"One can understand Mr. Jardine's needing you," he said. "I expect a bush rancher is forced to hustle."
"A bush rancher must hustle all the time," Margaret agreed. "Still, work one likes goes easily. Have you tried?"
"I have tried work I did not like and admit I've had enough," Jimmy said, and laughed. "When I started for Canada, my notion was I'd be content to play about."
Margaret nodded. "We know your sort. You are not, like our tourists, merchants and manufacturers. You have no use for business. All you think about is sport, and your sport's extravagant. You stop at our big hotels, and when you go off to hunt and fish you hire a gang of packers to carry your camp truck."
"I doubt if I really am that sort," Jimmy rejoined. "After all, my people are pretty keen business men, and I begin to see that to cultivate the habits of the other lot is harder than I thought. In fact, I rather think I'd like to own a ranch."
"For a game?" said Margaret and laughed, a frank laugh. "You must cut it out, Mr. Leyland. One can't play at ranching, and you don't know all the bushman is up against."
"It's possible," Jimmy admitted. "Well, I expect I am a loafer, but I did not altogether joke about the ranch. The strange thing is, after a time loafing gets monotonous."
Margaret stopped him. "I must get busy and you ought not to walk about. Sit down in the shade and I'll give you the Colonist."
Jimmy sat down, but declared he did not want the newspaper. He thought he would study ranching, particularly Margaret's part of the job. She put a heavy wooden yoke on the oxen's necks, fastened a rope to the hook, and drove the animals to a belt of burned slashing where big charred logs lay about. Jardine hitched the rope to a log and the team hauled it slowly to a pile. Jimmy wondered how two people would get the heavy trunk on top, but when Margaret led the oxen round the pile and urged them ahead, the log went up in a loop of the rope. For all that, Jardine was forced to use a handspike and Jimmy saw that to build a log-pile demanded strength and skill.
Resting in the shade, he felt the picture's quiet charm. The oxen's movements were slow and rhythmical; Jardine's muscular figure, bent, got tense, and relaxed; the girl, finely posed, guided the plodding animals. Behind were stiff, dark branches and rows of straight red trunks. A woodpecker tapped a hollow tree, and in the distance cow-bells chimed. The dominant note was effort, but the effort was smooth and measured. One felt that all went as it ought to go, and Jimmy thought about the big shining flywheel that spun with a steady throb at the Leyland cotton mill. Then his head began to nod and his eyes shut, and when he looked up Margaret called him to dinner.