The riddle of Three-Way Creek

WHALE RIVER meandered pleasantly down the middle of a valley. It was wood and grass from end to end, and the reed and willow banks of the river completed a picture of luxuriant fertility.

Andy McFardell had selected the valley of Whale River for the setting of his homestead without hesitation. In his police days he had come to know the place, and had pondered the thought that some day it would surely shelter a thriving homestead if only a sufficiently hardy settler should chance upon it. Often he had urged that only ignorance and something approaching superstition kept the homesteaders to the prairie lands. These people were obsessed by the openness of the plains, and, all unsheltered, preferred to face their winter storms rather than grapple fearlessly with their awe of the mystery world of the hills. But never in his dreams had he visualised himself as the first settler in Whale River valley.

Utterly dispirited, bitter and desperate, he had passed out of Calford barracks at the end of his term of imprisonment with but the vaguest plans for his future. Like many another, he had given himself up completely to police life, and regarded his calling as settled for the full extent of his working life. He had contemplated due promotion. He had contemplated a slow upward moving, which, at the end, should open for him the road to some form of official appointment which would afford him the comfortable old age he knew to be attainable. But he had reckoned without the machine. He had reckoned without those chances and accidents with which the machine dealt so mercilessly. And so he found himself adrift, with a thousand or so dollars in his pocket, and without any training or equipment for the civil life in which his future lay.

So it came that he had recourse to the fall-back which Canada holds out to everybody. There was land. There was Whale River valley, which he had so often pictured as sheltering a sturdy homestead. And he forthwith set out for it as the only possibility presenting itself.

But his suitability for the life had yet to be proved. It was all so very different from the shepherded life of the Police Force. Discipline, as a servant, he understood. It was an easy thing, provided temperament was right. He had even come to love the simple process of obeying the last order. And then, as a Corporal, he had had the appeal of inflicting orders upon others. Now the position was altogether different. He had become his own machine as well as its servant. Was he morally equal to the dual capacity?

For the first season he had worked with an enthusiasm that looked to be carrying all before it. His capital was spare, and he husbanded it carefully. With a few tools he built himself a shanty of green logs, and thatched it with reeds cut from the bosom of Whale River. The whole thing cost him no more than the labour, and he felt good about it, and settled his kit into it with no little satisfaction. Then he built his barn for the team he had acquired during his police days. And all the time in the work of it he was widening a clearing in the woodland bluff he had decided should shelter his homestead.

With the summer no more than half spent he set to work on the corral for his two cows, and a second small barn for their winter shelter. Then he embarked upon his first real expenditure. It was for the wire with which to fence in a twenty-acre pasture of sweet grass upon the river bank. It was all a wonderful exhibition of single-handed labour. But, then, his mood was bitter, and lent him artificial courage. It drove him hard. He was a “throw-out” from the Police, and he wanted to prove to the world the fierce injustice with which he had been treated.

At midsummer he passed into Hartspool, with its saloon, and store, and its freight of mixed human nature. The place caught him on the rebound, as it were. He had achieved amazingly, and felt a reasonable satisfaction. He felt himself to be a man of some sort of property. He felt he could afford to hold his head up with those others. He felt, alas! that he must loosen the strings of his purse, and show these folk that he knew the game he had only just embarked upon. He fell headlong into the pitfall awaiting every unwary settler. The implement and machinery agent was at his elbow, and pleasant evenings at the saloon helped towards his undoing.

He bought plough, and harrow, and seeder, and hayer, and binder, and a dozen and one other implements on the mortgage plan. It was so easy—so very easy. The future would pay for them—the crops he was going to grow. And Barney Lake, from behind his bar, watched the smiling dark eyes, and observed the confident attitude of the new man as he handled a deck of cards in the evening, or shook the crap dice with the men of substance who had built up large agricultural interests in the neighbourhood. And his mental reservations were decided and sharply pointed.

McFardell went back to his farm with his new possessions. And when winter closed down he had fifty acres under the plough. It was a tremendous feat.

It was during that first summer that Molly Marton became aware of her neighbour. For three months McFardell had been at work in Whale River valley before the girl discovered him, or the watchful Lightning became aware of his existence.

It happened on one of the girl’s periodical trips on domestic errands into Hartspool. As she rode down the valley over the grass-trail she beheld the smoke of a camp-fire curling above the tree-tops. Then she beheld the fencing down on the river flats where the grass was abundant. Then had come the final revelation, when she had looked into the clearing McFardell had cut in the shelter of the forest. The man was at work then on the finish of his log-built corral.

At sight of him her imagination was completely captured. His appeal was enormous. She beheld a muscular, good-looking man clad in an undershirt and trousers, and with queer, stout moccasins on his feet, waging a lonely battle with all the elements of the world she knew to be so fierce. Single-handed he was grappling with his colossal task, and the sight thrilled the hill-bred girl with its courage.

Beyond doubt McFardell was good to look upon. His eyes smiled pleasantly into hers, and the stubble of whisker about his cheeks and chin, and his black moustache, all helped to hide that curious ugliness of mouth which, even had she noticed it, Molly could hardly have read aright. That was the beginning of an intercourse that had never been allowed to die out. Intimacy leapt. She was a simple child, and he—he beheld a sweet, dark face, with fine grey eyes that were too honest to conceal her woman’s admiration.

Molly remained faithful to the picture of her first discovery. There was never any reason for her to do otherwise. Since that meeting she had seen him many times—far more frequently than she permitted Lightning to become aware of. And she always saw him in the same setting, battling with the labour of his primitive homestead in a fashion that never failed to provoke her admiration. But it was left to Lightning to nose out the things that helped to foster his unreasoning dislike, which he never attempted to conceal. And these things came in the short days and long nights of the first winter.

Winter was Lightning’s playtime. It had always been so during George Marton’s life, and Molly was content. Lightning would snatch days and nights in Hartspool. A fifty-mile ride or drive was nothing to the old sinner, if a reasonable soak of “hooch” was to be acquired as a result. And it was on these trips that he learned the depth of McFardell’s weakness.

The fierce loneliness of the hills in winter quickly proved intolerable to the ex-policeman. His homestead was snowed up. Whale River was solid to its bed. And the storms roaring down the valley, and the cruel depths of cold, left him with his thoughts flung back to the police canteen, with its roaring stove and pleasant companionship. He resisted temptation for a period. Then he yielded. By far the greater part of his first winter was spent in Hartspool, and his visits seriously ate into his capital, but they made far deeper inroads into such store of moral resolve as he possessed.

Barney Lake nodded reflectively over the thing he beheld, and his dictum remained uncontroverted.

“It ain’t no sort o’ use,” he said, for the enlightenment of Lightning and a group of his winter custom lounging about his office stove. “You can’t raise wheat enough to pay the machine agent settin’ around a cyard parlour all winter. I’d say winter’s mostly a bad time fer folks in general. Fer a tenderfoot, yearnin’ to look like a mossback, it’s just about all the hell he needs. But there’s a heap a feller ken do around winter, and he needs to do it if he’s goin’ to make good. You can’t sit around half soused, shootin’ craps fer a wad that wouldn’t attract a Hebrew-Chink,” he declared, spitting copiously into the stove. “That boy, McFardell, ain’t better’n the ord’nary police ‘throw-out.’”

The signs of McFardell’s weakening must have been apparent to any close observer as he stood in the doorway of his shanty gazing out upon the litter of his clearing. His eyes were unsmiling, and discontent looked out of them. He had no right to be standing there. He knew that. But his head ached, and he was hating the thought of work more than he had ever believed himself capable of hating it. His horses were in the barn, where he had put them somewhere about midnight. They were unbrushed, and unfed or watered. His two cows were at the corral bars bellowing for the milker and the feed they knew themselves entitled to. Then there was that seeding that should have been completed to-day. And now, in an hour or so, it would be noon. He felt tough. But——

He dived his hands into the pockets of his trousers. Then he searched his hip pocket. The result was a few silver coins and two bills of small denomination. He gazed at them awhile, and a feeling of sickness, which had nothing to do with the whisky he had consumed overnight, pervaded his stomach. He was thinking hard, and remembered he had “shot craps” to a late hour. Two dollars and a half was the change out of the fifty good dollars with which he had visited Hartspool the day before.

He thrust the dollars back into his pocket. Then he moved out into the sunlight.

“Gee! I must have been soused,” he muttered.

His heavy gaze surveyed the scene while the cows continued their clamour. It was a poor enough place, typical of its kind. The whole thing was haphazard. It was slipshod. Maybe the buildings were stout enough. It was the best that could be said of them. There was inexperience, carelessness, even indifference, in every detail of them. The thatch upon the barn was loose and wind-blown; the corral, snugged against the sheltering woods at the far side of the clearing, looked to have been constructed with regard to haste rather than stability; the near-by hay-stack of last year’s hay was a hopeless, wasteful litter. So, too, was the extravagant assortment of expensive implements, already rusted and paint-worn, which it would take him years to pay for.

He disregarded it all. At the moment his only concern was for the bad day he had had in Hartspool, and his complete disinclination for the arrears of work he knew to be awaiting him.

He passed down to the corral and cursed the clamouring cows. And later he returned with a bucket of none-too-clean milk, which, regardless of the swarming flies that descended upon it, he deposited just within the doorway of his shanty. Then, his mood improving with activity, he went on to the barn to tend his neglected team.

As he passed into the miserable building the whinny of gladness that greeted him was lost upon McFardell. All the years of his association with horseflesh had failed to inspire a shadow of appreciation. Horses had their uses, and, for him, that was all sufficient. And just now his only thought was to be done with irksome labours. The brush and curry-comb were things he had learned to hate in the days of his police life.

By the time he had rushed through the bare necessities of his team his mind was made up. There would be no seeding that day. It could wait until the morrow. He condemned himself for oversleeping. He knew that he had been half-drunk overnight. He had lost money at “craps” he could not afford. But he would straighten up. Yes. That was it. He would cut out Hartspool for awhile—at least till that big farmers’ dance which would take place in about two weeks. Hartspool was no use to him. He would stick to his work now the spring had come. So, for the rest of the day he would overhaul his machinery, and get it into good shape. He——

He looked up in the act of dipping corn from his iron bin, and stood listening. Then a shadowy smile crept into his eyes. He passed the feed to his horses while he listened to the sounds of someone approaching, and suddenly a girlish voice, hailing him by name, set him moving quickly to the doorway of the barn. His tongue moistened his thick lips behind the screen of his moustache.

“Ho! Andy!”

Molly Marton’s call was full of joyous greeting. She had just leapt from her saddle as McFardell appeared in the doorway. Her face was alight and smiling as she gazed into the man’s. She noted his stained, moleskin trousers, belted at the waist. She observed the business-like cotton shirt, with its sleeves rolled up to the elbows. She saw the muscular, sunburnt arms, and drew conclusions that satisfied her.

“Fixing your team for midday?” she said.

McFardell lied without hesitation.

“Sure,” he cried. “They done a big morning. But say, this is just great. I hadn’t thought you’d be along. It’s two weeks since—since—— It’s tough you living so far away, Molly. I sort of count the time between seeing you around.”

A quick flush mounted to the girl’s cheeks, and somehow she found herself interested in the cows feeding their hay down at the corral.

Molly stood with her reins linked over her arm. Her tall, gently rounded figure was full of appeal to the covetous gaze of the man. Her divided skirt was sufficiently attractive and business-like for all it was home-made, and of her own design. Her feet were well shod in soft tan riding-boots that were adequately spurred. Her half-length jacket over a white shirt-waist, and the wide-brimmed prairie hat securely strapped under the coil of hair at the back of her neck, completed a picture that stirred the man and banished the last of his heavy morning mood.

“It’s a real great time when we start seeding,” Molly cried impulsively, with a little laugh of excited spirits. “Doesn’t it make you feel glad? Seeding, I mean. It’s a good time for us folk.” She nodded wisely. “You see, we’re all looking ahead. The sun’s full of promise after winter. The birds an’ things are making ready, too. And the earth. Yes, everything’s just looking ahead. I love seeding. How many acres have you put down?”

McFardell lied again.

“Twenty so far,” he said. Then he reached out to take the reins from her arm. “You’ll stay and eat?” he went on eagerly. “I’ll just fix your mare, and we’ll go right up and eat. The beans are ready, and I’ve a swell piece of imported bacon I brought out from Hartspool last night.”

“Were you to Hartspool yesterday?”

The man’s smile passed abruptly as thought flung back.

“Yes,” he said, and laughed without mirth. “But I’m glad to be out again. As you say, it’s good with spring around.”

Molly was thinking of Lightning. She remembered his expressed contempt of this man. And her smile passed.

“You go right up and fix things,” she said quietly. “Sure I’ll be glad to eat. I’ll fix Rachel,” she went on. “I always fix her. She needs hobbling, and I guess I’ll set her out on the grass. You see, I’m out after our cows that have strayed. I left Lightning back there cursing cattle thieves and folk like that. He never reckons our cows can stray.” She laughed. “Lightning would hate to think they hadn’t been driven by cattle thieves.”

McFardell nodded.

“I see,” he said seriously. Then he added thoughtfully: “But I’m not so sure about Lightning being crazy that way. You know there’s a lot of young stock coming down out of these hills. The folk in Hartspool are guessing about it. A boy named Dan Quinlan, somewhere away above your place, has set them all wondering. And being folk who’re interested, and easily disturbed, all sorts of queer hints and looks are passing amongst ’em. Anyway, I’ll go fix the food while you pass your mare all she needs.”

Molly was sitting on a box just outside the doorway of the man’s shanty. McFardell was facing her on an up-turned bucket. And between them, on the ground, was the remains of their repast of beans and the boasted imported bacon.

Their tin platters had been laid aside, and each was in possession of a beaker of tea, which had just been dipped from the simmering camp kettle. The man was smoking his first pipe of the day and regarding the girl with that curious, burning smile which her innocence would never have permitted her to interpret aright. Frank admiration was looking out of Molly’s eyes. To an onlooker the truth must have been all apparent. The girl was in love. And the man with the curiously ugly mouth was contemplating her with no great purity of thought behind his eyes.

But McFardell held himself under restraint. He had come to know something of Molly’s courage and independence. He realised, too, the innocence of her mind. Her beauty was unusual. Her shapeliness was something that ravished him. So he did his best to hide up the feelings she stirred in him.

“You know, Molly, it’s a mighty tough life, this homesteading,” he said, with the air of a man contemplating affairs in the abstract. “It beats me, the way you get through on your lonesome.”

“But I’ve got Lightning.”

The man laughed contemptuously.

“Lightning?” He shook his head. “The fag end of a misspent life.”

Molly’s smile died on the instant.

“You think that?” she cried, a flush mounting to her cheeks. “You needn’t. You surely needn’t. He’s no ‘fag end,’ and never will be. He’ll be ‘Two-gun Rogers’ to the day he dies. A reckless, headlong creature, who’d as soon fight as eat. Sooner. I couldn’t get along without him. He knows the game from A to Z, and puts it through. Besides, he’s more than that. Since father got broke up, he’s been a sort of father to me. He’s got all the courage when I weaken.”

“Sure. But—do you ever weaken?” McFardell asked, a little hastily.

Molly’s smile returned at once.

“You don’t get things. Weaken?” she cried. “Why, surely I do. I weaken most all the time. I don’t know. I love my life. I just love our poor farm. There isn’t a beast or a stick on it I don’t love, but—but—oh, I don’t know,” she went on, spreading out her hands. “It’s the same. Always the same. The seasons come an’ go. The whole round. An’ each season has its work. Sometimes——” She sighed a little hopelessly. Then she laughed. “But I’m not grumbling. Sure. Sure. It’s spring now. And the sun’s fine, and the birds are nesting. There’s mallard and geese in the sloughs. And—and I just feel glad about everything. Why, I’m not worried a thing about our six cows. I just can’t worry in springtime.”

The man pressed the tobacco down in the bowl of his pipe. His eyes were hidden.

“I know,” he said. “It’s the way I feel. Most folks feel good when spring starts life moving again. You don’t ever get to the cities?”

Molly’s eyes widened as she shook her head.

“Only Hartspool for dry goods.”

“It’s a poor sort of settlement. But it isn’t that.”

“What d’you mean?”

“You know, Molly, folk just can’t live alone always,” McFardell went on, his eyes on the litter of his homestead. “That’s the thing. We’re human, and all that that means. We’re not machines to work like—like a thresher. We need companionship—our own kind and age. We want things to laugh at, or get mad about. We want things over which we can exercise all those moods and feelings Nature gave us. You’re feeling that way and don’t know it, or maybe your grit won’t let you admit it.”

The girl was just a little frightened. She knew that Andy had put into words something of her own secret thoughts.

“Maybe that’s so,” she hesitated, while she wondered admiringly at his penetration. “You know, Andy, it’s real ungrateful of us to feel that way. Get a look around. There’s nigh everything we folk need. There’s sweet grass you couldn’t find anywhere else. There’s the rivers full of fish. There’s shelter the Almighty set for us. There’s the wonderful, wonderful sun, and an earth ready to grow us the things we ask it. There’s——”

“Always that crazy human feeling we just can’t help.” McFardell nodded. “That’s why I went into Hartspool yesterday—to buy that bit of—bacon.”

They both laughed. Then Molly fell serious again as she watched Andy refill his pipe.

“But I wish it wasn’t that way,” she said.

“Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Father never felt the need of—playtime.”

“He was more than twice your years, I guess.”

Andy re-lit his pipe.

“You mean when he was young?”

“Surely.” Andy nodded. “Don’t you reckon he ever hit up a joytime?” he asked. “Don’t you guess he and your mother made out at parties an’ dances? Maybe,” he smiled, “he even found the inside of a saloon better than the outside. I tell you we all need to get joy or—burst.”

“Yes. I feel that.”

“Why, you can even get joy in Hartspool.”

“Hartspool? How?”

“A party. A swell dance.”

“A party? A—dance?”

Molly echoed the words with a deep breath of ecstasy. Then she shook her head.

“I’ve—I’ve never been to a—party,” she said dejectedly.

Andy nodded and laughed. And his eyes were hotly regarding this child of the hills who was like clay in his hands.

“Will you go to this one? It’s the swell farmers’ dance that they hold when seeding’s through. There’s two weeks yet. I’m going. I guess I wouldn’t miss it for a deal. Say, I haven’t always been a farmer like you. I couldn’t go right on here from year to year without a break. I’d go crazy. You come with me to it. I’ll fix the tickets. It don’t mean a thing but a good time. And for you a fifty-mile drive. Will you do it, Molly? Say, I’d be mighty glad and proud. You’d be the belle of that dance, and I’d be——”

“I don’t know,” Molly demurred. “Lightning would be real mad. He’d——”

“Oh, to hell with Lightning. He’s your hired man. You’ll come?”

“But I haven’t a party gown,” Molly cried, in sudden dismay.

“I said there’s two weeks yet.”

“You mean I could—fix one?”

The light in the girl’s eyes told the man all he wanted to know. She was a little overwhelmed, but wholly yielding. Her excitement was apparent in the rise and fall of her gently swelling bosom. He pressed her the more surely.

“Surely you could. There’s all the elegant stuff you need in Mike’s store in Hartspool. Make a trip in after you get your cows back—if the cattle thieves haven’t got ’em,” he said with a laugh. “Say, Molly, promise. You will?” he urged, leaning forward and suddenly reaching out for possession of her hands. “Promise,” he cried. “You must come. I—I——”

But the girl had risen from her seat. Perhaps it was those reaching hands she wished to avoid. Perhaps— Something was stirring within her, a feeling she had never known before. Quite suddenly she found herself impelled to flee from the sight of those appealing eyes, beyond the reach of those outheld hands. For one moment her cheeks had paled. Then, in an instant, a deep flush suffused them right up to the temples, and the broad, low forehead, shaded by the wide brim of her hat. She glanced quickly out over the clearing. Then she laughed. It was a forced laugh she was almost unconscious of.

“I—I won’t promise, Andy. I’ll just—think about it.”

The man urged her no further. He was content. He knew.

“All right, Molly,” he said, rising from his bucket. “That’s fixed.”

His confidence passed all unheeded. Molly was lost in the new, strange sensations of the moment. Quite suddenly and almost sharply she declared her intention of going.

“I’ll saddle up right away,” she cried. “Look! Look where the sun is! I must have sat here more than an hour!”