A Lover in Homespun / And Other Stories

by F. Clifford Smith

The words were addressed to a pale-faced young man who was driving the pair of mules hitched to the scraper. The only reply was a tired tug on the reins, and the next moment the scraper had torn up half a yard of the tenacious prairie sod and cast it to one side. As he turned the mules around to get them into position again, Joe glanced covertly at the weary face, shook his head in a troubled manner, and muttered, "It ain't the work that's breaking him up like this; it's her, and it's going to end in trouble long before we reach the Rockies."

It was a strange, almost fantastic life these two men, with hundreds of others, were leading away out here on the vast prairie, whose long solitude was now being broken by the babel that attends track-laying, and whose vast bosom, for the first time, was being girded with a band of steel which was to connect the Atlantic with the Pacific, and bring home most forcibly to the Mother Country the value of her great Canadian colony.

Stretching away in front of and behind the two men were hundreds of other scrapers, tearing up the sod, while closely following them came gangs of track-layers, who laid the ties and fastened the rails to them as quickly as the sod was removed. It was easy work track-laying on the flat expanse, where grading for hundreds of miles at a stretch was practically unnecessary. Such, indeed, was the rapidity with which the rails were laid that camp had to be moved from two to three miles westward every day, so that the men never knew what it was to sleep twice in the same place.

As Joe was about to scoop up another load, a gunshot echoed and re-echoed across the prairie. "Dinner time; just what we have been waiting for!" shouted Joe, as he let go the handles of the scraper, unhitched the mules, sprang on the back of one of them, and stooping, swung Harry Langdon, his delicate-looking driver, laughingly across the back of the other. The next moment they were dashing towards the camp half a mile away. Other laborers, similarly mounted, were straining every muscle to reach the same place, for they knew that the rule of "first come, first served," would be religiously adhered to.

A fast friendship had sprung up between the huge scraper-handler and his young driver. The very day the little fellow had wandered into camp, two months before, with his hands and face swollen with mosquito bites, and asked for a job, big-hearted Joe took a liking to him. It was owing to Joe's influence with the foremen that he was at last, grudgingly, given work, as his slim, girlish figure told strongly against him among such a crowd of sinewy, hardy men.

Had he been put driving for any other scraper-handler than Joe he would never have succeeded; for before he had been in camp a week the thick tepid surface water, which they all had to drink, coupled with the intense heat, told on him, and for weeks he was so ill that he could scarcely drag his feet along.

Owing to the custom of each scraper being compelled to clear a certain distance every day, it was impossible—on account of the great stretch to be covered by all the scrapers—for the foremen to more than two or three times a day visit the works, and thus it was that Joe, unknown to the foremen, was able to let his little driver lie for hours, when he was at his weakest, in the thick grass, while he wrestled with the stubborn mules and the scraper at the same time.

At last the evening of the torrid day with which this story opens, had arrived. Those who had been fortunate enough to get to the surface holes first, and get a little water, were washing their shirts, while the less fortunate were lounging around the little tents—of which there were hundreds—welcoming the cool breeze which the dark, ominous clouds had brought up. Suddenly there was a blinding flash, followed by a loud report, and then from the warring clouds the longed-for rain began to pour in heavy sheets.

For some time before the storm broke, Joe had been standing in the opening of the tent, gazing with furrowed brow, through the gathering darkness, toward a tent much larger than those of the ordinary laborers, in the shadow of which was dimly outlined the forms of a man and a woman. He at once recognized the woman as Nellie Shuter (the only white woman in camp), daughter of Bill Shuter, a general storekeeper and purveyor of smuggled and doctored whiskey. The man with her he knew was his mate, Harry Langdon.

The moment the rain began to fall, Nellie ran into the large tent—her father's store—and left Harry, who, regardless of the storm, stood for fully a minute looking after her. As he was about to turn, a figure, muffled in a gaudy colored blanket, emerged from behind an adjacent tent and touched him, in a supplicating manner, on the shoulder. He turned hastily, and seeing who it was, pushed the intruding hand away. As he did so the blanket fell away from the head and shoulders of the figure, and there stood revealed a young Indian girl belonging to the Cree tribe, several of whom—both Indians and squaws—had for weeks been following the encampment.