It flattered the vanity of Bull Langdon to have a "show place" on the Banff National Highway. He had built the main ranch house upon the crest of a hill that commanded the road to Banff, and the wide, rambling buildings, ornate in design and brightly painted, had been placed where they would show up well from the road, so that all who traveled along the highway would slow up for a view of the Bar Q.
Nettie's advent was both a surprise and a joy to the wife of the cattleman, who took a childish pride in at last "keeping a girl."
For a number of years the Bar Q had maintained a cook car, whither the "hands" went for "grub." It was on such a vehicle that Angela Loring had served. Now a thin and musty smelling Chinaman dominated the car, a shrinking, silent figure, who banged down the chow before the men, and paid no heed to protest or squabble, save when the "boss" came in, when Chum Lee became frenziedly busy. In winter, the Chinaman was moved to the Pure-Bred Bull camp at Barstairs, and the men left at the foothill ranch, "batched" in the bunkhouses.
Though the main cooking was done on the cook car, there yet remained an enormous amount of work at the ranch house, for besides the housework, the bread and butter for the ranch were made there by Mrs. Langdon. She "put down" the pork in brine, cured and smoked it; made hundreds of pounds of lard, sausage meat, headcheese, corned beef and other meat products. She made the soap, looked after the poultry and vegetable garden, she canned quantities of fruit and vegetables for the winter months. She was always working, always running hither and thither about the house, hurrying to "have things ready," for her husband had a greedy appetite, and her mind was exclusively occupied in devising ways and means of propitiating and pacifying him.
Of late, however, her health had been visibly failing. The long years of hard work, the tragedy of the yearly still-born baby, life and association with the overbearing cattleman had gradually taken their toll of the strength of Bull Langdon's wife.
Bull was what is known in the cattle world as a "night rider." In the earlier days it was said he did all of his "dirty work" at night, moving and driving bunches of cattle under cover of darkness. Rivalry, strife and bitter enmity are a commonplace of life in the cattle country, and the Bull vented his vindictive spite upon his neighbors by slipping their herds out of pastures and corrals, and driving them over the tops of canyon and precipice. Those incursions were, however, events of the past. The cowman was cautious now that he had arrived at a place of security and power. Rustling and stealing were dangerous undertakings in those days when the trails had turned into highways, and small ranches were beginning to dot the edges of the range. Moreover, the mounted police were less easy to influence and intimidate than the former Indian agents had been.
Night riding had remained one of his habits, however, and one that told heavily upon the wife, who would always wait up for his return, with supper always ingratiatingly ready.
For some time symptoms of a coming breakdown had been ominously evident to Mrs. Langdon, but she persistently fought against the prospect of becoming an invalid. She had an ingenuous faith, imbibed from tracts and books that had drifted into her hands in her teaching days; she denied the existence of evil, pain or illness in the world, and when it pushed its ugly fist into her face, or wracked her frail body, she had a little formula that she bravely recited over and over again, like an incantation, in which she asserted that it was an error; that she was in the best of health, and that everything in the world was good and beautiful and in the image of God. Whether she deluded herself or not, it is certain that this desperate philosophy, if such it could be called, was the crutch that had upheld her and kept her sane throughout the turbulent years of her life with Bull Langdon, so that she had never lost her faith in mankind, and had remained curiously innocent of wrong.