HIS ROYAL
NIBS

By
WINIFRED EATON REEVE
AUTHOR OF “CATTLE,” ETC.

W. J. WATT & CO.
PUBLISHERS
601 MADISON AVE., NEW YORK.

Copyright, 1925, by
W. J. WATT & COMPANY

Printed in the United States of America

To
CARL LAEMMLE

FOR WHOM THE AUTHOR HAS
THE SINCEREST ADMIRATION

His Royal Nibs

CONTENTS

HIS ROYAL NIBS

CHAPTER I

Along the Banff National Highway, automobiles sped by in a cloud of dust, heat, noise and odour. They stopped not to offer a lift to the wayfarer along the road, for they were intent upon making the evergrowing grade to Banff on “high.”

This year tramps were common on the road, war veterans, for the most part, “legging it” from Calgary to lumber or road camp, or making for the ranches in the foothills, after that elusive job of which the Government agent in England had so eloquently expatiated, but which proved in most cases to be but a fantastic fable. With somewhat of that pluck which had meant so much to the world, when the “vets” were something more than mere job hunting tramps, these men from across the sea trudged in the heat, the dust and the dry alkali-laden air. Sometimes they were taken on at camp or ranch. More often they were shunted farther afield. One wondered where they would finally go, these “boys” from the old land, who had crossed to the Dominion of Canada with such high hopes in their breasts.

The O Bar O lies midway between Calgary and Banff, in the foothills of the ranching country. Its white and green buildings grace the top of a hill that commands a view of the country from all sides.

From the Banff road the fine old ranch presents an imposing sight, after miles of road through a country where the few habitations are mainly those melancholy shacks of the first homesteaders of Alberta.

When “Bully Bill,” foreman of the O Bar O, drove his herd of resentful steers from the green feed in the north pasture, where they had broken through the four lines of barbed wire, he was shouting and swearing in a blood-curdling and typically O Bar O fashion, whirling and cracking his nine feet long bull whip over the heads of the animals, as they swept before him down to the main gate.

Bully Bill had “herding” down to a science, and “them doegies,” as he called them, went in a long line before him like an army in review. Had events followed their natural course, the cattle should have filed out of the opened gate into the roadway, and across the road to the south field, where, duly, they would distribute themselves among the hummocks and coulies that afforded the most likely places for grazing. On this blistering day, however, Bully Bill’s formula failed. Something on the wide road had diverted the course of the driven steers. Having gotten them as far as the road, Bully Bill paused in his vociferous speech and heady action to take a “chaw” of his favorite plug; but his teeth had barely sunk into the weed when something caused him to shift it to his cheek, as with bulging eyes, he sat up erectly upon his horse, and then moved forward into swift action.

A certain pausing and grouping, a bunching together and lowering of heads, the ominous movement of a huge roan steer ahead of the herd, apprised the experienced cowpuncher of the fact that a stampede was imminent.

As he raced through the gate, Bully Bill perceived the cause of the revolution of his herd. Directly in the path of the animals was a strange figure. Not the weary footsore tramp common to the trail. Not the nervy camper, applying at O Bar O for the usual donation of milk and eggs. Neither neighbour, nor Indian from Morley. Here was a clean tweed-clad Englishman, with a grip in his hand. How he had maintained his miraculous neatness after forty-four miles of tramping all of the way from Calgary cannot be explained.

Eye to eye he faced that roan steer, whose head sank loweringly, as he backed and swayed toward that moving mass behind him, all poised and paused for the charge.

Time was when the Englishman had been in another kind of a charge, but that is a different story, and France is very far away from Alberta, Canada.

As the dumbfounded cowpuncher raced wildly in his direction, the man afoot did a strange thing. Raising on high his grip in his hand, he flung it directly into the face of the roan steer. In the scattering and scampering and bellowing that ensued, it was hard to distinguish anything but dust and a vast, moving blur, as the startled herd, following the lead of the roan steer, swept headlong down the road, to where in the canyon below, the Ghost and the Bow Rivers had their junction.

From the direction of the corrals swept reinforcements, in the shape of “Hootmon,” a Scot so nicknamed by the outfit, because of his favourite explosive utterance, and Sandy, son of the O Bar O, red-haired, freckled-faced and indelibly marked by the sun above, who rode his Indian bronc with the grace and agility of a circus rider.

Into the roaring mêlée charged the yelling riders. Not with the “hobo-dude,” lying on the inner side of the barbed-wire fence, through which he had scrambled with alacrity before the roan steer had recovered from the onslaught of the grip, were the “hands” of the ranch concerned. Theirs the job to round up and steady that panic-stricken herd; to bring order out of chaos; to soothe, to beat, to drive into a regulation bunch, and safely land the cattle in the intended south field.

Half an hour later, when the last of the tired herd had passed through the south gate, when the bellowings had died down and already the leaders were taking comfort in the succulent green grass on the edges of a long slough, Bully Bill bethought him of the cause of all this extra work and delay. He released that plug of tobacco from his left cheek, spat viciously, and with vengeance in his eye, rode over to where the intruder still reclined upon the turf. Said turf was hard and dry, and tormenting flies and grasshoppers and flying ants leaped about his face and neck; but he lay stretched out full-length upon his back, staring up at the bright blue sky above him. As Bully Bill rode over, he slowly and easily raised himself to a sitting posture.

“Hi! you there!” bawled the foreman, in the overbearing voice that had earned for him his nickname. “What the hell are you squattin’ out here for? What d’ya mean by stirrin’ up all this hell of a racket? What the hell d’ya want at O Bar O?”

The stranger smiled up at him, with the sun glinting in his eyes. His expression was guileless, and the engaging ring of friendliness and reassurance in his voice caused the irate cowhand to lapse into a stunned silence, as he gaped at this curious specimen of the human family on the ground before him.

“Ch-cheerio!” said the visitor. “No harm done. I’m f-first rate, thank you. Not even scratched. How are you?”

Hootmon applied his spurs to his horse’s flanks, and cantered up the hill in the direction of the corrals, there to recount to an interested audience old Bully Bill’s discomfiture and amazement.

Things move slowly in a ranching country, and not every day does the Lord deposit a whole vaudeville act at the door of a ranch house.

Sandy, seeking to curry favour with the confounded foreman, winked at him broadly, and then deliberately pricked the rump of the unfortunate Silver Heels with a pin. Kicking around in a circle, the bronco backed and bucked in the direction of the man upon the grass, now sitting up and tenderly examining an evidently bruised shin.

At this juncture, the long-suffering Silver Heels developed an unexpected will of his own. Shaking himself violently from side to side, he reared up on his hind legs, and by a dash forward of his peppery young head, he jerked the reins from the hands of the surprised lad, who shot into the air and nearly fell into the lap of the Englishman.

That individual gripped the boy’s arm tightly and swung him neatly to his side.

“You leggo my arm!”

Sandy squirmed from the surprisingly iron grip of the visitor.

The tramp, as they believed him to be, was now sitting up erectly, with that sublime, smooth air of cheerful condescension which Canadians so loathe in an Englishman.

“Cheerio, old man!” said he, and slapped the unwillingly impressed youngster upon the back. “Not hurt much—what?”

“Hurt—nothing! Whacha take me for?”

Sandy, a product of O Bar O, let forth a typical string of hot cusses, while the Englishman grinned down upon him.

“What the hell you doin’ sittin’ on our grass?” finished Sandy shrilly. “What cha want at our ranch?”

“Oh, I say! Is this a rawnch then?”

He turned a questioning eager gaze upon the foreman, who now sat with right leg resting across the pummel of the saddle, studying their visitor in puzzled silence. After a moment, having spat and transferred his plug from the left to the right cheek, Bully Bill replied through the corner of his mouth.

“You betchour life this ain’t no rawnch. Ain’t no rawnches this side o’ the river. They ranch on this side.”

The other looked unenlightened, and Bully Bill condescended further explanation, with a flicker of a wink at the delighted Sandy.

“Yer see, it’s like this. On the south side of the river, there’s a sight of them English “dooks” and earls and lords and princes. They play at rawnching, doncherknow. On the north side, we’re the real cheese. We’re out to raise beef. We ranch!”

Having delivered this explanation of things in the cattle country, Bully Bill, well pleased with himself, dropped his foot back into his stirrup and saluted the Englishman condescendingly:

“Here’s lookin’ at you!” he said, and gently pressed his heel into his horse’s side.

“I say——!”

The tramp had sprang to his feet with surprising agility, and his nervy hand was at the mouth of Bully Bill’s mount.

“I say, old man, will you hold on a bit? I w-wonder now, do you, by any chance, need help on your ranch? Because if you do, I’d like to apply for the position. If this is a cattle ranch, I’ll say that I know a bit about horses. R-r-r-ridden s-some in my time, and I t-took care of a c-car-load of cattle c-coming up from the east. W-w-worked my way out here, in fact, and as to w-wages, nominal ones will be quite satisfactory as a s-starter.”

Bully Bill, his mouth gaped open, was surveying the applicant from head to foot, his trained eye travelling from the top of the sleekly-brushed blond hair, the smoothly-shaven cheek, down the still surprisingly dapper form to the thin shoes that were so painfully inadequate for the trail. Sandy was doubled up in a knot, howling with fiendish glee. Bully Bill spat.

“I d-don’t m-mind roughing it at all,” continued the applicant, wistfully. “D-don’t judge me by my clothes. Fact is, old man, they happen to be all I’ve g-got, you see. B-but I’m quite c-competent to——”

Bully Bill said dreamily, looking out into space, and as if thinking aloud.

“We ain’t as tough as we’re cracked up to be. Of course, they’s one or two stunts you got to learn on a cattle ranch—rawnch—beggin’ your pardon——”

“That’s quite all right, old man. Don’t mention it. Is there a chance then for me?”

There was not a trace of a smile on Bully Bill’s face as he solemnly looked down into the anxious blue eyes of the applicant.

“They’s the makin’s of a damn fine cowboy in you,” he said.

“I say!”

A smile broke all over the somewhat pinched face of the strange tramp. That smile was so engaging, so sunny, so boyish that the cowpuncher returned it with a characteristic grin of his own.

“D-you really mean to say that I’m engaged?”

“You betchu.”

“Thanks awfully, old man,” cried the other cordially, and extended his white hand, which gripped the horny one of the cowpuncher, at rest on his leather-clad knee.

Bully Bill rode off at a slow lope, and as he rode, he steadily chewed. Once or twice he grunted, and once he slapped his leg and made a sound that was oddly like a hoarse guffaw. In the wake of the loitering horse, carrying his now sadly-battered grip in his hand, the Englishman plugged along, and as he came he whistled a cheery strain of music.

CHAPTER II

Sandy made three somersaults of glee on the turf, and at his last turn-over, his head came into contact with something hard. He rubbed said head, and at the same time observed that which had pained him. It was a large, old-fashioned gold locket, studded with rubies and diamonds.

“Holy Salmon!” ejaculated the highly-elated boy. In an instant he had seized the bridle of his horse, and was on him. He went up the hill on a run, and began calling outside the house, while still on horse.

“Hilda! I say, Hilda! Come on out! Looka here what I found!”

A girl, skin bronzed by sun and wind, with chocolate-coloured eyes and hair and a certain free grace of motion and poise, came on to the wide verandah. Sandy had ridden his horse clear to the railing, and now he excitedly held up the trinket in his hand, and then tossed it to Hilda, who caught it neatly in her own. Turning it over, the girl examined to find with admiration and curiosity, and, with feminine intuition, she found the spring and opened the locket. Within, the lovely, pictured face of a woman in low-cut evening dress, looked back from the frame. On the opposite side, a lock of dead-gold hair curled behind the glass.

Sandy had leaped off his horse, and now was excitedly grasping after the treasure.

“Wher’d you find it, Sandy?”

“Down in the lower pasture. Betchu its his girl! Say, Hilda, he’s a scream. You’d oughter’ve been there. He came along the road all dolled up in city clothes, and—look! Oh, my God-frey! Look ut him, Hilda!”

In an ecstasy of derision and delight, Sandy pointed.

Hand shading his eyes, the stranger was gazing across the wide-spreading panorama of gigantic hills, etched against a sky of sheerest blue, upon which the everlasting sun glowed.

“By George!” exclaimed the new “hand” of the O Bar O, “what a tophole view! Never saw anything to beat it. Give you my word, it b-b-beats S-switzerland. When I was tramping along the road, I th-thought that was a good one on us at home, ’bout this being the Land of Promise, you know, b-but now, by George! I’m hanged if I don’t think you’re right. A chap cannot look across at a view like that and not feel jolly well uplifted!”

There was a ring of men closing in about the new arrival, for it was the noon hour, and Hootmon had hurried them along from bunkhouse and corral. At the stranger’s stream of eloquence to Bully Bill anent the beauties of nature in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, “Pink-eyed Jake” swooned away in the arms of Hootmon. A gale of unbridled laughter burst from a dozen throats. The men held their sides and leaned forward the better to scan this new specimen of the human family. Hands on hips, they “took his number” and pronounced him internally a freak of nature.

To the door of the cook-car, rolled the immense form of Tom Chum Lee, the Chinese cook who dominated the grub-car of O Bar O. With a vast smile of benignant humour directed upon his “boys,” Lee summoned all hands to chow, by means of a great cow bell, that he waved generously back and forth.

With immense satisfaction and relish, the newcomer was taking in all of the colour and atmosphere of the ranch. The fact that he himself was an object of derisive mirth to the outfit, troubled him not at all.

A skirt—pink—flirted around the side of the house, and outlined against the blue of the sky, the slim form of a young girl shone on the steps of the ranch house. The Englishman had a glimpse of wide, dark eyes, and a generous red mouth, through which gleamed the whitest of teeth. But it was her voice, with its shrill edge of impudent young mirth that sent the colour to the pinched cheeks of the new hand of O Bar O. There was in it, despite its mockery, a haughty accent of contempt.

“Who’s his royal nibs, Bully Bill?”

Through the corner of his mouth, the foreman enlightened her:

“Vodeyveel show. Things gittin’ kind o’ dull at O Bar. Thought I’d pull in something to cheer the fellows up a bit, and they’s nothing tickles them more than turnin’ a green tenderfoot Englishman on to them. This one here is a circus. When I asked him what the hello—excuse me, Miss Hilda!—what the hello he was doin’ round here, he ses: ‘Cheerio!’ Say, if ever there was ‘Kid me’ writ all over a human bein’, it’s splashed over that there one.”

“Um!”

Hilda came down the steps and approached the newcomer. Head slightly on one side, she examined him with evident curiosity and amusement. “Paper-collar dudes,” as the ranch folk called the city people, came quite often to O Bar O, but this particular specimen seemed somehow especially green and guileless. A wicked dimple flashed out in the right cheek of the girl, though her critical eyes were still cold as she looked the man over from head to foot.

“Hi-yi! You! Where do you hail from?”

As he looked up at the beautiful, saucy young creature before him, the Englishman was seized with one of his worst spells of stuttering. The impediment in his speech was slight, on ordinary occasions, but when unduly moved, and at psychological moments, when the tongue’s office was the most desired of adjuncts, it generally failed him. Now:

“Bb-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b——”

The girl, hands on hips, swayed back and forth with laughter.

“Haven’t you a tongue even? What are you doing in this wild country, you poor lost lamb from the fold?”

He had recovered his wits, and the use of his tongue. His heels came together with a curiously smart and military click, and his blue eyes looked squarely into the impudent brown ones of the girl, laughing in his face. With complete gravity, he replied:

“J-just came across to the p-promised land, to try and make a home for myself and—” he paused, smiling sunnily—“and another, you know.”

“Now wasn’t that the great idea!” guyed the girl, with mock seriousness. “And who’s the other one, by the way? Another like you? Do tell us.”

“Her name’s—Nanna, we call her.”

“Nanna! Nanna! What a sweet name!”

She was still mocking, but suddenly swung the locket on its chain toward him.

“Do you know, I believe we’ve found your long-lost Nanna. I was just admiring her fair, sweet face inside. Catch her!”

She tossed it across to him. It dropped on the stones between them. He stooped to pick it up, and anxiously examined it, before turning to look back at the girl with a slightly stern glance.

“Righto!” he said. “Thanks for returning her to me.”

For some unaccountable reason, the girl’s mood changed. She tossed her head, as the colour flooded her face. Something wild and free in that tossing suggested the motion of a young thoroughbred colt. Affecting great disdain, and as if looking down at him from a height, she inquired:

“Oh, by the way, what’s your name?”

He absently fished in his vest pocket, and this action provoked a fresh gale of laughter from the highly edified hands, in which the girl heartily joined. At the laughter, he looked up, slightly whistled, and said in his friendly way:

“Cheerio!”

“Cheerio!” repeated the girl. “Some name. Boys, allow me—Cheerio, Duke of the O Bar O. Escort his grace to the dining-car, and mind you treat him gentle. And say, boys—” she called after them, “doll him up in O Bar O duds. Let’s see what he looks like in reglar clothes.”

Shoved along by the men, “his grace” was pushed and hustled into the cook-car. Here the odour of the hot food, and the rich soup being slapped into each bowl along the line of plates, almost caused the hungry Englishman to faint. Nevertheless, he kept what he would have termed “stiff upper lip,” and as the Chinaman passed down between the long bench tables, and filled the bowl before the newcomer, Cheerio, as he was henceforward to be known, controlled the famished longing to fall to upon that thick, delicious soup, and, smiling instead, turned to the man on either side of him, with a cigarette case in his hand:

“Have one, old man, do. P-pretty g-good stuff! Got them in France, you know. Believe I’ll have one myself before starting in, you know. Topping—what?”

CHAPTER III

P. D. McPherson, or “P. D.” as he was better known throughout the ranching country, owner of the O Bar O, was noted for his eccentricities, his scientific experiments with stock and grain, and for the variety and quality of his vocabulary of “cusses.”

An ex-professor of an Agricultural College, he had come to Alberta in the early days, before the trails were blazed. While the railroads were beginning to survey the new country, he had established himself in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

Beginning with a few head of cattle imported from the East, P. D. had built up his herd until it was famous throughout the cattle world. His experiments in crossing pure-bred grades of cattle in an attempt to produce an animal that would give both the beef of the Hereford and the butterfat and cream of the Holstein, had been followed with unabated interest.

He had been equally successful with his horses and other stock. Turning from cattle and stock, P. D. next expended his genius upon the grain. It was a proud and triumphant day for O Bar O when, at the annual Calgary Fair, the old rancher showed a single stalk of wheat, on which were one hundred and fifty kernels.

His alfalfa and rye fields, in a normally dry and hilly part of the country, were the wonder and amazement of farmers and ranchers.

The Government, the Railways, the Flour mills and the Agricultural Colleges, sought him out, and made tempting offers to induce him to yield up to them his secrets.

P. D. stroked his chin, pinched his lower lip, drew his fuzzy eyebrows together, and shook his fine, shaggy old head. He was not yet satisfied that his experiments had reached perfection.

He’d “think it over.” He’d “see about it some day, maybe,” and he “wasn’t so damned cussed sure that it would benefit the world to produce cheap wheat at the present time. This way out, gentlemen! This way out!”

He was a rude old man, was P. D. McPherson.

In a way, he was obliged to be so, for otherwise he would have been enormously imposed on. O Bar O was in the heart of the game and fishing country, and was, therefore, the mecca of all aspiring hunters and fishermen, to say nothing of the numerous campers and motor hoboes, who drove in every day upon the land and left their trail of disorder and dirt behind, and quite often small or large forest fires, that were kept under control only by the vigilance of O Bar O.

The ranch was noted for its hospitality, and no tramp or stranger or rider along the trail had ever been turned from its door. The line, however, had to be drawn somewhere, and it was drawn in so far as the idle tourists, pausing en route to Banff or Lake Louise to “beat” a meal or a pleasant day at the ranch, were concerned, or the numerous motor hoboes, who, denied at the ranch house their numerous requests for milk and eggs and gasolene and the privilege of spending the night there, slipped in under the bridge by the river, and set up their camps on the banks of the Ghost River.

About the time when his wheat had brought him considerable, but undesired, fame, P. D., holding his lower lip between thumb and forefinger, was looking about for new experimental worlds to conquer. By chance, his motherless son and daughter, then of the impressionable ages of four and ten respectively, shot under his especial notice, through the medium of a ride down the bannister and resultant noise.

P. D. studied his offspring appraisingly and thoughtfully, and as he looked into the grimy, glooming young faces, he conceived another one of his remarkable “inspirations.”

It was soon after this, that P. D. founded that “School of Nature,” to which were bidden all of the children of the neighbouring ranch country, and into which his own progeny were unceremoniously dumped. However, when the curriculum of this Institution of Learning became more fully understood, despite the fame of its founder and president, there were none among the parents of the various children who felt justified in sending them to the O Bar O School of Nature.

Even the most ignorant among them believed that school existed only mainly for the purpose of teaching the young minds how to shoot with reading, writing, spelling and arithmetic.

P. D. proposed only the slightest excursion into these elementary subjects. Nature, so he declared, addressing the assembled farmers at a special meeting, was the greatest of all teachers, a book into which one might look, without turning a single leaf, and learn all that was necessary for the knowledge of mankind.

He was convinced, so eloquently proclaimed P. D., that school such as the world knew it, was antiquated in its methods and wholly unnecessary and wrong. To teach the young the secrets and mysteries of nature—that alone was needed to produce a race of supermen and women.

One timid little woman arose, and asked what “supermen” meant, and the huge, rough father of the family of ten replied that it meant “men who liked their supper.”

The meeting broke up in a riot—so far as P. D. was concerned, and his neighbours departed with his wrathful imprecations ringing in their ears.

Not to be daunted by the lack of support afforded him by his neighbours, P. D. set at once to put his theories into practice upon his helpless children.

It came to pass that the children of P. D. missed the advantages of the ordinary modern schools. Had P. D., in fact, carried out his original curriculum, which he prepared with scientific detail, it is quite possible that the results might have turned out as satisfactorily as his experiments with cattle, pigs, sheep and horses. P. D. reckoned not, however, with the vagaries and impetuosities of youth and human nature. Unlike dumb stock, he had fiery spirits, active imaginations, and saucy tongues to deal with. He was not possessed with even the normal amount of patience desirable in a good teacher. His classes, therefore, were more often than not punctuated by explosive sounds, miraculous expletives, indignant outcries, and the ejection or hurried exit from the room of a smarting, angry-eyed youngster, suffering from the two-fold lash of parental tongue and hand.

Then when some of his original ideas were just beginning to take substantial root in their young minds and systems, P. D. fell a victim to a new and devastating passion, which was destined to hold him in thrall for the rest of his days.

Chess was his new mistress, alternately his joy and his bane. Even his children were forgotten in the shuffle of events, and, turned upon their own resources, they grew up like wild young things, loose on a great, free range.

If, however, the young McPhersons had missed school, they had learned much of which the average child of to-day is more or less ignorant. They knew all of the theories concerned in the formation of this earth of ours, and the living things upon it. They were intimately acquainted with every visible and many invisible stars and planets in the firmament. They had a plausible and a comprehensible explanation for such phenomena as the milky way, the comets, the northern lights, the asteroids and other denizens of the miraculous Alberta sky above them. They knew what the west, the east, the north and the south winds portended. They could calculate to a nicety the distance of a thunderstorm. No mean weather prophets were the children of P. D. McPherson; nor were their diagnosis dependent upon guess-work, or an aching tooth, or rheumatic knee, or even upon intuition or superstition, as in the case of the Indian.

Woodlore they knew, and the names and habits of the wild things that abounded in the woods of O Bar O. Insects, ants, butterflies, bees, were known by their scientific names. A rainbow, a sunrise, sunset, the morning mist, fog, the night sun of Alberta, the Japanese current that brought the Chinook winds over the Rocky Mountains, that changed the weather from thirty below zero to a tropical warmth in Alberta, the melting clouds in the skies, the night rainbows—all these were not merely beautiful phenomena, but the result of natural causes, of which the McPherson children were able to give an intelligent explanation.

They could ride the range and wield the lariat with the best of the cowpunchers. Hilda could brand, vaccinate, dehorn, and wean cattle. She was one of the best brand readers in the country, and she rode a horse as if she were part of the animal itself. She could leap with the agility of a circus rider upon the slippery back of a running outlaw, and, without bridle or saddle, maintain her place upon a jumping, bucking, kicking, wildly rearing “bronc.”

Untamed and wild as the mavericks that, eluding the lariat of the cowpuncher, roamed the range unbranded and unbroken, Hilda and Sandy McPherson came up out of their childhood years, and paused like timid, curious young creatures of the wild upon the perilous edge of maturity.

Hilda was not without a comprehension of certain things in life that had been denied her. If her heart was untamed, it was not the less hungry and ardent. Though she realized that she had missed something precious and desirable in life, she was possessed with a spartan and sensitive pride. About her ignorance, she had erected a wall of it.

It was all very well to ride thus freely over the splendid open spaces and to wend her fearless way through the beckoning woods of the Rocky Mountain foothills. It was fine to be part of a game which every day showed the results of labour well done, and to know that such labour was contributing to the upkeep and value of the world. Yet there were times when a very wistful expression of wonder and longing would come into the girl’s dark eyes, and the craving for something other than she had known would make her heart burn within her.

To appease this heart hunger, Hilda sought a medium through the reading matter obtainable at O Bar O; but the reading matter consisted of the Encyclopædia Brittanica, Darwin’s “Origin of the Species,” several scientific works, and two voluminous works on the subject of chess.

For a time, the Encyclopædia afforded sufficient material to satisfy at least her curiosity; but presently a new source was tapped. From the bunkhouse came dime novels and the banned newspapers, which P. D. had more than once denounced as “filthy truck fit for the intelligence of morons only.” Besides these were the Police Gazette, two or three penny dreadfuls, Hearsts’, and several lurid novels of the blood-and-thunder type. This precious reading matter, borrowed or “swiped” by Sandy and Hilda, while the men were on the range, was secretly devoured in hayloft and other secure places of retreat, and made a profound impression upon their eager young minds.

CHAPTER IV

At this time, P. D. McPherson held the title of Champion Chess Player of Western Canada. He was, however, by no means proud or satisfied with this honourable title to chess fame.

Western Canada! One could count on the fingers of one hand the number of real players in the whole of the west. P. D. had played with them all. He considered it child’s play to have beaten them. P. D. had issued a challenge not merely to the eastern holders of the title, but across the line, where went his bid to contest the world’s title with the Yankee holders of the same.

P. D. dreamed and brooded over the day when he would win in an international tournament that would include the chess players of all the nations of the world. Meanwhile, it behooved him to keep in practice, so that his skill and craft should abate by not a jot or a tittle.

He had taught his young son and daughter this noble game. Though good players, they had inherited neither their parent’s craft nor passion for it. Indeed, they had reason to fear and dislike chess as a veritable enemy. Many a ranch or barn dance, many a gymkhana, rodeo, stampede and Indian race; many a trip to Calgary or Banff had been wiped off Hilda’s pleasure slate, as punishment for a careless move or inattention when the ancient game was in progress. Many a night the bitter-hearted Sandy had departed early, supperless, to bed, because of a boyish trick of wriggling while his father debated in long-drawn-out study and thought the desirability of such and such a move.

Hilda and Sandy loved their father; yet his departure upon a scouting expedition on the trail of a prospective chess player filled them always with a sense of unholy elation and ecstatic freedom.

P. D.’s good or bad humour upon his return to the ranch depended entirely upon the success or failure of his quest. If success crowned his pursuit, and his cravings were satisfied, P. D. returned, beaming with good will upon the world in general and the inhabitants of O Bar O in particular. On the other hand, should such excursions have proven fruitless, the old monomaniac came back to his ranch in uncertain and irascible humour. All hands upon the place then found it expedient and wise to give him a wide berth, while his unfortunate son and daughter were reduced to desperate extremities to escape his especial notice and wrath.

It should not be inferred from the foregoing that P. D. necessarily neglected his ranching interests. Chess was a periodic malady with him. The ranch was a permanent institution. O Bar O was the show-place of the foothills and a matter of pride to the country. The smoothest of beef, grass-fed steers, topped the market each year, when they went forth from the ranch not merely to the local stockyards, but to Kansas City, Montreal, St. Louis, and Chicago, in the latter place to compete with success with the corn-feds of the U. S. A.

At the fairs, over the country, O Bar O stock carried a majority of the ribbons, and “Torchy,” a slim, black streak of lightning and fire, brought undying fame to its owner by going over the bar of the annual horse-show of Calgary, with Hilda upon his back, the highest peak ever attained by a horse in Canada.

A berth at O Bar O was coveted by all the riders and cowpunchers of the country. The fame of the fine old ranch had crossed the line, in fact, and had brought to the ranch some of the best of the bronco busters and riders. The outfit could not, in fact, be beaten. The food was of the best; the bunkhouses modern and clean; the work done in season and in a rational number of hours per day; the wages were fair; first-class stock to care for; a square foreman, and a bully boss. What more could a man wish upon a cattle ranch? Pride permeated to every man-Jack upon the place. Each sought to stand well in the eyes of P. D., and his praise was a coveted thing, while his anger was something to escape, and unlikely to be forgotten.

P. D.’s praise took the form of a resounding, smashing clap upon the shoulder, a prized assignment, and a bonus at the end of the month. His anger took the form of an ungodly and most extraordinary string of blistering and original curses, words being cut in half to slip curses midway between as the torrent poured from the wrathful P. D.

It may be mentioned in passing that P. D.’s son and his daughter had inherited and were developing a quaint vocabulary of typical O Bar O “cusses,” much to their father’s amazement and indignation. Indeed, the first time P. D.’s attention was directed toward this talent of his daughter—her voice was raised in shrill damning speech toward a squawking hen who desired to sit upon a nest of eggs destined for the house—the old fellow stopped midway in his strut across the barnyard, overcome with dismay and anger. Every “hand” within sight and sound was bawled to the presence of the irate parent, and upon them he poured the vials of his wrath.

“Where in hot hell did my daughter learn such language? You blocketty, blinketty, gosh darned, sons of cooks and dish-washers have got to cut out all this damned, cursed, hellish language when my daughter’s around. D’you hear me?”

And to the foreman!

“Orders to your men, sir, no more damned cursing upon the place! I’ll have you and your men know that this is O Bar O and not a G— D— swearing camp for a blasted lot of bohunks.”

This, then, was the outfit to which the seemingly guileless Englishman had become attached.

P. D., his bushy eyebrows twitching over bright old eyes, confirmed the judgment of the foreman, that “a bite of entertainment won’t come amiss at O Bar O” in the shape of the English tenderfoot.

“Put him through the ropes, damn it. Get all the fun you want out of him. Work the blasted hide off him. Make him sweat like hell to earn his salt. Go as far as you like, but—” and here P. D.’s bushy eyebrows drew together in an ominous frown, “give the man a damned square deal. This is O Bar O, and we’ll have no G— D— reflections upon the place.”

So the Englishman was “put through the ropes.” Despite his greenness and seeming innocence, it is possible that he was wider awake than any of the men who were working their wits to make his days and nights exciting and uproarious. He played up to his part with seeming ingenuousness and high good humour. If the hands of O Bar O regarded him as a clown, a mountebank, a greenhorn, he played greener and funnier than they had bargained for.

He was given steers to milk. He was assigned the job of “housemaid, nurse, chambermaid, and waitress” to the house barn stock. He fed the pigs, and he did the chores of cook-car and bunkhouse. All the small and mean jobs of the ranch were assigned to the newcomer. He was constantly despatched upon foolish and piffling errands. For an indefinite period, he was relegated to the woodpile of the cook-house. This was a job that the average cowman scorned. The cowpuncher and ranch rider consider any work not concerned with horse or cattle a reflection upon their qualities as riders. Cheerio, however, acquired a genuine fondness for that woodpile. He would chop away with undiminished cheer and vigour, whistling as he worked, and at the end of the day, he would sit on a log and contentedly smoke his pipe, as he surveyed the fruit of his labours with palpable pride and even vanity.

“Boastin’ of how many logs he’d split. Proud as a whole hen. Hell! you can’t feaze a chap like that. He’d grin if you put’m to breakin’ stones.”

Thus Bully Bill to Holy Smoke, assistant foreman at the O Bar O. “Ho” as he was known for short, scowled at that reference to breaking stones, for Ho knew what that meant in another country across the line. Out of the side of his mouth he shot:

“Why don’t cha set ’im choppin’ real logs if he’s stuck on the job. Stick ’im in the timber and see if he’ll whistle over his job then.”

So “into the timber” went Cheerio, with strict orders to cut down ten fifty-feet tall trees per day. He looked squarely into the face of the assistant foreman, and said: “Righto,” and took the small hand axe handed him by the solemn-faced Hootmon, whose tongue was in his cheek, and who doubled over in silent mirth as soon as Cheerio’s back was turned. But neither Mootmon, nor Ho, nor Bully Bill, nor, for that matter, old P. D. or his son and daughter, laughed when at the end of the day Cheerio returned with twelve trees to his credit for the day’s work. It was, in fact, a matter of considerable wonder and speculation as to the method employed by the Englishman to achieve those twelve immense trees through the medium of that small hand axe. Cheerio went on whistling, kept his own counsel, and was starting off the next morning upon a similar errand when Bully Bill harkened to another suggestion of his assistant, and beckoned him to the corrals.

There was a wary-eyed, ominously still, maverick tied to a post, and him Cheerio was ordered to mount. He said:

“Hello, old man—waiting for me, what?” smiled at the boy holding his head, and swung up into the saddle.

“Now,” said Bully Bill. “You lookut here. You ride that bronc to hell and back again, and break ’er cowboy if you have to break your own head and hide and heart in doing it.”

Then someone untied the halter rope, and the race was on. He was tossed over and over again clear over the head of the wild maverick, and over and over again he remounted, to be thrown again by the wildly kicking bronco. Bruised and sore, with a cut lip and black eye, he pursued, caught, and again and again mounted, again and again was thrown, to mount once again, and to stick finally like glue to the horse’s back, while the hooting, yelling ring of men surrounding the corrals—Hilda and Sandy upon the railings—yelled themselves hoarse with derisive comments and directions, and then went wild with amazed delight, when, still upon the back of a subdued and shivering young outlaw, Cheerio swept around the corrals. He arose in his stirrups now, himself cheering lustily, and waving that newly-acquired O Bar O hat like a boy. Even Hilda begrudged him not the well-earned cheers, though she stifled back her own with her hand upon her mouth, when she found that he had observed her, and with eyes kindling with pride, rode by.

He was thumped upon the back, hailed as “a hellufafellow,” and enjoyed the pronounced favour and patronage of Bully Bill himself, who brought forth his grimy plug of chewing tobacco, and offered a “chaw” of it to the Englishman. Cheerio bit into it with relish, nor showed any sign of the nauseating effects of a weed he preferred in his pipe rather than his mouth.

As a matter of fact, like most Englishmen of his class, Cheerio was an excellent rider, though his riding had not been of the sort peculiar to cowboydom. However, it did not take him long to learn “the hang of the thing.” He dropped his posting for the easy, cowboy lope, and he discovered that, while one clung with his knees when on an English saddle, such an action had painful and exhausting results with a stock saddle. There really was something to Bully Bill’s simple formula:

“Hell! There ain’t nothin’ to this here ridin’. All you got to do is throw your leg over his back and—stick!”

His English training, however, stood him in good stead. More than the foreman at O Bar O noted and appreciated the fact that the newcomer was as intimate with horses as if they were human brethren.

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.

Sandy, on the other hand, had slowly but completely capitulated to the man whose first appearance had so amused him. In Alberta, daylight lingers, in the summer time, till as late as ten o’clock at night. When the day’s work was done, Sandy and his new friend, would depart from the ranch on a hunt that was new to the cattle country. They hunted, in fact, for fossils, whitened, hardened bones of the original denizens of the land that had existed before the Rocky Mountains had sprung into being by some gigantic convulsion of nature.

Zoology was a subject that exercised an uncanny fascination over the mind of the red-haired boy. P. D. had scarcely begun the instruction of this alluring subject when chess diverted him, much to the disappointment and aggravation of his son. Cheerio, however, proved a mine of information in this particular field. He had actually once been a member of an archæological expedition to Thibet, from whose bowels the bones of the oldest man in the world had been dug. Sandy could have sat by the hour listening to the tales of that expedition and its remarkable contribution to science. It was an even more enthralling experience for the youngster, therefore, to personally explore the wild canyons above the Ghost River, and, with bated excitement, himself assist in picking out on the gigantic rocks what Cheerio definitely proved were bones of a dinosaur. These immense reptiles of prehistoric days were quite common to the Red Deer district, but the new “hand” of the O Bar O had proven that they were to be found also along the Ghost River canyons.

Many a time, sitting on the bank of the river, waiting for the wary trout to bite, the slowly-drawling, seldom-stammering Cheerio, pictured to the bulging-eyed, open-mouthed youngster, the giant reptiles and mountainous mammals of prehistoric days. He even drew life-like pictures upon scraps of paper, which Sandy carefully cherished and consigned to his treasure drawer. Sandy, at such times, came as near to touching complete satisfaction with life as was possible.

His defection, in favour of Cheerio, however, was a bitter pill for his sister to swallow. Argue and squabble, wrangle and fight as the young McPherson’s had done all of their lives, for they were of a healthy, pugnacious disposition, they nevertheless had always been first-rate chums, and in a way, a defensive and offensive alliance to which no outsider had been permitted more than a look-in. Now “that Englishman” had come between them, according to Hilda. Sandy evidently preferred his society to that of his own and only sister. Thus, bitter Hilda. Sandy upbraided, reproached and sneered at, grouchily allowed that she could come along too if she wanted to and “didn’t interfere or talk too much.” Girls, he brutally averred, were a doggone, darned old nuisance, and always in the way when something real was being done. They were well enough as ornaments, said Sandy, but the female of the species was not meant for practical purposes and they ought to know and keep their place, and if they wouldn’t do it, why they’d be made to.

This was adding insult to injury. It proved beyond question that someone had been “setting her brother against her,” and Hilda knew who that someone was. Sandy knew absolutely nothing about the “female of the species”—that, by the way, was a brand new expression to the young McPhersons—and Hilda proposed to “teach him a thing or two” about her much maligned sex. Also she would “spite that Englishman” who had influenced her brother against her, by imposing her unwanted society upon the explorers.

Each evening, therefore, Hilda was on hand, and she arose before dawn of a Sunday morning—a time when all hands on the ranch were accustomed to sleep in late—to ride out with them under the grey-gold skies, with the air fresh and sparkling, and such a stillness on all sides that one felt loth to break it by even a murmur.

She rode somewhat behind the “bone enthusiasts,” disdaining to ride abreast with them, or to join in the unintelligible conversation that presently would begin. No brush was too thick to hold back this girl of the ranching country; no trail too intricate or tortuous. Foot wide ledges, over precipices three and four hundred feet above the river daunted her not. Hilda held her careless seat on the back of her surefooted and fleet young Indian pony, and if the path crumbled away in places too perilous for even a foothill horse to pass, Hilda dismounted and led him, breaking a trail herself through dense timber land.

True, bones, whether of prehistoric man or mammal, had no actual interest for the living girl. Sandy’s passion for such things indeed puzzled and troubled her, inasmuch as she was unable to share it with him. It was strangely sweet and pleasant, none the less, to ride out in the quiet dawn or in the evening when the skies were bronzed and reddened by the still lingering sun. With every day, they found new trails, new byways, new depressions in the wild woods of O Bar O.

On these excursions Sandy monopolized the conversation and, in a measure, Hilda was ignored. Cheerio’s concern in her behalf when first they had penetrated into difficult woods and his offer to lead her horse had met with haughty and bitter rebuff. Hilda, indeed, rudely suggested that she was better able to care for herself than he was. Also she said:

“Don’t bother about me. Ride on with Sandy. I like to ride alone, and I don’t care for conversation when I ride.”

Sandy more than made up for his sister’s conversational deficiency. He was a human interrogation point, and his hunger for knowledge in matters anent man and beast of ancient days was unquenchable.

Hilda, riding a few paces behind, would listen to the endless questions popped by the eager boy, and secretly marvel at the always comprehensible replies of his companion. Sometimes she was tempted to join in the discussions; but her opinions were never solicited by her brother or Cheerio. As the two rode on, apparently oblivious of her very existence, Hilda was torn with mixed emotions. She had scornfully advised Cheerio not to bother her; nevertheless, she was indignant at thus being ignored. “I might just as well be an old pack pony,” she thought wrathfully. “I don’t know why I come along anyway. However, I’m not going to turn back for that Englishman. Not if I know it.”

Cheerio, on the other hand, was not insensible to that small, uplifted chin and the disdainful glance of the dark eyes that seemed to harden when they glanced in his direction. He was not versed in the ways of a woman, or it may be that Hilda’s treatment of him would not have wounded him so sorely. Cheerio was not stupid; but he was singularly dense in certain matters. He pondered much over the matter of how he could possibly have offended the girl, and the thought that she very evidently disliked him was hard to bear. That cut deep.

Many a night, pipe in mouth, upon the steps of the bunkhouse, Cheerio would debate the matter within himself. Why did Hilda dislike him? What was there about him that should arouse her especial scorn and contempt? Why should her eyes harden and her whole personality seem to stiffen at his approach? Almost it seemed as if the girl armoured herself against him. He could find no answer to his questions, and his troubled meditations would end with the dumping of his pipe, as he shook his head again in the puzzle of womanhood, and ruefully turned in for the night. Sometimes he would lie awake for hours, and wholly against his will the vision of her small, dark face, with its scarlet lips and deep brown eyes accompanied him into the world of sleep.

About this time, he began to draw sketches of Hilda. He made them at odd moments; at the noon hour, when he scratched them on the backs of envelopes, slips of paper, a bit of cardboard torn from a box. Presently parcels were brought by an Indian on horseback from the Morley Trading Store, and after that Cheerio began to paint the face of the girl whom he believed hated him. It is true that his model sat not for him. Yet she was drawn from life, for his memory drew her back as faithfully as though they were standing face to face. This was all secret work, done in secret places, and packed away in the locked portfolio, which was in that battered grip. Drawing and painting in this way was not at all satisfactory to the artist, who felt that he was not doing Hilda justice. His need of a place, where he might work, undisturbed, was keenly felt by him. Cheerio, as before mentioned, was the one “hand” at the ranch who daily visited the Ghost River for bathing purposes. He would arise an hour before the other men and was off on horse to the river, returning fresh and clean for breakfast and the long day’s work. His explorations with Sandy and these daily expeditions to the river had made him very well acquainted with the Ghost River canyon. One day, scanning thoughtfully the rockbound river, he perceived what appeared to be a declivity in the side of a giant rock that jutted out several feet above the river. Out of curiosity, Cheerio climbed up the cliff, and discovered a small cave, part of which was so cleft that the light poured through. His first thought was of Sandy, and the fun the boy would have exploring through what was evidently a considerable tunnel. His next thought was that on account of the nature of the earth, this might prove a dangerous and hazardous undertaking for an adventurous youngster. Suddenly an inspiration flashed over Cheerio. Here was the ideal studio. Not in the tunnel, on whose ledge he could very well keep his work, but in that round natural chamber near the opening, when the north light was husbanded. It did not take him long to bring his drawing and painting paraphernalia to his “studio,” and after a few days he fashioned a rude sort of easel for himself. Here on a Sunday Cheerio worked, and during that day of rest the ranch saw him not. He would carry his lunch with him, and depart for the day, much to the bewilderment of Hilda and the disappointment of Sandy, unwilling to abandon the Sunday morning exploration trips. The cave was so situated that his privacy was complete, and anyone coming along the top of the canyon or even down the river itself could not have seen the man in the cave a few feet above, quietly smoking and drawing those impressionistic pictures of the ranch, the Indians, the cowboys, P. D., the overall-clad Sandy and Hilda. Hilda on horse, flying like the wind at the head of the cowboys; Hilda, loping slowly along the trail, with her head dropped in a day dream, that brought somehow a singularly wistful and touching expression of longing to the lovely young face; Hilda with hand on hip, head tossed up, defiant, impudent, fascinating; Hilda’s head, with its crown of chocolate-coloured hair and the darker eyes, the curiously dusky red that seemed burned by the sun into her cheeks, and the lips that were so vividly alive and scarlet.

Of all his subjects, she alone he drew from memory. He had found no difficulty in inducing his other subjects to “pose” for him. Even P. D. with old pipe twisted in the corner of his mouth had made no demur when Cheerio, pad and pencil in hand, seated on the steps of the ranch-house rapidly sketched his employer. The Indians were a never-failing source of inspiration to the artist. The chubby babies, the child mothers, the tawny braves, the ragged, old, shuffling women; Indian colours—magentas, yellows, orange, scarlet, cerise. They furnished subjects for the artist that made his paintings seem fairly to blaze with light, and later were to win for him well-deserved fame and monetary reward. Cheerio would take these miniature sketches to his studio, and there enlarge them. Hilda, however, whom above all things in the world, he desired to paint, somehow eluded him. No matter how lifelike or well-drawn his pictures of this girl, they never wholly satisfied him. Indeed it was not one of his drawings, but a little kodak picture of her, acquired from Sandy, that found its way into the ancient locket, where previously had been the picture of the woman with the long sleepy eyes and dead-gold hair.

CHAPTER VI

Purely by accident, the wall of reserve that Hilda had reared between herself and Cheerio was, for the nonce at least, removed. Sandy had desired to go over a certain cliff, incredibly steep and slippery and four hundred feet above the river. Now Sandy could climb up and down places with the agility and sureness of a mountain goat, but even a mountain goat would have hesitated to go over the side of that cliff.

Hilda came out of her absent trance with a start, as she realized the intention of the daring and reckless youngster. Over an out-jutting rock Sandy was poised.

“Sandy McPherson! You cut out that darned nonsense. You can’t go down there. It’s too doggone steep.”

“Guess I can if I want to,” retorted the boy, looking over the perilous edge and scrutinizing the grade for any possible root or tree stump upon which he might grasp in an emergency. “Say,” his head jerked sideways toward Cheerio, who had dismounted himself to investigate the situation. “Will you look after Silver Heels till I get back? ’Tain’t safe for him to go over, but I’ll be Jake.”

“Sandy! You come back! Dad said the earth wasn’t safe under those rocks there, and any minute one of ’em might roll over. That rock’s moving now! Sandy! Oh, stop him! D-d-don’t let—him! Please!”

She had appealed to Cheerio. It was the first request she had ever made of him. Instantly he grasped the arm of her brother.

“Come on, old man. There’s a prospect over yonder that looks a jolly sight better than down there.”

“Aw, girls give me a pain,” declared the disgusted Sandy. “What do they want to come spyin’ along for anyway, and throwin’ fits about nothin’. What do they know about dinosauruses or anything else, I’d like to know?”

“On you go, old man!”

He had hoisted the grumbling boy upon his horse. Sandy raced angrily ahead. Cheerio looked at Hilda with the expectant boyish smile of one hoping for reward. He had “taken her part.” Thanks were his due. Thanks indeed he did not get. Hilda’s glance met his own only for a moment and then she said, while the deep colour flooded all of her face and neck:

“Now you can see for yourself what your fool expeditions might lead to. Sandy’s the only brother I have in the world, and first thing you know he’ll be going over one of those cliffs and then—then—you’ll be entirely to blame.”

Discomfited, Cheerio lost the use of his tongue. After a moment he inquired, somewhat dejectedly:

“Sh-shall we c-c-c-call them off then?”

Hilda was unprepared for this. Though she would not have admitted it to herself for anything in the world, those evening rides were becoming the most important events in her life. Indeed, she found herself looking forward to and thinking of them all day. Faced now with the possibility of their being ended, she said hurriedly and with a slight catching of her breath that made Cheerio look at her with an odd fixity of expression:

“No, no—of course not. I wouldn’t want to disappoint my brother, b-but I can’t trust that boy alone. I’ve always taken care of Sandy. That’s why I come along. Sandy’s just a little boy, you know.”

How that “little boy” would have snarled with wrath at his sister’s designation! Even Cheerio’s eyes twinkled, and Hilda, to cover up her own embarrassment, hastily pressed her heel into her horse’s flank, and for the first time she suffered him to ride along beside her.

It was intensely still and a dim golden haze lay like a dream over all the sky and the land, merging them into one. Into this glow rode the girl of the ranching country and the man from the old land across the sea. The air was balmy and full of the essence of summer. There was the sweet odour of recently-cut hay and green feed and a suave wind whispered and fragrantly fanned the perfumed air about them. They came out of the woods directly into the hay lands and passed through fields of thick oats already turning golden. A strange new emotion, a feeling that pained by its very sweetness was slowly growing into being in the untutored heart of the girl of the foothills. Glancing sideways at the man’s fine, clean-cut profile, his gaze bent straight ahead, Hilda caught her breath with a sudden fear of she knew not what. Why was it, she asked herself passionately, that she was unable to speak to this man as to other men? Why could she scarcely meet his clear, straight glance, which seemed always to question her own so wistfully? What was the matter with her and with him that his mere presence near her moved her so strangely? Why was she riding alone with him now in this strange, electrical silence? As the troubled questions came tumbling over one another through the girl’s mind, Cheerio suddenly turned in his saddle and directly sought her gaze. A wonderful, a winning smile, which made Hilda think of the sunshine about them, broke over the man’s face. She was conscious of the terrifying fact that that smile awoke in her breast tumultuous alarms and clamours. She feared it more than a hostile glance. Feared the very friendly and winning quality of it.

Impetuously the girl dug her little spurred heels into her horse’s flanks and rode swiftly ahead.

It was nearly ten o’clock, yet the skies were incredibly bright and in the west above the wide range of mountains, shone the splendour of a late sunset, red, gold, purple, magenta and blue. All of the country seemed tinted by the reflected glow of the night sun. Hilda, riding breathlessly along, had the sense of one in a race, running to escape that which was pursuing her. On and on, neck and neck with the galloping horse beside her, and feeling its rider’s gaze still bent solely upon her.

Presently there was a slackening of the running speed; gradually the galloping turned to the shorter trot. Daisy and Jim Crow, panting from the long race, slowed down to a lope. Some of the fever had run out of Hilda’s blood and she had recovered her composure.

Silence for a long interval, while they rode steadily on into the immense sun glow. Then:

“R-ripping, isn’t it?” said the man, softly.

“Meaning what?” demanded the girl, angry with herself that her voice was tremulous.

Almost they seemed to be riding into the sky itself. Sky and earth had the curious phenomenon of being one.

“Everything,” he replied, with an eloquent motion of his hand. “It’s a r-ripping—land! I’m jolly glad I came.”

“I don’t suppose,” said Hilda, “that you have skies like this in England.”

“Hardly.”

“It’s foggy and dark there, I’ve heard,” said Hilda.

He glanced at her, as if slightly surprised.

“Why no, that hardly describes it, you know.”

He was thoughtful a moment, and then said, with a smile, as if glad to reassure her:

“It’s a dashed fine place, all the same. C-carn’t beat it, you know.”

That brought the girl’s chin up. For some reason, she could not have analyzed, it hurt and offended her to hear him praising the land from which he had come.

“Hm! I wonder why Englishmen who think so darned much of their own old land bother to come to wild outlandish places like Canada.”

If she had expected him to deny that Canada was wild and outlandish she was to be disappointed, for he replied eagerly:

“Oh, by Jove! th-that’s wh-why we like it, you know. It’s—it’s exhilarating—the difference—the change from things over there. One gets in a rut in the old land and travel is our only antidote.”

Hilda had never travelled. She had never been outside the Province of Alberta. Calgary and Banff were the only cities Hilda had ever been in. She was conscious now of a sense of extreme bitterness and pain. Like some young wounded creature who strikes out blindly when hurt, Hilda said:

“Look here, Mr.——er——Whatever your name is, if you Englishmen just come out to Canada out of curiosity and to——”

“But, my dear child, Canada is part of us! We’re all one family. I’m at home here.”

“No, you’re not. You’re a fish out of water.”

“I s-say——”

“And look here, I don’t let anyone call me ‘dear child.’ I won’t be patronized by you or anyone like you. I’m not a child anyway. I’m eighteen and that’s being of age, if you want to know.”

He could not restrain the smile that came despite himself at this childish statement. Hilda’s face darkened, and her eyelids were smarting with the angry tears that, much to her indignation, seemed to be trying to force their way through. She said roughly, in an effort to hide the impending storm:

“Anyway you can’t tell me that there is anything whatsoever in England to compare with—that—for instance.”

Her quirt made an eloquent motion toward the west, along the complete horizon of which the long line of jagged peaks were silhouetted against the gilded skies.

“Righto!” said the man, softly and then after a pause he added almost gently, and as if he were recalling something to memory: “But I doubt if there’s anything rarer than our English country lanes—lawns—fine old places—the streams—but you must see it all some day.”

When he spoke, when he looked like that, with the faraway absent expression in his eyes. Hilda had a passionate sense of rebellion and resentment. For some reason she could not have explained she begrudged him his thought of England. It tormented her to think that the man beside her was homesick. Her quirt flicked above Daisy’s neck. A short swift gallop and back again to the lope of the cow ponies. The ride had whipped the colour into her cheeks and brought back the fire to her eyes. She was ready now with the burning questions that for days she had ached to have answered.

“If England’s such a remarkable place, why do you come to Canada to make a home for this—what was her name, did you say?”

“Her name? Oh, I see—you mean—Nanna.”

He said the name softly, almost tenderly, and Hilda’s breath came and went with the sudden surge of unreasonable fury that swept over her. He answered her lightly, deliberately begging the question.

“Why not? This is the p-p-promised land!”

“Are you making fun of Canada?” she demanded imperiously.

“No—never. I s-said that quite seriously.”

She shot her next question roughly. She was determined to know the exact relationship of this Nanna to the man beside her. Undoubtedly she was the woman of the locket, whose fair, lovely face Hilda was seeing in imagination too often these days for her peace of mind.

“Is she your sister?”

“Oh, no. No relation whatever. At least, no blood relation.”

“I see. I sup-pose you think her very—pretty?”

“Lovely,” said Cheerio. Something had leaped into his eyes—something bright and eager. He leaned toward Hilda with the impulse to confide in her, but the look on the girl’s face repelled him, so that he drew back confounded and puzzled. Hilda set her little white teeth tightly together, put up her nose, and, with a toss of her head, said:

“For goodness sakes, let’s get home. Hi, Daisy! get a wiggle on you, you old poke.”

She was off on the last lap of the journey.

In her room, she faced herself in the wide mirror and revealed a remarkable circumstance so far as she was concerned. Tears, bitter and scorching, were running down her face. Clinching her hands, she said to the tear-stained vision in the mirror:

“It’s just because I hate him so! Oh, how I hate him. I never knew anyone in all the days of my life that I hated so much before and I’d give anything on earth if only I could just hurt him!”

Hurt him she did, for the following evening when he brought her horse, saddled and ready for her, to the front of the ranch house, Hilda, in the swinging couch on the verandah apparently deeply absorbed in a dictionary, looked up coolly, and inquired what the hell he was doing with her horse.

“Wh-why I th-th-thought you would be coming with us as usual,” said the surprised Cheerio.

“No thank you, and I’m quite able to saddle my own horse when I want to go,” said Hilda, and returned to a deep perusal of the dictionary. But the crestfallen and puzzled Cheerio did not see her, as on tiptoe, she stole around the side of the house, to catch a last glimpse of him as he rode out with Sandy beside him. Her cheeks were hot and her eyes humid with undropped tears as over the still evening air her brother’s shrill young voice floated:

“Hilda not coming! Gee! we’re in luck! Now we can go over the cliff!”

Hilda didn’t care just then whether that brother of hers went over the cliff or not. She felt forsaken, bitter, ill-used and extremely unhappy and forlorn. But she had had her last ride in the magical evenings on a dinosaur quest.

CHAPTER VII

“Say, Hilda, guess what I found to-day? I didn’t reckernize it at first until he said it was his. Viper rooted it up right under his window outside the bunkhouse. Well, I found that picture of his girl that he keeps in that locket. It must’ve slipped out, and Viper nearly chewed it up. So I yipped to him to come on out and I give it up to him and I says: ‘Whose her nibs anyway,’ and he says: ‘Someone I used to know,’ and I says: ‘Don’t you know her still?’ and he says: ‘Oh, yes, oh, yes,’ and he was lookin’ just as if he wasn’t hearin’ a word I was saying and he says as if he was talking to himself; ‘She was to have been my wife, you know.’ Just like that. Then he got up and he looked kind of queer, and he went on inside and come on out again with that locket in his hand and he sits down beside me on the steps and smokes without saying a word. So then I said, just to kid him: ‘Say, I’ll give you two of my buffalow skulls for that bit of dinky tin,’ meaning the locket, and he dumps his pipe and gives me the laugh and he says: ‘Nothing doing, old man. The sweetest girl in the world is enshined’—that’s what he said—‘right inside that “dinky bit of tin”!’”

CHAPTER VIII

Sitting in the sunlight on the wide steps of the ranch house, chin cupped in her hands, her glance far off across the mountain tops, her thoughts wandering over the seas that stretched between the Dominion of Canada and the Mother-land, Hilda McPherson came out of her deep reverie to find the object of her thoughts standing before her. He had a book in his hand and with the sunny, engaging almost boyish smile that was characteristic of him he was tendering it to the girl on the steps.

For some days Cheerio’s discourse on mastodons, dinosaurs and the various species of the prehistoric days had been extremely vague and unsatisfactory to his disciple. Matters reached a climax upon this especial Sunday, when he had wandered from the matter of a fossil skeleton recently discovered on the Red Deer River, said to be one hundred and sixty feet long and at least seventy feet tall, with a sudden question that brought a snort of disgust from the intensely-interested Sandy.

“What’s she got to do with the Mezzozoic age?” he exploded.

(Note: Cheerio had digressed from the absorbing matter of the age of the Red Deer dinosaurs, to ask suddenly whether Hilda was likely to be riding with a certain bachelor rancher whose bronco was tied to the front of the ranch house when the reluctant Cheerio and Sandy had ridden away that morning.)

“I s-s-suppose,” stuttered Cheerio, “that your s-s-sister w-w-will probably be riding with her caller at the r-r-ranch.”

Sandy’s reply was neither enlightening nor respectful. He glimpsed his friend with the shrewd unflattering scrutiny of a wise one, and presently:

“Say, you don’t mean to tell me that you’re gettin’ stuck on her too!”

That was a disturbing question, and moreover a revealing one. It plainly disclosed to the upset Cheerio that there were others “stuck on” Hilda. In fact, Sandy left no room for doubt as to that.

“Holy Hens!” went on Hilda’s brother. “Half the guys in this country’s got a case on her! I don’t know what they see in her. Should think you’d have more common sense than to pile along in too.”

“Hilda’s eyes,” said the Englishman softly, “are as b-brown as loamy soil. They’re like the dark earth, warm and rich and full of promise.”

“Oh, my God—frey!” groaned Sandy and rolled clear down the grassy slope on which they had been sitting to the more intelligent and sane company of Viper, a yellow and unlovely cur who was, however, the private and personal property of Sandy. Viper was at that moment “snooping” above a gopher hole. One intelligent eye and ear cocked up warily, signalled with canine telepathy to his master and pal the warning:

“Careful! She’s under there! Don’t let on you and me are above her. I’ll get her for you. You’ll have another tail for your collection. Don’t forget there’s a gymkhana over at the Minnehaha ranch next month and the prize for the most gopher tails is five plunks.”

To this unspoken but perfectly comprehensible message, Sandy replied:

“Betchu we get his tail, Viper! Betchu I take the prize this year! I got seventy-five now. Make it seventy-six, Viper, and I’ll give you eight bones for dinner to-night.”

Cheerio, meanwhile, ruminating painfully upon Sandy’s revelation, and also upon that bronco tied to front of the ranch house, and its good-looking owner who was inside, unable to endure the picture his mind conjured of Hilda riding off with her caller into their own (his and Hilda’s) especial sun glow, jumped in a hurry upon Jim Crow’s back, and with the best of intentions sped back to O Bar O.

It was Sunday afternoon, and such of the ranch hands as were not off on some courting or hunting or fishing or riding expedition, were stretched out on the various cots that lined the long bunkhouse taking their weekly siesta. Cheerio himself was accustomed to spend his Sundays in his cave studio, but in these latter days—since in fact Hilda had ceased to ride with them in the evenings—even the painting had lost its charm for him. He spent his Sundays in the near vicinity of the ranch house, his hopeful eyes pinned upon that wide verandah on to which the girl now so seldom came.

Occasionally, as on this Sunday, Sandy would induce him into short excursions from the ranch, but Cheerio was restless and unsettled now, and far from being the satisfactory companion and oracle upon whom Sandy had depended.

Now as Cheerio paused at the bunkhouse, he turned over in his mind such small treasures as he possessed. He had a most ardent desire to endow Hilda with one or all of his possessions. He was obsessed with a longing to lay his hands upon certain treasures of a great house that should have been his own. His possessions at the ranch were modest enough. His wages had been spent mainly for paint and books. He surveyed the crude, but adequate, book-case he had built himself, and scanned the volumes laid upon the shelves. After all, one could offer no finer gift than a book. He chose carefully, with a thought rather for what might appeal especially to a girl of Hilda’s type than his own preferences.

As he came around the side of the house, he perceived that the bronco was gone. A momentary heartshake over the thought that Hilda might have gone with it, and then a great thumping of that sensitive organ as he saw the girl upon the steps. She was sitting in the sunlight, staring out before her in a day dream. Something in the mute droop of the expressive young mouth and the slight shadow cast by the lashes against her cheek gave Hilda a look of singular sadness and depression and sent her caller impetuously hurrying toward her. He had come, in fact, directly in front of her, before the eyes were lifted and Hilda looked back at him. Slowly the colour swept like the dawn over her young face, as he extended the book, stammering and blushing in his boyish way.

“M-m-m-miss Hilda, I r-r-recommend this f-for b-b-both pleasure and information. It’s p-p-part of one’s education to read Dumas.”

Education! The word was inflammatory. It was an affront to her pride. He was rubbing in the fact of her appalling ignorance. That was her own affair—her own misfortune. Hilda sprang to her feet, up in arms, on the defensive and the offensive. While the astonished Cheerio still extended the book—a silent peace offering—Hilda’s dark head tossed up, in that characteristic motion, while her foot stamped the ground.

“I don’t care for that kind of rot, thank you. My dad’s right. It’s better to be real people in the world rather than fake folk in a book.”

Again the head toss and the blaze of angry wide eyes; then, swift as a fawn, Hilda sped across the verandah and the ranch house door banged hard.

Thus might have ended the Dumas incident, but on the following day, when the men were all out on the range, she who had spurned “The Three Musketeers” slipped out of the ranch house, over to the grove of trees to the east and running behind the shelter of these, so that Chum Lee should not see her as she passed, made her way swiftly to the bunkhouse.

Bunkhouses in a ranching country are not savoury or attractive places as a general rule. This of the O Bar O was “not too bad” as the expression goes in Alberta. It had the virtue at all events of being clean, thanks to the assiduous care of Chum Lee. Moreover, shiftless and dirty fellows found a short job at O Bar O. Hats and caps, hide shirts, buckskin breeks, chaps and coats were all, therefore, neatly hung along the wall on the row of deer horns, while under these were piled on the long shelf the puttees, boots and other gear of the riders.

The bunkhouse was lavishly decorated, the entire walls being covered with pictures cut from magazines or newspapers or from other sources and pasted or tacked upon the wall. Ladies in skin tights of rounded and ample curves, in poses calculated to attract the attention of the opposite sex, ravishing beauties, all more or less with that stage smile in which all of the dental equipment of their owners, alluringly displayed, beamed down above the beds of the riders of O Bar O. Hilda had seen these often before and they had no especial interest for her. Her glance travelled instead to the long table on which was piled the treasured possessions of the men, correspondence boxes, tobacco, pipes, jack-knives, quirts, gloves, letters and photographs of friends and relatives. Nothing on that table would likely belong to him. Nothing suggested Cheerio. Her eye went slowly down the row of beds till it came to rest upon that one pulled out from the wall till the head was thrust directly under the widely opened window, by the side of which stood the crude book-case and stand. She paused only a moment and then swiftly crossed to the Englishman’s bed.

Three of the shelves were filled tightly with books and the bottom one held a writing folio and sketch tablet. This Hilda seized upon, but stopped before opening it, while the colour receded from her cheeks. Within that folio, perhaps, would be found some clue, some letter from the woman he loved. Yes, Hilda faced the fact that Cheerio loved the woman whose pictured face was in the locket, and for whom he had come to Canada to make a home. As she held the folio in her hand, she felt a passionate impulse of shame that fought her natural curiosity, and caused her to put the thing back upon the shelf. No! She had not come to the bunkhouse to spy into a man’s correspondence. It was only that she suffered from an unconquerable hunger merely again to see the other woman’s face; to study it, to compare it with her own—Oh! to destroy it! But no, no—she would not stoop so low as to look at something which he did not wish her to see.

The book was a different matter. He had offered it to her. It was therefore really her own. Thus argued Hilda within herself. A quick search along the shelves and she had picked out the volume she sought. It was marked number one in the row of books by Alexandre Dumas. Thrusting it under her cape, Hilda hurried to the door, and once again like a scared child who has been stealing apples, she slipped behind the sheltering bushes, came from behind them into the open and sped across the yard to the house.

All of that morning, Hilda McPherson was dead to the world. Lying on the great fragrant heap in the hay loft, she lost herself in the meshes of one of the most entrancing romances that has ever been penned by the hand of man. She emerged from her retreat at the dinner hour, brought back to earth by the arrival of the “hands” in the barn below. It was haying time and the men came in from the fields for their noon meal. Certain of the horses were changed and relieved and brought to the stables for especial feeding. Hiding her precious book under a pile of hay in a corner of the loft, Hilda descended, and still under the spell of the book she had been reading all morning, made her way to the house.

It so happened, that in her absorption, she had paid little attention to Sandy’s dog, who leaped up at her as she passed, capered around her, sought to lick her hands and otherwise ingratiate himself. Absently Hilda ordered him down.

“That will do, Viper! Now cut it out! Get away! Get away! Shoooo-o-o! Bad dog! Down!”

Duly admonished, spirits but slightly dampened, Viper repaired to the barn, where for a spell, with his tongue hanging out and panting from recent long runs across the land after his master on horse, he endeavoured to attract the attention of such hands as were still in the barn by an occasional yelp and a moan of protest when at last the doors were shut upon him.

For a little while Viper rested in one of the stalls; then being young and of an active disposition he arose and stretched himself and looked about him for diversion. In the natural course of events, having tired of chasing the various hens from the stalls and vainly snapping at persistent fleas, he sniffed along the trail over which his young mistress (he regarded her as such) had passed. In due time, therefore, Viper arrived in the loft. Also in the natural course of events, he nosed around and dug under the hay, disclosing the hidden book. He carried this treasure below in his mouth, and was having quite a jolly time with it, growling and barking and shaking it and alternatively letting it go and then pouncing upon it, when he was interrupted by a well-known and much-beloved and sometimes feared whistle. Joyously, proudly, triumphantly Viper brought his find to his master, and with the pride of a new mother, laid it at Sandy’s feet. Wagging his tail furiously and emitting short, sharp yelps which spoke as eloquently as mere words the dog’s demand for well-earned praise, he was rewarded from various pockets of Sandy’s overalls. The prizes consisted of bones and other edibles “swiped” from the kitchen through which Sandy had passed like a streak en route to join his dog in the barn.