CHAPTER IX
Part of journal kept by Lady Angella Loring: I hate men and despise women. I am afraid of children. Animals are my only friends.
I'm not pretty. My face is hard, my hair—what is left of it—of no color. My hands are calloused. I am a "tough old nut" as once I heard a "hand" of the Bar Q describe me. I wear men's clothes because they are comfortable and because I want to forget that I am a woman.
My father was the victim of a swindler, a smiling-faced, lying-tongued scoundrel, who robbed him of all we possessed in the world. The man I was to have married was as surely my father's murderer as if he had held the hand that sent the shot through my father's brain that killed him. I am the last of the Lorings, I—the poor old man-maid recluse, on the edge of Yankee Valley in the Canadian Northwest.
This bit of Alberta land is all that is left of the once vast Loring estate. That I still have this is due purely to the accident of a groom paying back a debt he owed my father. It was strange that I should have learned of its existence at a time when I believed that the end had come for me even as it had come for my father. True, I was not to go out of life by the act of my own hand and will. A quite eminent scientist had pronounced my death sentence. He gave me a few months in which to live. It was a ghastly situation for one who had been through what I had and who desired to live for the noble purpose of revenge. That sounds melodramatic and I suppose if I were pious I would hear in mind that revenge is sweet only for God. But my nature is not sweet and hell raged within me at that time. It was strange, as I have said, at that time suddenly to learn of the existence of this ranch. I seemed to see it as in a dream—it lay far off under a spotlight of Alberta sunlight and it called to me with a clarion call.
I came out here. I am hard and strong. I don't intend to die. I've something to live for. Not a man. I hate men, as I have said above. I have deep-rooted, never-dying aversion for the whole mean race of men. That which I have to live for is this quarter section of Alberta land. It's mine. I love it better than anything else on earth.
I broke my own land. I've put in my own crop. I hayed and chored, fenced and drudged, both in house and upon the land. I made most of my own furniture and I practically rebuilt the inside of this old shack.
"Necessity is the mother of invention" goes the proverb, but I loathe proverbs. One can find an opposing one for even the best of them. Some people pin proverbs and poems and texts upon their souls as on their walls. I suppose they get the sort of comfort and help from it that a cripple gets from a crutch. As far as that goes we are all cripples in life, and few there be who can walk without a crutch. I never saw a human being yet who did not limp, at least mentally....