Read Ebook: Dennison Grant: A Novel of To-day by Stead Robert J C

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Ebook has 1746 lines and 80442 words, and 35 pages

Linder thought that a strange peg on which to hang their welcome. But she was continuing--

"And you have been so successful, haven't you? You have made quite a hit with Dad."

"How about Dad's daughter?" asked Transley. Transley had a manner of direct and forceful action. These were his first words to her. Linder would not have dared be so precipitate.

"Perhaps," thought Linder to himself, as he turned the incident over in his mind, "perhaps that is why Transley is boss, and I'm just foreman." The young woman's behavior seemed to support that conclusion. She did not answer Transley's question, but she gave no evidence of displeasure.

"You boys must be hungry," Y.D. was saying. "Pile in."

The rancher and his wife sat at the ends of the table; Transley on the side at Y.D.'s right; Linder at Transley's right. In the better light Linder noted Y.D.'s face. It was the face of a man of fifty, possibly sixty. Life in the open plays strange tricks with the appearance. Some men it ages before their time; others seem to tap a spring of perpetual youth. Save for the grey moustache and the puckerings about the eyes Y.D.'s was still a young man's face. Then, as the rancher turned his head, Linder noted a long scar, as of a burn, almost grown over in the right cheek.... Across the table from them sat the girl, impartially dividing her position between the two.

A Chinese boy served soup, and the rancher set the example by "piling in" without formality. Eight hours in the open air between meals is a powerful deterrent of table small-talk. Then followed a huge joint of beef, from which Y.D. cut generous slices with swift and dexterous strokes of a great knife, and the Chinese boy added the vegetables from a side table. As the meat disappeared the call of appetite became less insistent.

"She's been a great summer, ain't she?" said the rancher, laying down his knife and fork and lifting the carver. "Transley, some more meat? Pshaw, you ain't et enough for a chicken. Linder? That's right, pass up your plate. Powerful dry, though. That's only a small bit; here's a better slice here. Dry summers gen'rally mean open winters, but you can't never tell. Zen, how 'bout you? Old Y.D.'s been too long on the job to take chances. Mother? How much did you say, Transley? About two thousand tons? Not enough. Don't care if I do,"--helping himself to another piece of beef.

"I think you'll find two thousand tons, good hay and good measurement," said Transley.

"I'm sure of it," rejoined his host, generously. "I'm carryin' more steers than usual, and'll maybe run in a bunch of doggies from Manitoba to boot. I got to have more hay."

So the meal progressed, the rancher furnishing both the hospitality and the conversation. Transley occasionally broke in to give assent to some remark, but his interruption was quite unnecessary. It was Y.D.'s practice to take assent for granted. Once or twice the women interjected a lead to a different subject of conversation in which their words would have carried greater authority, but Y.D. instantly swung it back to the all-absorbing topic of hay.

The Chinese boy served a pudding of some sort, and presently the meal was ended.

"She's been a dry summer--powerful dry," said the rancher, with a wink at his guests. "Zen, I think there's a bit of gopher poison in there yet, ain't there?"

The girl left the room without remark, returning shortly with a jug and glasses, which she placed before her father.

"I suppose you wear a man's size, Transley," he said, pouring out a big drink of brown liquor, despite Transley's deprecating hand. "Linder, how many fingers? Two? Well, we'll throw in the thumb. Y.D? If you please, just a little snifter. All set?"

The rancher rose to his feet, and the company followed his example.

"Here's ho!--and more hay," he said, genially.

"Ho!" said Linder.

"The daughter of the Y.D!" said Transley, looking across the table at the girl. She met his eyes full; then, with a gleam of white teeth, she raised an empty glass and clinked it against his.

The men drained their glasses and re-seated themselves, but the women remained standing.

"Perhaps you will excuse us now," said the rancher's wife. "You will wish to talk over business. Y.D. will show you upstairs, and we will expect you to be with us for breakfast."

With a bow she left the room, followed by her daughter. Linder had a sense of being unsatisfied; it was as though a ravishing meal has been placed before a hungry man, and only its aroma had reached his senses when it had been taken away. Well, it provoked the appetite--

The rancher re-filled the glasses, but Transley left his untouched, and Linder did the same. There were business matters to discuss, and it was no fair contest to discuss business in the course of a drinking bout with an old stager like Y.D.

"I got to have another thousand tons," the rancher was saying. "Can't take chances on any less, and I want you boys to put it up for me."

"Suits me," said Transley, "if you'll show me where to get the hay."

"You know the South Y.D?"

"Never been on it."

"Well, it's a branch of the Y.D. which runs south-east from The Forks. Guess it got its name from me, because I built my first cabin at The Forks. That was about the time you was on a milk diet, Transley, and us old-timers had all outdoors to play with. You see, the Y.D. is a cantank'rous stream, like its godfather. At The Forks you'd nat'rally suppose is where two branches joined, an' jogged on henceforth in double harness. Well, that ain't it at all. This crick has modern ideas, an' at The Forks it divides itself into two, an' she hikes for the Gulf o' Mexico an' him for Hudson's Bay. As I was sayin', I built my first cabin at The Forks--a sort o' peek-a-boo cabin it was, where the wolves usta come an' look in at nights. Well, I usta look out through the same holes. I had the advantage o' usin' language, an' I reckon we was about equal scared. There was no wife or kid in those days."

The rancher paused, took a long draw on his pipe, and his eyes glowed with the light of old recollections.

"Well, as I was sayin'," he continued presently, "folks got to callin' the stream the Y.D., after me. That's what you get for bein' first on the ground--a monument for ever an ever. This bein' the main stream got the name proper, an' the other branch bein' smallest an' running kind o' south nat'rally got called the South Y.D. I run stock in both valleys when I was at The Forks, but not much since I came down here. Well, there's maybe a thousand tons o' hay over in the South Y.D., an' you boys better trail over there to-morrow an' pitch into it--that is, if you're satisfied with the price I'm payin' you."

"The price is all right," said Transley, "and we'll hit the trail at sun-up. There'll be no trouble--no confliction of interests, I mean?"

"Whose interests?" demanded the rancher, beligerently. "Ain't I the father of the Y.D? Ain't the whole valley named for me? When it comes to interests--"

"Of course," Transley agreed, "but I just wanted to know how things stood in case we ran up against something. It's not like the old days, when a rancher would rather lose twenty-five per cent. of his stock over winter than bother putting up hay. Hay land is getting to be worth money, and I just want to know where we stand."

"Quite proper," said Y.D., "quite proper. An' now the matter's under discussion, I'll jus' show you my hand. There's a fellow named Landson down the valley of the South Y.D. that's been flirtin' with that hay meadow for years, but he ain't got no claim to it. I was first on the ground an' I cut it whenever I feel like it an' I'm goin' to go on cuttin' it. If anybody comes out raisin' trouble, you just shoo 'em off, an' go on cuttin' that hay, spite o' hell an' high water. Y.D.'ll stand behind you."

"Thanks," said Transley. "That's what I wanted to know."

The rancher had ridden into the Canadian plains country from below "the line" long before barbed wire had become a menace in cattle-land. From Pincher Creek to Maple Creek, and far beyond, the plains lay unbroken save by the deep canyons where, through the process of ages, mountain streams had worn their beds down to gravel bottoms, and by the occasional trail which wandered through the wilderness like some thousand-mile lariat carelessly dropped from the hand of the Master Plainsman. Here and there, where the cutbanks of the river Canyons widened out into sloping valleys, affording possible access to the deep-lying streams, some ranchman had established his headquarters, and his red-roofed, whitewashed buildings flashed back the hot rays which fell from an opalescent heaven. At some of the more important fords trading posts had come into being, whither the ranchmen journeyed twice a year for groceries, clothing, kerosene, and other liquids handled as surreptitiously as the vigilance of the Mounted Police might suggest. The virgin prairie, with her strange, subtle facility for entangling the hearts of men, lay undefiled by the mercenary plowshare; unprostituted by the commercialism of the days that were to be.

Into such a country Y.D. had ridden from the South, trailing his little bunch of scrub heifers, in search of grass and water and, it may be, of a new environment. Up through the Milk River country; across the Belly and the Old Man; up and down the valley of the Little Bow, and across the plains as far as the Big Bow he rode in search of the essentials of a ranch headquarters. The first of these is water, the second grass, the third fuel, the fourth shelter. Grass there was everywhere; a fine, short, hairy crop which has the peculiar quality of self-curing in the autumn sunshine and so furnishing a natural, uncut hay for the herds in the winter months. Water there was only where the mountain streams plowed their canyons through the deep subsoil, or at little lakes of surface drainage, or, at rare intervals, at points where pure springs broke forth from the hillsides. Along the river banks dark, crumbling seams exposed coal resources which solved all questions of fuel, and fringes of cottonwood and poplar afforded rough but satisfactory building material. As the rancher sat on his horse on a little knoll which overlooked a landscape leading down on one side to a sheltering bluff by the river, and on the other losing itself on the rim of the heavens, no fairer prospect surely could have met his eye.

And yet he was not entirely satisfied. He was looking for no temporary location, but for a spot where he might drive his claim-stakes deep. That prairie, which stretched under the hot sunshine unbroken to the rim of heaven; that brown grass glowing with an almost phosphorescent light as it curled close to the mother sod;--a careless match, a cigar stub, a bit of gun-wadding, and in an afternoon a million acres of pasture land would carry not enough foliage to feed a gopher.

Y.D. turned in his saddle. Along the far western sky hung the purple draperies of the Rockies. For fifty miles eastward from the mighty range lay the country of the foothills, its great valleys lost to the vision which leapt only from summit to summit. In the clear air the peaks themselves seemed not a dozen miles away, but Y.D. had not ridden cactus, sagebrush and prairie from the Rio Grande to the St. Mary's for twenty years to be deceived by a so transparent illusion. Far over the plains his eye could trace the dark outline of a trail leading mountainward.

The heifers drowsed lazily in the brown grass. Y.D., shading his eyes the better with his hand, gazed long and thoughtfully at the purple range. Then he spat decisively over his horse's shoulder and made a strange "cluck" in his throat. The knowing animal at once set out on a trot to stir the lazy heifers into movement, and presently they were trailing slowly up into the foothill country.

Far up, where the trail ahead apparently dropped over the end of the world, a horse and rider hove in view. They came on leisurely, and half an hour elapsed before they met the rancher trailing west.

The stranger was a rancher of fifty, wind-whipped and weather-beaten of countenance. The iron grey of his hair and moustache suggested the iron of the man himself; iron of figure, of muscle, of will.

"'Day," he said, affably, coming to a halt a few feet from Y.D. "Trailing into the foothills?"

Y.D. lolled in his saddle. His attitude did not invite conversation, and, on the other hand, intimated no desire to avoid it.

"Maybe," he said, noncommittally. Then, relaxing somewhat,--"Any water farther up?"

"About eight miles. Sundown should see you there, and there's a decent spot to camp. You're a stranger here?" The older man was evidently puzzling over the big "Y.D." branded on the ribs of the little herd.

"It's a big country," Y.D. answered. "It's a plumb big country, for sure, an' I guess a man can be a stranger in some corners of it, can't he?"

Y.D. began to resent the other man's close scrutiny of his brand.

"Well, what's wrong with it?" he demanded.

"Oh, nothing. No offense. I just wondered what 'Y.D.' might stand for."

"Might stand for Yankee devil," said Y.D., with a none-of-your-business curl of his lip. But he had carried his curtness too far, and was not prepared for the quick retort.

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