Remember that this ranch, ablaze with romance for me, is squalid every-day routine for Billy, whose dreams are beyond the sky-line. He imagines railways as we imagine dragons, and the Bloomsbury boarding-house from which my sister wrote on her return from India is, from his point of view, a place in the Arabian Nights. I read to him Taddy's letter, about the new boarder from Selangor, who is down with fever, the German waiter caught reading Colonel Boyce's manuscript on protective color for howitzers, the tweeny's sailor father drowned at sea, and the excitement in that humdrum house when Lady Blacktail called. "Wish I'd had a shot," said Billy wistfully, his mind on the black-tail, our local kind of deer. Perhaps he saw forest behind the boarding-house. "In the old country," said he, "do the does call? Only the buck calls here. Your folks is easy excited, anyways."
"Lady Blacktail," said I, "is a woman."
"What was she shouting about?"
"She just called—came to take tea, you know."
"Got no job of work?"
"Oh, but her husband, Sir Tom, was a very rich man. He left her millions."
"Mother's first husband," said Billy, his mind running on widows, "had lots of wealth. He kep' a seegar stand down-town near the Battery, and had a brass band when they buried him. Mother came out West."
That night the lad had come from Hundred Mile House, with Jesse's pack-train bearing a load of stores. There was a dress length, music for my dear dumpy piano, spiced rolls of bacon, much needed flour and groceries, and an orange kerchief for Billy. From his saddle wallets he produced my crumpled letters and the weekly paper, a Vancouver rag. Therein Jesse labors among tangles of provincial politics, I gloat over the cooking recipes of America's nice cuisine, and spare maybe just a sigh over the London letter. Billy's portion consists of blood-curdling disasters and crimes, and the widow waits ravenous for her kindling, bed stuffing, wall paper, and new pads for her wooden leg. At ten cents that paper is a bargain.
She hovered presiding while her boy had supper, I checked stores against an untruthful invoice, and Jesse prepared to read: "Bribed with a Bridge! Who Stole the Bonds," etc. Dear Jesse takes his reading seriously. His mind must be prepared with a pipe. His stately spectacles are cleaned on his neck-cloth, and so mounted that he can see to read over the edges. Next he crawls under the stove to find the bootjack, and pull off his long boots. After that he fills the lamp, lights that and a cigar of fearful pungency, and settles his great limbs in the chair of state. When all was arranged that night he looked up from his paper. "Say," he drawled, "Billy. When you ride away and turn robber, what's the matter with politics? You see if you was Sir Billy O'Flynn, and a Right Honorable Premier, you could steal enough to buy spurs as big as car wheels. You're fiercer than our member already with that new cow-scaring scarf, so all you'd need is a machine gun slung on your belt, a man-killer like my mare Jones, and you'll be the tiger of the forest. You git yo' mother's cat to learn you how to yowl."