The Border Boys in the Canadian Rockies

by John Henry Goldfrap

His father, whom he had so strangely recovered, had been cashier of a city bank many years before, when Jimmie was a baby. Before that he had followed the sea for a time, and sailor fashion, he had had tattooed on his arms his own initials,—H. R., Horace Ransom,—and the initials of Jimmie’s mother,—A. S., Anna Seagrim. There came a day when shortage was discovered in the bank and Jimmie’s father, wrongfully suspected, fled to Canada rather than face the chance of being convicted, as he knew that had happened to many another innocent man.

Beyond the fact that he had gone to the Canadian Rockies, then a wilder region even than they are to-day, Jimmie’s mother knew nothing. Time went on and it was found out that Horace Ransom was innocent, but he could not be found. Jimmie’s mother fell ill and died, but before she passed away she left a paper with her son describing the marks on his father’s arm and where he had last been heard of.

Jimmie was too young to understand what it all meant then. He was sent to an orphans’ home, but ran away as soon as he was old enough to make his escape. He drifted about, selling newspapers, performing with circuses and doing many other things, but all the time he clung to the precious bit of paper his mother had entrusted to him. Jimmie’s one ambition had been to find his father if he were alive, and to make him happy. He saved and scrimped and at last got money enough together for railroad fares back to the States for his father and himself. But he had, as we know, to make his way to the Rockies without financial assistance, traveling as best he could.

The boys’ stories of the wild man had worked on his imagination and a feeling that the man might be his father had come to possess him. But, of course, he had no proof of the matter till he knelt at the bedside of the raving man and saw the tattoo marks. Such, in brief, was Jimmie’s strange story.

With this, our party had to be content for the time being, and leaving Jimmie with the neighborhood doctor at Bill Dawkins’ hut, they went down the trail to pitch camp at the Big Bend. They decided to remain at this place at least until Jimmie’s new-found father was out of danger and his plans for the future were made.

Some days later Mr. Ransom rallied enough to talk haltingly,—and to Jimmie’s joy he talked rationally! The surgeon in attendance declared that, as is not altogether unusual, the sudden blow on the head had restored the man’s senses. He felt assured that some particularly severe experience during Mr. Ransom’s years of loneliness and hardship in the Rockies had deprived him temporarily of his mental poise, and that he had been subject to periods of wildness.

What the crucial strain was, no one could discover. He seemed very uncertain when questioned about his past and apparently was unable to relate one incident to another as he recalled them.

It was left for Jimmie, who could hardly be tempted to leave his father’s bedside, by day or night, to tell him of his early history and to piece together the later experiences as they fell from the injured man’s lips.

It seemed that Mr. Ransom had accidentally blundered upon the boys’ camp on one of his lone pilgrimages amidst the mountains, for doubtless he had searched only during his sane periods for gold or silver. The sound of boyish voices had evidently stirred memories of his own son, Jimmie, who he had realized must be a grown lad, although he had left him a baby in arms.

But the fear of being arrested for the crime of which, as he supposed, he still stood accused, always haunted him and had made him afraid of meeting the travelers from the States face to face. He had followed them at a distance, his half-crazed brain fascinated by them. In the terrible passage of the brulee his own pony had died under him, and the next night he had stampeded the travelers’ ponies and stolen one of them. In the same way, when necessity arose, he had stolen some of their provisions. He was still on their trail when the accident that restored to him his son, his senses and the knowledge of his complete clearance of suspicion of the bank shortage, had occurred to him.