There were ten of them. A baby—and there was always a baby in that family—of a few months old, a toddler of two, another of three, another of five, twins of seven, a boy of nine, twins of twelve, and Nettie, the eldest. The mother dying when she was fourteen, the girl found herself faced with the desperate problem of fending and caring for the whole wild and hungry brood of her brothers and sisters.
Nettie was of that blonde type seen often in the northern lands. She was a big girl, with milk-white skin and dead gold hair, a slow-moving, slow-thinking girl, simple-minded and totally ignorant of the world that lay beyond the narrow confines of their homestead land.
School had played no part in the life of Nettie Day. She knew vaguely of the existence of books and papers, things she remembered vaguely as having seen, but she had not been able to read them. She believed that the world contained two kinds of folk, the rich and the poor. The rich lived away off somewhere on big ranches, where the cattle were fat and the grain grew high, though some lived also in the cities. Nettie had heard of cities; her father had come from a small town in Oregon. As for the poor folk, with simple resignation Nettie accepted the fact that to them belonged such as themselves, the Days, for whom life was one unceasing struggle against hunger and cold.
Occasionally a neighboring farmer, riding across the range or bringing home stray cattle, would drop in at the Day homestead and share the meager meal shyly set out by Nettie, and as the years went by and the girl began to unfold in the early blossoming of womanhood the visitor might linger a while longer to stare curiously at this maturing product of the D. D. D. Nettie possessed one true and unfailing friend in the man who had brought her and her nine little brothers and sisters into the world; who came periodically to scold, tease and teach; to clean and work, himself, in an effort to bring some semblance of order into the chaotic confusion that reigned in that shack.
Dr. McDermott, in spite of his twenty years in Canada, was still as stubbornly Scotch as on the day he landed; He was admitted to be the busiest man in the country, his practice extending from the prairie to the mountains. He had brought into the world most of the children born in that part of the country ever since he had planted his rough homestead there. There were other families as helpless as the Days and as dependent upon the "Doc" to scold and instruct them, and it was not often that he found time to talk with Nettie. She would decide in advance the questions she meant to ask him when his monthly visit came round, but being so slow and shy, by the time the doctor had finished his dissatisfied inspection of the family affairs, the questions had all escaped her. But always the warm grip of his hand brought something surging up within her that sought utterance and expression.
"Growing! Growing! Growing!" the Scotch doctor would growl, glaring round at the circle of healthy, grimy faces, "like weeds! like weeds!" Latterly, however, like the neighbors, he had begun to look longer at Nettie, and with puckered brows he would change the word "weed" to "flower." He told her she reminded him of a wild flower, and she liked that—it pleased her that her doctor friend had picked her out, as it were, from the weeds, and her bosom swelled with pride when he appeared one day unexpectedly at the shack and took her with him across the country to help care for a sick woman in a shack on the C. P. R. quarter section which had been Dr. McDermott's own original homestead.
That swift running drive over the road allowances in the doctor's democrat always stood out in her memory as one of the few sweet days in her life.
It was early March, but a "Chinook," the warm wind which has its origin in the Japanese current, had melted the flying snow of a March blizzard; it was as though a miracle had been wrought; the Chinook had sunk deep into the earth and thawed the last bit of frost out of the ground. Streams were running along the roads, the sloughs were filling to the top, the cattle no longer nibbled in the neighborhood of the fenced-in hay and straw stacks, but hit down into the upspringing grass, green already in this wonderful land. Eight-horse teams were pulling plow, disc and harrow out into the fields, preparatory for an early seeding. Overhead a great, warm sun sent its benevolent rays abroad, filling sky and earth with a warm glow; the land was bathed in sunlight. Small marvel that someone had fondly named it: "Sunny Alberta, the Land of Promise."
If Nettie was slow of speech and shy, Dr. McDermott was Scotch and brief. There was that, moreover, on his mind at this time, which dismayed and concerned him deeply. It is not strange, therefore, that as he whipped his horses to their top speed—they were upon an errand that he knew was a matter of life or death—he forgot the girl at his side, looking about her in a sort of trance.
All the world seemed good and bonny to Nettie at this time; life was thrilling. The bumping, rickety old democrat was a luxurious coach, the rough trails and road allowances, full of holes and mud slews, a smooth highway over which she was being borne into a scene that spelled romance.