“My share is about thirty,” answered Nasmyth, with a little laugh. “My partner draws a few dollars more. He got in a week when the big log that rolled on my cut leg lamed me. I seem to have a particularly unfortunate habit of hurting myself. Are you going back to Ontario when we get that money, Mattawa?”
“No,” the big axeman replied slowly; “anyway, not yet, though I was thinking of it. The ticket costs too much. They’ve been shoving up their Eastern rates.”
“You ought to have a few dollars in hand,” remarked Nasmyth, who was quite aware that this was not exactly his business. “Are you going to start a ranch?”
Mattawa appeared to smile. “I have one half cleared back in Ontario.”
“Then what d’you come out here for?” Gordon broke in.
“To give the boy a show. He’s quite smart, and we were figuring we might make a doctor or a surveyor of him. That costs money, and wages are ’way higher here than they are back East.”
It was a simple statement, made very quietly by a simple man, but it appealed forcibly to those who heard it, for they could understand what lay behind it. Love of change or adventure, it was evident, had nothing to do with sending the grizzled Mattawa out to the forests of the West. He had, as he said, merely come there that his son might be afforded opportunities that he had never had, and this was characteristic, for it is not often that the second generation stays on the land. Though teamsters and choppers to the manner born are busy here and there, the Canadian prairie is to a large extent broken and the forest driven back by young men from the Eastern cities and by exiled Englishmen. Their life is a grim one, and when they marry they do not desire their children to continue it. Yet, they do not often marry, since the wilderness, in most cases, would crush the wives they would 111 choose. The men toil on alone, facing flood, and drought, and frost, and some hate the silence of the winter nights during which they sit beside the stove.
“Then,” inquired Wheeler, “who runs the ranch?”
“The wife and the boy. That is, when the boy’s not chopping or ploughing for somebody.”
There were reasons why Nasmyth was stirred by what he had heard, and with his pipe he pointed to Mattawa, as the flickering firelight fell upon the old axeman’s face.