“The profit? Before I'm through, I'll build a house over there fit to stand in any city.”
Nicoll repeated, “No doubt!” not hesitatingly this time, but decisively. “Not a doubt on earth!â¦But I didn't mean it that way. Do you find time to live? Besides, I've half a score of kids.”
“I've three,” Abe said with a laugh. “There hasn't been time for more. What we want. A population. What do I want more than anything else? I'll tell you. Neighbours.”
Nicoll laughed; and, with an intonation almost of archness which sat strangely on a man of his age, he added, “To buy out?”
Abe frowned but took no offence. “Tell you. I'll buy out every no-account fellow who settles next to me. Rather than let his claim revert to weeds which would be a menace to me. But if a man shows he can make a success, I'll help him all I can. Why, man,” he burst out vigorously, “I'll tell you why I need neighbours. Because I need roads; because I need cross-ditches and other improvements. And as the kids grow up, I'll need a school. That's why I need neighbours. There's been a Yankee snooping around. I don't like him. A runt of a fellow, with an eye and a nose like a terrier dog. I've encouraged him. Why? Because he might know the business end of a rake from the handle. And Germans have been looking the district over, from the reserve down south. Even a Ukrainian came last fall; had been working on the ditching machine. I'd like to have men of my own colour about. But rather than stay alone, let niggers and Chinamen come.”
“Good farmers,” Nicoll said pensively, “those Germans and Ukrainians. And Chinamen, tooâ¦. I believe I'm going to do it. I'm not quite ready. But that corner suits me to the ground if it can be farmed.”
“I've been steering others away from the place.”
“I believe I will,” Nicoll said, and went to his buggy as though to start at once for the land-titles office.
But in the spring of 1904 there was no sign yet of any Nicoll in the district.
Abe had suddenly seen himself forced to buy a third quarter of land, unless, indeed, he had been willing to let it go to someone else. It was the north-west quarter; and, together with other parcels in other districts, it had been put up for
public sale. Abe had been taken by surprise; and though the price was low, he had had to borrow at the bank. Not that it mattered; but his increased acreage demanded an ever-rising investment in implements; and Ruth was plainly getting impatient about the house. What could he do? He could not afford to let the land go to any one else. If, for a few more years, they had to put up with a house less roomy and less well built than their hired man's, it could not be helped. He had bidden the land in, paying seven hundred and fifty dollars for it.
Yet he was worried and restless. He was in debt. He worked frantically; he even pulled weeds again by hand, a thing he had not done for a year or two; and he did it alone now; for Ruth no longer kept him company. The crop did not promise so well that year; the flood had been slow in running out; and after that there was a drought; in patches the wheat was turning yellow before it had headed out. It was, of course, impossible to rogue three hundred acres of grain; he did what he could. Yet there were odd little twinges of a lack of confidence. With his thirst for conquest he lived dangerously, always assuming new debts before the old ones were paid off; he was discounting the future; he was selling himself into slavery. Such curious, harrying thoughts could be shaken off only by desperate spurts of work. Never was the day's task finished before eleven at night; he never sat about with Ruth any longer. The hired man had his more or less defined hours; Abe had not. Conscience-stricken over his neglect of Ruth, he tried to compensate for it by an occasional ostentation of solicitude. There were four children now: two boys and two girls, the name of the youngest being Frances. He urged Ruth to get help for the house. Ruth asked scornfully, “Where should I put a girl? In the hay-loft?” Yes, yes, the house was too small.
All this was worrying Abe when, one evening, Nicoll drove into the margin of the field where Abe was roguing. Sitting in his old, wobbly buggy, he asked whether he could spend the night in the barn.
“Sure,” Abe said. “Had your supper?”
“Had a bite in town. Well, I am coming at last.”
“To stay?”
“Not yet. We'll move next spring. But I've filed on the place.”
“A wonder nobody got ahead of you.”
“That risk I had to take. But I'm coming; provided I can count on getting occasional work on your place for a year or two.”
Abe laughed. “You're a godsend. Want to start to-night?”
“Not this summer. I've only a few weeks to spare before harvest. I need that for building. But if you say I can make enough to pay my store bill next summer, I'll go to town to-morrow and buy the lumber I need. I must have the house. There's been another kid during the year.”
“Same here. A girl. Number four.” Nicoll's coming would solve Abe's most pressing problem: that of help for the summer-fallowing while he and Bill did the breaking on the new quarter. An extensive fallow had become imperative unless he was willing to look on while his acres were being fouled with weeds. “I've bought a new quarter,” he added.
By way of answer, Nicoll looked at Abe with his queer, half-ironic smile. “I'm honestly tired,” he said.
“I haven't the time to feel tired,” Abe replied.
Thus the spring of 1905 saw Abe's desire for a neighbour fulfilled. North of the bridge across the ditch a house had been built, with a commodious, roofed-over porch. Behind it, a small stable with a granary as a lean-to on one side, and a henhouse
on the other. A strip of ploughing, for the wind-break, surrounded the two acre-yard. West of it, twenty acres of new breaking extended to the north.
Blessings, like disasters, have a habit of coming in pairs. Two miles east of what was henceforth to be known as Nicoll's Corner, a log-shack went up, south of the ditch. For a long while neither Abe nor Nicoll knew who was building in this furtive way. Whoever it was did his hauling and fitting at night, after dark. For hours there was a continual going and coming about the place by lantern light. Nicoll at last rode over on horseback. He reported to Abe that the walls of a house twenty by eighteen feet were going up there. Not a soul had been visible about the place.
The next time Abe was at Somerville he dropped in at the land-titles office and inquired. The man had given his name as Shilloe; he was a Ukrainian who had little English. When filing his claim he had produced naturalization papers. He lived at a town called The Coulee, eight miles south-west of Somerville, where he was employed as a section man by the Great Prairie Railroad.
Abe felt encouraged. For five years he had been alone; now he was going to have two neighbours at once. They would help to bring in other settlers. He had also noticed that the ditch along the Somerville Line was being deepened and widened; it had been taken over by the provincial government. But when he mentioned at Morley that this was evidently being done to attract settlers, he was laughed at. It was done, he was told, to attract votes to a certain party.
As for Nicoll, he and Abe became more than neighbours that summer; they became friends. Considering their almost antipodal outlook on life, this was a remarkable factâ¦.
Abe was breaking the newly acquired quarter section; and, belatedly, he was fallowing the south-west quarter. This ploughing Nicoll did while Bill Crane helped Abe with his breaking. Sometimes it happened that Abe and Nicoll met at the line dividing the two quarters where Abe had taken down his fence and replaced it by a shallow ditch.
Often, when they met, Nicoll jumped across to join Abe while the horses rested; and they talked; sometimes, as is often the case with farmers, on curious and recondite subjects.
Thus Wilson, the postmaster at Morley, having suddenly died, leaving his daughter Susie in charge, Nicoll said with seeming irrelevancy and in that light tone with which we touch on things that disquiet us, “Strange thing, death, isn't it?”
“I don't know,” Abe replied. He had a definite aim in life: to be the most successful farmer of a district yet to be created; he was a materialist and felt uncomfortable when facing fundamentals.
“I wish we could know!”
Abe turned and picked up the lines of his team. “Best not to inquire, I guess,” he said, and clicked his tongue.
When they met again, Nicoll pursued the topic. “I read an article recently,” he said. “The doctor gave it to me.” He meant Dr. Vanbruik, not Dr. Schreiber, the practising physician at Morley. “It said a life after death was impossible unless we had existed from all eternity.”
Abe's eyes swept over the landscape beyond his fences. He did not often allow it to do so. Rarely, during the first years of his life on the prairie, had he given the landscape any thought. It had offered a “clear proposition,” unimpeded by bluffs of trees or irregularities in the conformation of the ground; the trees he wanted he had planted where he wanted
them. But when Nicoll spoke as he had done, Abe felt something uncanny in that landscape. Nicoll's words impressed him as though they were the utterance of that very landscape itself; as though Nicoll were the true son of the prairie, and he, Abe, a mere interloper. Incomprehensibly he was drawn to this man even while resenting the fact that his, Abe's, brother-in-law should loan him things to read. Abe read nothing but farm papers; and in them only what might enable him to farm more land more efficiently than any one else.
Again he picked up his lines. But, still standing in his place, he shrugged his shoulders. “What of it? Suppose we come from nothing and go to nothing? While I'm here, what difference does it make?”
Nicoll gave him a troubled glance.
“Get up, there!” Abe shouted, shaking the lines over the horses' backs; and as they bent into their collars, he caught up with the plough by running a few steps before he lifted himself to its seat.
Here and there, in the long strip of pasture, cows were grazing in groups; others were lying down and chewing the cud. To the east, two miles away as the crow flies, a slight indentation of the sky-line marked the spot where Nicoll's farmstead lay. Shilloe's buildings were quite invisible. Abe's own barn was so far the only landmark to be seen from Morley.
Conquest of that landscape depended on ways and means of speeding up the work. Abe owned three quarter sections now. No doubt the man who held the remaining quarter of the section would turn up one day prepared to sell. Abe would have a square mile then; how could he farm it? Hired men? Bill Crane needed too much supervising right now; when he milked, he did not milk dry; when he fed, he seemed to grudge the hay and yet wasted more than he saved. Why in the world,
he had recently asked, did Abe not turn the horses out at night? Even the horses liked it better. “They can't pick up enough green feed to keep in trim for the work and sleep besides,” Abe had answered. What was the solution? There was only one: power-farming as it was called: machinery would do the work of many horses and many men. But Abe liked the response of living flesh and bone to the spoken word and hated the unintelligent repetition of ununderstood activities which machines demanded. Yet sooner or later he must come to that; he would have to run the farm like a factory; that was the modern trendâ¦.
At noon, when the men went to the yard for dinner, two little boys, four and three years old, crossed from the house to the open door of the barn, plying their little legs as fast as they could and holding each other by their hands. Three teams, sixteen horses in allâfor Bill and Nicoll worked with six horses each, while Abe drove his “crack” team, four full-blooded Percheronsâcrowded around the water trough north of the barn. Abe left them and entered behind the children.
The two little boys were in the first stall opposite the door, south of the driveway, a stall never used except to drop hay into from above. Abe began to take oats to the various stalls.
But as boys will do, Charlie and Jim ran to the door every now and then, to scamper back to the protection of the stall, crowing.
They were on such a run when the first horses entered: a cunning mare with colt at foot. “Watch out!” Abe shouted.
The children jumped into safety; and the mare ran successively into several stalls to stick her nose into the feed-boxes. This was a trick of hers to steal a mouthful of oats here or there while the other horses filed in; but every time Abe
gave a lusty shout; and, tossing her head and slipping on the planking, she backed out again. The children laughed at her antics.
Abe was still carrying oats into the various stalls, greeted wherever he went by impatient whinnyings and the thuds of shifting feet, when Bill and Nicoll entered and distributed the hay. The feeding done, Bill climbed by the ladder into the loft to throw down enough hay for the evening's feeding. This was a special delight for the boys, who allowed themselves to be buried as each forkful came down.
“Bill!” Abe called when there was enough hay.
“Yah?”
“Look into the bin and see how much oats is left.”
The answer came shortly: “Not much. A bushel or so.”
“We better fill up to-night before we quit,” Nicoll said.
That was it! If all helpers were like Nicoll, it would not be bad. Bill would never have suggested working overtime to fill up a feed bin that was running low. The feed was there, in the granaryâ¦.
Abe picked up Jim, the smaller one of the boys, and put him on his shoulder; Charlie reached for his hand. And, with a nod to the other men, he strode off to the house, frowning.
He always frowned when he went to the house while Nicoll was there. He resented it that Ruth had suggested Nicoll might take his dinner at Bill's. At first Abe had flatly refused to agree to such an arrangement; but Ruth had made their meals so uncomfortable that he had broached the matter to Nicoll who had at once consented. “I quite understand. It's all right.”