WHALE RIVER meandered pleasantly down the middle of a valley. It was wood and grass from end to end, and the reed and willow banks of the river completed a picture of luxuriant fertility.
Andy McFardell had selected the valley of Whale River for the setting of his homestead without hesitation. In his police days he had come to know the place, and had pondered the thought that some day it would surely shelter a thriving homestead if only a sufficiently hardy settler should chance upon it. Often he had urged that only ignorance and something approaching superstition kept the homesteaders to the prairie lands. These people were obsessed by the openness of the plains, and, all unsheltered, preferred to face their winter storms rather than grapple fearlessly with their awe of the mystery world of the hills. But never in his dreams had he visualised himself as the first settler in Whale River valley.
Utterly dispirited, bitter and desperate, he had passed out of Calford barracks at the end of his term of imprisonment with but the vaguest plans for his future. Like many another, he had given himself up completely to police life, and regarded his calling as settled for the full extent of his working life. He had contemplated due promotion. He had contemplated a slow upward moving, which, at the end, should open for him the road to some form of official appointment which would afford him the comfortable old age he knew to be attainable. But he had reckoned without the machine. He had reckoned without those chances and accidents with which the machine dealt so mercilessly. And so he found himself adrift, with a thousand or so dollars in his pocket, and without any training or equipment for the civil life in which his future lay.
So it came that he had recourse to the fall-back which Canada holds out to everybody. There was land. There was Whale River valley, which he had so often pictured as sheltering a sturdy homestead. And he forthwith set out for it as the only possibility presenting itself.
But his suitability for the life had yet to be proved. It was all so very different from the shepherded life of the Police Force. Discipline, as a servant, he understood. It was an easy thing, provided temperament was right. He had even come to love the simple process of obeying the last order. And then, as a Corporal, he had had the appeal of inflicting orders upon others. Now the position was altogether different. He had become his own machine as well as its servant. Was he morally equal to the dual capacity?
For the first season he had worked with an enthusiasm that looked to be carrying all before it. His capital was spare, and he husbanded it carefully. With a few tools he built himself a shanty of green logs, and thatched it with reeds cut from the bosom of Whale River. The whole thing cost him no more than the labour, and he felt good about it, and settled his kit into it with no little satisfaction. Then he built his barn for the team he had acquired during his police days. And all the time in the work of it he was widening a clearing in the woodland bluff he had decided should shelter his homestead.
With the summer no more than half spent he set to work on the corral for his two cows, and a second small barn for their winter shelter. Then he embarked upon his first real expenditure. It was for the wire with which to fence in a twenty-acre pasture of sweet grass upon the river bank. It was all a wonderful exhibition of single-handed labour. But, then, his mood was bitter, and lent him artificial courage. It drove him hard. He was a “throw-out” from the Police, and he wanted to prove to the world the fierce injustice with which he had been treated.
At midsummer he passed into Hartspool, with its saloon, and store, and its freight of mixed human nature. The place caught him on the rebound, as it were. He had achieved amazingly, and felt a reasonable satisfaction. He felt himself to be a man of some sort of property. He felt he could afford to hold his head up with those others. He felt, alas! that he must loosen the strings of his purse, and show these folk that he knew the game he had only just embarked upon. He fell headlong into the pitfall awaiting every unwary settler. The implement and machinery agent was at his elbow, and pleasant evenings at the saloon helped towards his undoing.
He bought plough, and harrow, and seeder, and hayer, and binder, and a dozen and one other implements on the mortgage plan. It was so easy—so very easy. The future would pay for them—the crops he was going to grow. And Barney Lake, from behind his bar, watched the smiling dark eyes, and observed the confident attitude of the new man as he handled a deck of cards in the evening, or shook the crap dice with the men of substance who had built up large agricultural interests in the neighbourhood. And his mental reservations were decided and sharply pointed.
McFardell went back to his farm with his new possessions. And when winter closed down he had fifty acres under the plough. It was a tremendous feat.