It was with a lighter heart and many good wishes that I rode out again, and eventually reached Coombs’ homestead, where a welcome of a different kind awaited me. The house was well built of sawn lumber, and backed by a thin birch bluff, while there was no difficulty in setting down its owner as an Englishman of a kind that fortunately is not common. He was stout and flabby in face, with a smug, self-satisfied air I did not like. Leaning against a paddock rail, he looked me over while I told him what had brought me there. Then he said, with no trace of Western accent, which, it afterward appeared, he affected to despise:
“You should not have borrowed that horse, because if we come to terms I shall have to feed him a day or two. Of course you would be useless for several months at least, and with the last one I got a premium. However, as a favor I’ll take you until after harvest for your board.”
“What are the duties?” I asked cautiously. And he answered:
“Rise at dawn, feed the working cattle, and plow until the dinner-hour—when you learn how. Then you could water the stock while you’re resting; plow, harrow, or chop wood until supper; after that, wash up supper dishes, and—it’s standing order—attend family prayers. In summer you’ll continue hay cutting until it’s dark.” 38
Now the inhabitants of eastern Lancashire and the West Riding are seldom born foolish, and Jasper had cautioned me. So it may have been native shrewdness that led to my leaving the draft for one hundred pounds intact at the Winnipeg office of the Bank of Montreal and determining to earn experience and a living at the same time as promptly as possible. Also, though I did not discover it until later, this is the one safe procedure for the would-be colonist. There is not the slightest reason why he should pay a premium, because the work is the same in either case; and as, there being no caste distinction, all men are equal, hired hand and farmer living and eating together, he will find no difference in the treatment. In any case, I had no intention of working for nothing, and answered shortly:
“I’ll come for ten dollars a month until harvest. I shall no doubt find some one to give me twenty then.”
Coombs stared, surveyed me ironically from head to heel again, and, after offering five dollars, said very reluctantly:
“Seven-fifty, and it’s sinful extravagance. Put the horse in that stable and don’t give him too much chop. Then carry in those stove billets, and see if Mrs. Coombs wants anything to get supper ready.”
I was tired and sleepy; but Coombs evidently intended to get the value of his seven-fifty out of me—he had a way of exacting the utmost farthing—and after feeding the horse, liberally, I carried fourteen buckets of water to fill a tank from the well before at last supper was ready. We ate it together silently in a long match-boarded room—Coombs, his wife, Marvin the big Manitoban hired man, and a curly-haired brown-eyed stripling with a look of good breeding about him. Mrs. Coombs was thin and angular, with a pink-tipped nose; and in their dwelling—the only place I ever saw it on the prairie—she and her 39 husband always sat with several feet of blank table between themselves and those who worked for them. They were also, I thought, representatives of an unpleasant type—the petty professional or suddenly promoted clerk, who, lacking equally the operative’s sturdiness and the polish of those born in a higher station, apes the latter, and, sacrificing everything for appearance, becomes a poor burlesque on humanity. Even here, on the lone, wide prairie, they could not shake off the small pretense of superiority. When supper was finished—and Coombs’ suppers were the worst I ever ate in Canada—the working contingent adjourned after washing dishes to the sod stable, where I asked questions about our employer.
“Meaner than pizon!” said Marvin. “Down East, on the ’lantic shore, is where he ought to be. Guess he wore them out in the old country, and so they sent him here.”