"There ain't no cattle on two or four legs that Bull Langdon fears."
He was a man of gigantic stature, with a coarse, brutal face, and in his expression there was something of the primitive savage.
The name "Bull" had been given him because of his bellowing twice, his great strength and his driving methods with men and cattle. Tyrannical, unprincipled and cruel, Bull was hated and feared. He had fought his way to the top by the sheer force of his raging, dominating personality, and once there he reigned in arrogance without mercy or scruple.
To him cattle and men were much alike. Most men, he asserted, were "scrub" stock, and would come tamely and submissively before the branding iron. Very few were spirited and thoroughbred, and for these the Squeezegate had been invented, in which all who were not "broke," emerged crippled or were killed. Finally there were the mavericks, wild stuff, that escaping the lariat of the cowpuncher, roamed the range unbranded, and for these outlaws the Bull had a measure of respect. There was a double bounty for every head of such stuff rolled into the Bar Q, and quite often the Bull himself would join in the dangerous and exciting business of running them to ground.
If the Bull looked upon men in the same way as on cattle, he had still less respect for the female of the human species. With few exceptions, he would snarl, spitting with contempt, women were all scrub stock, easy stuff that could be whistled or driven to home pastures. A man had but to reach out and help himself to whichever one he wanted.
By some such contemptuous speeches as these he had overruled the alarmed objections with which his proposal had been received by the timid, gentle girl from Ontario, whom he had found teaching in the rural school planted in the heart of the then stern and rigid country. It is true, he had thrown no lariat over the school teacher's neck, for he had no wish to kill the thing he coveted, but the cowmen knew of diabolical traps more ingenious than the Squeezegate in which a girl's unwary feet might be ensnared.
She was an innocent, harmless creature, soft and devoted, the kind that is born to mother things, but Mrs. Langdon had had only dream-things to mother; the babes that came to her with every year were born only to die immediately, as on some barren homestead the mother fought out her agony and longing alone and with no one to minister to their needs.
That was the tragedy of this land in the early days, that in innumerable cases the doctors' help would often come not at all, or come too late to be of any avail.
Time could neither accustom nor compensate the wife of the cattleman to those fearful losses, nor compensate her for them. And each time she would cling to the hope that the Bull would send her, before it was too late, to the city, to Calgary. Those were the years, however, when the Bull had had neither time nor thought for such unimportant things as his wife's troubles. He was the type of man who will sit up all night long with a sick cow, or scour the range in search of a lost one, but look with indifference and callousness upon a woman's suffering, especially if she be his wife. Those were the years when the Bull was building up his herd. He was buying and stealing land and cattle. He was drunk with a dream of conquest and power, intent upon climbing to the top. It was his ambition to become the cattle king of Alberta—the King Pin of the northwest country.
And when the years of power and affluence did come, it was too late to help the cattleman's wife, for Mrs. Langdon had reached the age when she could no longer bear a child. The maternal instinct which dominated her, however, found an outlet in mothering the children of neighboring ranchers, the rosy-cheeked papooses on the little squaws' backs, the rough lads who worked upon the ranch, and she even found room in her heart for Jake, the Bull's half-witted illegitimate son.