From this time on, his progress at the ranch was swift, considering the daily handicaps the men still continued to slip in his way. His courage and grit won him at least the grudging respect of the men, though, try as he might, to “pal” with the O Bar O “hands,” his overtures were met with suspicion.
There is about certain Englishmen, an atmosphere of superiority that gives offence to men of the newer lands. The “hands” of the O Bar O realized instinctively that this man belonged to another class and caste than their own. No one in the outfit was in a mood to be what he would have considered “patronized.” It was all very well to have a whale of a good time “guying,” “stringing,” and making the tenderfoot hop. That was part of the game, but when it came down to “pal-ing” with a “guy,” who patronized the Ghost River for a daily bath, wielded a matutinal razor, and had regard for the cleanliness of his underwear as well as his overwear, that was a different proposition. Undaunted by continual rebuffs, however, Cheerio pertinaciously and doggedly continued to cultivate his “mates” of the bunkhouse, and at the end of the second month he felt that he could call at least four of the men his friends.
Pink-eyed Jake vehemently and belligerently proclaimed him a “damfinefellow.” This was after Cheerio had knocked him out in a bout, in private, after enduring public bulldogging and browbeating. Hootmon made no bones about expressing his conviction that Cheerio was a “mon”! Neither he nor Cheerio revealed the fact that the better part of Cheerio’s first month’s wages was in the coat pocket of the Scotchman. The latter had a sick wife and a new baby in Calgary. Jim Hull was unlikely to forget certain painful nights, when all hands in the bunkhouse snored in blissful indifference to his groans, while Cheerio had arisen in his “pink piejammies” and rubbed “painkiller” on the rheumatic left limb.
The foreman by this time had discovered that despite his stammering tongue and singular ways, this lean and slight young Englishman could “stand the gaff” of twenty-four hours at a stretch in the saddle, nor “batted an eyelash” after a forty mile trip and back to Broken Nose Lake, after a “bunch” of yearling steers, without a moment off his horse, or a speck of grub till late at night.
His love of nature, his enthusiasm over sunsets and sunrises, the poetry he insisted upon inditing to the moon and the star-spotted skies, to the jagged outline of those misty mountains, towering against the sun-favoured sky, the pen pictures he drew of the men and the silhouette shadows of ranch buildings and bush; the wild flowers he carried into the bunkhouse and cherished with water and sun; these and other “soft” actions, which had at first brought upon him the amused contempt of the men, slowly won at last their rough respect and approval.
Came long evenings, when under the mellow beams of the Alberta night sun, the wide-spreading hills and meadows seemed touched by a golden spell, and a brooding silence reigned on all sides, then the low murmur of Cheerio, half humming, half reciting the songs he had written of home and friends across the sea, tightened something in the throats of the toughest of the men and brought recollections of their own far-off homes, so that with suspended pipes they strained forward the better to catch each half-whispered word of the Englishman.
CHAPTER V
One there was at O Bar O who could not be reconciled to Cheerio. Hilda intuitively recognized the fact that this stranger on the ranch belonged to that “upper world” of which she knew vaguely through the medium of newspapers and tawdry literature emanating from the bunkhouse. Even the Encyclopædia had furnished the girl with information concerning kings and princes, lords and dukes, and earls that abounded in diverse places in the old world. “Bloody parasites,” her father had named them, “living for generations off the blood and sweat and toil of the poor, blind underdogs who had not the intelligence or the ‘sand’ to unseat them from power.”
Her fiery young nature was up in arms at the thought of “that Englishman’s patronage.” No doubt, thought the proud, hot-headed and ignorant girl, “he looks down on us as poor Rubes. Well, we’ll show him a thing or two,” and she urged the men on to torment and make uneasy the life of Cheerio.
Thorny and suspicious, with her free head toss, so characteristic of her young, wild nature, her eyes intensely dark, fixed above his head, or surveying him as from an amused and contemptuous height, Hilda left no opportunity neglected to show her scorn and contempt for the newcomer. She could not herself have diagnosed the reason for her hostility.