The Luck of the Kid

by Ridgwell Cullum

Hesther and Jim McLeod had developed a family of three boys and three girls in the course of the eight years. Trade was bad, and the threat of closing down the store was always hanging over them. Then, one day, in the depths of the terrible Arctic winter, the man was taken ill with pneumonia, and, in a week, Hesther was left a widow with six small children and no one to turn to for support and comfort, and with little more in the world than the shelter of the store, and such food as it provided, until the Fur Valley Company should remove her and replace her dead husband with a new Factor.

The Company dealt fairly, if coldly, with her. Ben Needham was sent up to replace the dead Jim McLeod at the opening of spring. And the widow and her children were to be brought down to Dawson, and, forthwith sent on to such destination as she desired. The Company gave her travelling expenses, and a sum of money to help her along. And that was to be the limit of its obligations.

But Hesther McLeod had definite ideas. Her cheerful optimism and gentle philosophy never for a moment deserted her. During the dark months of winter, when she was left with only the ghost of her dead, she strove with all the calm she possessed to review the thing which life had done to her. She was quite unblinded to the seriousness of her position. She probed to the last detail all it meant to those lives belonging to her which were only just beginning. And finally the decision she took had nothing in it of the promptings of hard sense, but came from somewhere deep down in a gentle, brave, motherly heart.

She would not quit the country in which had been consummated all the joys of motherhood. Her children were of the North, and should be raised men and women of the great wide country which had yielded her all the real emotions of her life. She would stay. She would take the pittance which the Company offered, but the North should remain her home. And curiously enough the main thought prompting her heroic decision was the memory of the white girl she had handed over to the care of the Indian, Usak.

The rest had been easy to a creature of her simple practice. Usak was forthwith consulted, and the loyal creature jumped at the idea that the whitewoman and her children should make their home on the farm he was so ardently labouring to build up for the daughter of his “good boss.”

In short order the three-roomed log shanty grew. It spread out in any convenient direction under the man’s indefatigable labours, and the mother’s domestic mind. A room here was added. A room there. And so it went on, regardless of all proportion, but with keen regard for necessity and convenience. And Hesther brought all her chattels with her from the store, and her busy hands and invincible courage swiftly turned the place into a real home for the children, and everything else calculated for the well-being of the lives it was her cherished desire to do her best for.

So in the course of years, sometimes under overwhelming difficulties, Felice, who, from the start had been affectionately designated “the Kid” had grown up to womanhood, taught to read and write and sew by Hesther, and made adept in the laborious work of the farm and trail and river by Usak.

And through every struggle, under the radiance of the mother’s courage and sweetness of temper, and watched over by the fierce dark eyes of the devoted Indian, it had always been a home of happiness and hope. And this despite the fact that every factor to make for hope was steadily diminishing.

The Indian was in the mood for plain speaking now. And the Kid, her mind disturbed out of its usual calm by her recent adventure, was eagerly responsive.

The Indian shook his head so that his lank hair swept the greasy collar of his buckskin shirt.