It was during that first summer that Molly Marton became aware of her neighbour. For three months McFardell had been at work in Whale River valley before the girl discovered him, or the watchful Lightning became aware of his existence.
It happened on one of the girl’s periodical trips on domestic errands into Hartspool. As she rode down the valley over the grass-trail she beheld the smoke of a camp-fire curling above the tree-tops. Then she beheld the fencing down on the river flats where the grass was abundant. Then had come the final revelation, when she had looked into the clearing McFardell had cut in the shelter of the forest. The man was at work then on the finish of his log-built corral.
At sight of him her imagination was completely captured. His appeal was enormous. She beheld a muscular, good-looking man clad in an undershirt and trousers, and with queer, stout moccasins on his feet, waging a lonely battle with all the elements of the world she knew to be so fierce. Single-handed he was grappling with his colossal task, and the sight thrilled the hill-bred girl with its courage.
Beyond doubt McFardell was good to look upon. His eyes smiled pleasantly into hers, and the stubble of whisker about his cheeks and chin, and his black moustache, all helped to hide that curious ugliness of mouth which, even had she noticed it, Molly could hardly have read aright. That was the beginning of an intercourse that had never been allowed to die out. Intimacy leapt. She was a simple child, and he—he beheld a sweet, dark face, with fine grey eyes that were too honest to conceal her woman’s admiration.
Molly remained faithful to the picture of her first discovery. There was never any reason for her to do otherwise. Since that meeting she had seen him many times—far more frequently than she permitted Lightning to become aware of. And she always saw him in the same setting, battling with the labour of his primitive homestead in a fashion that never failed to provoke her admiration. But it was left to Lightning to nose out the things that helped to foster his unreasoning dislike, which he never attempted to conceal. And these things came in the short days and long nights of the first winter.
Winter was Lightning’s playtime. It had always been so during George Marton’s life, and Molly was content. Lightning would snatch days and nights in Hartspool. A fifty-mile ride or drive was nothing to the old sinner, if a reasonable soak of “hooch” was to be acquired as a result. And it was on these trips that he learned the depth of McFardell’s weakness.
The fierce loneliness of the hills in winter quickly proved intolerable to the ex-policeman. His homestead was snowed up. Whale River was solid to its bed. And the storms roaring down the valley, and the cruel depths of cold, left him with his thoughts flung back to the police canteen, with its roaring stove and pleasant companionship. He resisted temptation for a period. Then he yielded. By far the greater part of his first winter was spent in Hartspool, and his visits seriously ate into his capital, but they made far deeper inroads into such store of moral resolve as he possessed.
Barney Lake nodded reflectively over the thing he beheld, and his dictum remained uncontroverted.
“It ain’t no sort o’ use,” he said, for the enlightenment of Lightning and a group of his winter custom lounging about his office stove. “You can’t raise wheat enough to pay the machine agent settin’ around a cyard parlour all winter. I’d say winter’s mostly a bad time fer folks in general. Fer a tenderfoot, yearnin’ to look like a mossback, it’s just about all the hell he needs. But there’s a heap a feller ken do around winter, and he needs to do it if he’s goin’ to make good. You can’t sit around half soused, shootin’ craps fer a wad that wouldn’t attract a Hebrew-Chink,” he declared, spitting copiously into the stove. “That boy, McFardell, ain’t better’n the ord’nary police ‘throw-out.’”