turned, for on the trip west he had figured out that that line squared would give him thirty acres.