Fruits of the Earth (4 page)

This was the signal for the work-horses and the cows to return to the stable; and since they were always fed a measure of oats and a handful of shorts, a scarcely visible cluster of
animals began at once to move from the open prairie towards the farmstead. As soon as Abe saw that they were on their way, he ceased calling, turned back into the stable and turned the drivers out into the yard. There being no room for all his stock in the barn, he had to feed in relays. Then he went to the gate and waited for the rest of the horses to come. Even his waiting he seemed to do briskly, calling again for the horses when they lingered to snatch another bite of good grass. At last they started their nightly comedy of a struggle between their love of freedom and their love of oats. Invariably the desire of the belly conquered; and, leaving the more deliberate cows behind, they entered the yard in a galloping rush, tossing their heads, and raising their tails. The cows followed at a walk, breaking into a short run only as they passed the master who impatiently closed the gate behind them.

All this while Ruth had been sitting in the buggy and looking on. A somewhat empty smile never left her lips. Was this routine of the farm still new enough to her to retain its charm? Or was she so intensely in love with her vigorous and swift-moving husband that she was unwilling to lose a minute of his company?

Abe was occasionally conscious of a twinge of impatience with her–or was it with himself? He would have liked to say something; what was there to say? He had tried to speak of his plans; the topic, endlessly repeated, had exhausted itself. Sometimes she looked as though she were waiting; for what? He was doing his best.

The milking next, for evening was coming fast. Meanwhile, in the house, supper was waiting; and Abe was conscious of being hungry.

Ruth descended from the buggy and stood in the door, looking on. A year ago she had tried her hand at the
traditional woman's task, with poor success. Laughing at herself, she had given it up; and Abe preferred to do all outside work himself.

Together they went to the house, Abe carrying the brimming pails. At the table, nothing was being said, either, beyond such brief words as were called for by the task in hand. Abe was thinking of his coming negotiations with Hall; Ruth–of what?

Supper over, Abe separated the cream while Ruth cleared the table and washed the dishes. It was seven o'clock; but the sun was still high. Abe carried the skimmed milk to the pig-pen beyond the pool.

When he returned, he stopped in the centre of the yard. “Coming out?” he called to Ruth who was still in the shack.

She came to the door. “Might as well.”

Might as well! Yet every bit of work was Abe's.

They went to the field where the wheat stood knee-high, being in the shot-blade; and for two hours they went about pulling weeds; bright-yellow charlock and paler tumbling mustard. As always, Abe worked like a whirlwind; Ruth languidly, she being pregnant. Abe kept slapping neck and hands, for mosquitoes were bad. Ruth laughed, immune.

Suddenly Abe straightened and listened. “By jingo!” he exclaimed.

“What is it?” Ruth asked; for she, too, had caught a faint pulsation in the air.

“The ditchers,” Abe said. “Come on!” And, turning, he ran for the yard, leaving Ruth behind.

The sun was almost setting; and as they passed through the gate where Abe had waited, they saw, straight west, little puffs of steam and smoke rising into the clear evening air.

“It
is
the ditching machine,” Abe said. “They'll get past here after all this summer. I'll hitch up to-morrow; we'll have a look at them.”

He took Ruth's arm and, bending down to kiss her, led her back to the field where they rogued for another hour till it was too dark to distinguish weeds from grain. The weeds Abe piled in the margin, at right angles to a rope which he had brought and by the help of which he swung the huge bundle on his back. Thus, through the dusk, they returned to the yard where Abe kindled a fire with chips from the wood pile, smothering the flames with the green weeds till they disengaged a dense, acrid smoke which dispelled the increasingly troublesome mosquitoes. Ruth brought two chairs from the shack; and they sat down in the smudge, Abe in the thickest of it, Ruth near the margin.

They had been sitting there for half an hour, Abe yawning with that abandon which comes from overwhelming drowsiness, when, from the trail beyond the fence, a voice sounded across: “Seen the ditchers?”

Abe and Ruth gave a start. “Yes,” Abe said. “Heard and seen them.”

“Both?”

“What do you mean?”

“They're working on both lines,” said Hall's voice. “They're nearer on the south line.”

“Come,” Abe said to Ruth; and again he took her arm.

“Do you mean to say they work at night?” Abe asked at the gate.

Hall laughed and spat. “They had better. They've contracted to finish the work before freeze-up.”

The bright glare of a headlight was visible against the dark sky from which the pallor of the sunset had vanished; and
farther south a second similar light pointed eastward, less brightly, for these three humans were not in the line of its focus.

“That there machine,” Hall said, pointing ineffectively with a chewed-off pipe-stem, “is two miles south. It's the bigger one; they work three steam-shovels there; that's why they've overtaken this here devil. They've shipped in two carloads of forriners, Ukarainians, dodgast them. I was thinking of asking fer a job my own self. But the white man don't stand a chancet in this country any longer.”

“That reminds me,” Abe said. “I'm going to build a granary. You can get a job right here.”

“All right, bo'. What about that there house you were talking of?”

“I'll get you the house. Trouble is, I'll have to owe you the money it costs. You have to sign under oath that the house is yours.”

Hall chuckled. “So long as I gets my money when I pull out.”

“You don't need to pull out till you've got it.”

“That's so. It's all right then. I'm danged if I stays on this prairie a day longer than I've got to.”

Three, four miles to the west, lights shifted, crossing the pointed finger of the headlight. The night seemed to intensify into a more palpable blackness; and the pulse of the engine ceased. Startlingly, two or three of the movable lights were reversed, pointing converging beams backward, against the face of the machine that was straddling the ditch it excavated. Magically, it seemed drawn nearer.

“Something wrong,” Hall said, spitting. “Lighting up for repairs.”

They stood and stared but could not, of course, see what was going on. The second outfit was visibly forging ahead.
Whenever Abe looked away for a second, he noticed the progress made in the interval.

“That there outfit,” Hall said, “lifts three yards of dirt at a bite; the ditch is forty feet wide and thirty deep; but that there monster digs it at the rate of two rods an hour. Twenty rods in a ten-hour day; that's two miles a month. They're speeding her up now to five miles a month, what with night work and more help. They've got to finish her, or they lose their deposit.”

“That so? How do you know?” Abe felt Ruth pressing against him.

Hall, however, did not take the slightest notice of her. Again he spat. “I've been down. Foreman told me.”

“Well,” Abe said, turning away, “I was thinking of hitching up and driving down myself to-morrow, it being Sunday.”

“No work on Sundays,” Hall said. “Stop at midnight. Wait till Monday.”

Abe was fingering the gate. “No time on weekdays.”

“You're in a blasted hurry. Learn better by-m-by. When do I start on that there granary of yours?”

“Report on Monday. We'll haul the lumber…Good night.”

And once more husband and wife sat in silence within the smudge till the excitement of the trip to the road had worn off and drowsiness reconquered body and mind.

FIRST NEIGHBOURS

A
gain a year had gone by; and Abe, with the help of a huge steam-tractor rented from Anderson, the round-faced young hardware dealer in town, and operated by Bigelow, the powerful, club-footed blacksmith, had hauled out for Hall a three-roomed farm-house which he had bought from Wilson, postmaster at Morley. The price, three hundred dollars, had been figured, as Dr. Vanbruik had advised, against the wages which Abe owed Hall for work done during the year.

It was in that spring of 1902 that Nicoll first came out to look the district over. He was renting a farm along the southern edge of Grand Pré Plains.

“Renting!” he said to Abe. “You don't know what that means. No chance to do as I think best. My landlord wants me to summer-fallow eighty acres. ‘Very well,' I say, ‘give me a lease so that I can count on some return from my labour. Unless I know that I can crop that fallow next year, I won't earn wages for my work.' ‘I can hardly do that,' he says. I may want to sell; or another tenant may offer a better rent.' ‘Then,' I say, ‘I'll crop what I till or go where I can do so.' ‘You've got
your living,' he says; ‘what more do you want?' I always leave my land better than I found it; but it's no use. I have to have land of my own. I have my own horses and implements, such as they are. And I've a little money besides. I've
got
to have land of my own.”

“The land's here,” Abe said, irritated by the man's hesitation, yet liking him. “It has its drawbacks, like any land. It's subject to floods coming down from the hills. They bring weeds. But
I
'm farming. Seems to me I'm getting ahead; though, of course, it's hard to say where you stand in this game. So far I've been tying my money down, what little I had. But this year I'll have a crop of a hundred and fifty acres; and it's doing well. I came when there wasn't even a ditch. We are getting the better of the water. I'm buying more land and proving up on the homestead. Seems to me I'm on the safe side.”

“It looks that way,” Nicoll said.

But he did not, that year, file on the quarter section which he had picked and decided upon.

In the summer of 1903 he returned. During the previous fall Abe had built a huge barn and added a room to the shack, financing his operations by using his last capital and borrowing at the Somerville bank–a process which he found surprisingly easy. True enough, it was a short-term loan of only fifteen hundred dollars; but, after threshing, he had paid off only eight hundred, covering the balance by a renewal note. In the spring he had planted a four-rowed wind-break of black poplar, with spruces interspersed along the north and west lines of the yard. There were other changes which Nicoll inspected and duly admired. The whole of what was now Abe's half section was fenced; and the land was divided by a cross-fenced pasture of twenty acres, extending from the rear of his
huge, red, curb-roofed barn for twenty rods west and for half a mile north. In the house which he had bought for Hall lived Bill Crane who had been a notorious idler in town but who, having married, seemed to have changed his ways, for young Mrs. Crane could often be heard shrilly driving her man to work in the morning. Hall, having received eight hundred dollars, had turned over to Abe his newly acquired title and left for parts unknown. Abe had a hundred acres of this new land under crop; and sixty acres were freshly broken when Nicoll appeared. The total number of horses on the place was eleven now, not counting three colts born in the new barn. Ten cows were being milked; and there were steers and heifers besides, and pigs and fowl.

Nicoll, medium-sized, middle-aged, bearded, deliberate, went about and looked at it all. “You say you came here with a few wagon-loads of truck and slept on the ground for the first two weeks?”

“That's what I said.” They were standing in the open door of the magnificent barn. Opposite, in front of the house–for with the new room and the gable roof it was hardly a shack any longer–two youngsters played about; and a cradle stood in the shade north of the building. This cradle held a little girl called Mary, after her aunt, though, to avoid confusion, her parents had resolved to change the name to Marion, which was the first name of Ruth's mother.

Nicoll smiled up at Abe, sighing. It would have been hard to define his expression. Ordinarily he seemed to look into himself rather than at the things surrounding him. Now he seemed ready to be impressed. At times his look verged on adoration and yet seemed on the point of turning on itself and, in a smile half veiled by the reddish beard streaked with grey, of becoming tinged with a gentle irony. Abe was by far
the younger man of the two; but the way in which Nicoll looked at him might have suggested that he gave him credit for superior wisdom and experience while at the same time half mocking at it.

In spite of the fact that Abe could not understand the man's hesitation he was attracted. To him the world was a thing to be conquered, waiting to take the impress of his mind and will. Nicoll seemed rather to look for a niche to slip into, unnoticed and unobserved.

“You,” Nicoll said at last, “were of course in a different position when you arrived. “You had capital.”

“I had five thousand dollars.”

Nicoll seemed to shrink within himself. “As I said,” he muttered, with his curious smile. “Dukes and lords…” He had said nothing of the kind; but perhaps he had thought it.

“But look what I've got!” Abe said impulsively. “This barn cost me three thousand dollars. My stock is worth two any day. And all that”–indicating, by a sweep of his arm, the fields with their crops–“is clear profit, not to mention the rest of my equipment. I had nothing but a hand plough when I came. Before I'm through, I'll be farming whole sections of land, ploughing with tractors, an acre every two minutes.”

“No doubt,” Nicoll said. “Dukes and lords. How about the margin?”