Jake was a half-breed, whose infirmity was due to a blow Langdon had dealt him on the day when, as a boy, his mother having died on the Indian Reserve, he had come to the Bar Q and ingenuously claimed the Bull as his father. As far as lay in her power, Mrs. Langdon had sought to atone to the unfortunate half-breed for the father's cruelty, and it was her gentle influence—she was newly married to the Bull at the time—that had prevailed upon him to allow Jake to continue upon the ranch. The boy worked about the house, doing the chores and the wood chopping and the carrying of water. He was slavishly devoted to his stepmother, and kept out of the reach of the heavy hand and foot of the Bull, for whom he entertained a wholesome terror.
CHAPTER II
Although this story chiefly concerns Bull Langdon, we must return at this point to the three humble quarter sections aforementioned, which are the scene of part of its action.
To the first of these the name of ranch or farm could only by courtesy be applied. It was known as the "D. D. D.," the "D's" being short for Dan Day Dump, as a neighboring farmer had once called the place, and the name had stuck to it ever since.
It was on the extreme rocky edge of Yankee Valley, an otherwise prosperous section of the "prairie" country, so named because most of its settlers had hailed originally from the U. S. A.
Dan Day himself had come from the States, but he had found a wife in Canada. They had "fetched up" finally at this sorry "stopping-off place," as they called it then, where first they squatted, and later, with the assistance of neighbors, who knew better than to let shiftless newcomers encroach upon the more fertile lands hard by, they had staked their homestead. There Dan Day had put up the rackety shack and lean-to which had provided shelter of sorts for his growing family and stock, and in that rough environment the Day children had grown up like Indians.
Time had taught the homesteader at least one lesson, which was that he would never squeeze a living out of his barren acres. Day, as his neighbors were wont to declare, shaking disapproving heads, was not cut out to be a farmer. Nevertheless, they grudgingly gave him work, putting up with his inept services chiefly because as a community they waged unrelenting warfare against the stern approach of school authorities, who had begun to query whether the size of the Day family did not warrant the imposition upon the municipality of a new rural school.
Time and growth, however, are things the farmer, most of all men, must reckon with, and even as the crops leaped up tall and strong out of the rich black virgin soil, even as the cattle and the stock flourished and increased until they spread over all the wide pasture lands of Alberta, so the Day progeny shot upward, and seemed, hungrily, to clamor for their place in the world.