Jasper County Democrat, Volume 22, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 April 1919 — North of Fifty-Three [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

North of Fifty-Three

by Bertrand W. Sinclair

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SYNOPSIS. CHAPTER I—The story opens In the town of Grenville Ontario, where Miss gazel Weir la employed as a stenographer the office of Harrington and Bush. She is engaged to Jack Barrow. a young real estate agent, and the wedding day Is set. While walking with him one Sunday they meet Mr. Bush, Hasel's employer, who for the first time seems to notice her at* tractlveneas. Shortly afterward, at his request. she becomes bls private stenographer. After three months Mr. Bush proposes marriage, which Hasel declines, and after a stormy scene In the office Hasel leaves her employment, Mr. Bush warning her her would make her sorry for refusing him. CHAPTER IT—Hush makes an effort, by a gift of flowers, to compromise Hasel In 'the minds of her friends. She returns them. The next day Bush Is thrown from his horse and fatally hurt. He sends for Hasel, who refuses to see him before he dlea Three days afterward It Is announced that he left a legacy of $6,000 to Hasel, “In reparation for any wrong I may have done her." Hasel recognises at once what construction will be put upon the words. Bush had his revenge. CHAPTER lll—Jack Barraw. In a fit of jealous rage, demands from Hasel an explanation of Bush's action. Hasel's pride la hurt, and she refuses. The engagement is broken and Hasel determines to leave Granville. She sees an advertisement for a school teacher at Cariboo Meadows. British Columbia, and secures the situation. ' CHAPTER IV—Cariboo Meadows Is in a wild-part of British Columbia and Hasel. shortly after her arrival, loses her way while walking in the woods. She wanders until night, when, attracted by the light of a campfire, she turns to it. hoping to find somebody who will guide her home. At the fire she recognises a character known to Cariboo Meadows as "Roaring Bill Wagstaff,” who had seen her at her boarding house there. He promises to take her home in the morning, but she is compelled to spend the night In the woods. CHAPTER V-r-They start next day. Hazel supposes, for Cariboo Meadows, but Wagstaff Anally admits he Is taking her to his cabin In the mountains. He is respectful and considerate and Hazel, though protesting indignantly. Is helpless and has to accompany him. 1 CHAPTER Vl—At the cabin Wagstaff provides Hazel with clothing which had been left by tourists. There they pass the winter. Wagstaff tells her he loves her, but in her indignation at her "abduction" sift refuses to listen to him. CHAPTER Vll—With the coming of spring Hazel Insists that Wagstaff take ner out of the mountains. He endeavors to persuade her to marry him and stay, but on her persistent refusal, he accompanies her to Bella Cools, from where she can proceed to Vancouver. CHAPTER VriT—On parting. Wagstaff gives Hazel a package which she discovers later contains $1,200 and a map which will anable her to find her way to the cabin If she desires to go back. At Vancouver Hazel plans to return to Granville, but on the train realizes that she loves Wagstaff, and decides to go to him. She leaves the train at the first stop. CHAPTER IX—With the aid of Bill’s map she finds her way back, and the pair travel to a Hudson Bay poet and are married After some months they decide to go farther into the mountains to a spot where Bill Is confident there Is gold. CHAPTER X—After an arduous trip, which severely tries Hazel’s strength, they arrive at their destination and settle down for the long: winter.

CHAPTER XI. Four Wall* and a Roof. Brought to it by a kindlier road. Hazel would have found that nook in the Klappan range a pleasant enough place. She could not deny its beauty. But she was far too trail to appreciate the grandeur of the Klappan range. She desired nothing so much as rest ana comrort, and the solemn mountains were neither restful nor Soothln& They stood too grim and 'aloof lira lonely land. There was so much to be done, work of the hands; a cabin to build, and a stable; hay to be cut and stacked so that their horses might live through the long winter —which already heralded his approach with sharp, stinging frosts at night, and flurries of snow along the higher ridges. Bill staked the tent beside the spring, fashioned a rude fork out of a pronged willow, and fitted a handle f'to the scythe he had brought for the .purpose. From dawn to dark he swung 'th© keen blade in the heavy grass

which carpeted the bottom. Behind him Hazel piled it in little mounds with a fork. She insisted on this, though it blistered her hands and brought furious pains to her back. If her man must strain every nerve she would lighten the burden with what strength she had. And with two pair of hands to the task, the piles of hay gathered thick on the meadow. When Bill judged that the supply reached twenty tons, he built a rude sled with a rack on it, and hauled In the hay with a saddle horse. _ “Amen I” saldJßill, when he had emptied the rack for the last time, and the hey rose in a neat etnek «nw.

another load off my mind. 1 can build a cabin and a stable in six feet of snow if I have to, but there would have been a slim chance of haying once a storm hit us. We wouldn’t go hungry—there’s moose enough to feed an army ranging in that low ground to the south.” “There’s everything that one needs, almost, in the wilderness, isn’t there?” Hazel observed reflectively. “But still the law of life is awfully harsh, don’t you think, Bill. Isolation is a terrible thing when it is so absolutely complete. Suppose something went wrong? There’s no help, and no mercy—absolutely none. Nature, when you get close to her, is so inexorable.” Bill eyed her a second. Then he put his arms around her, and patted her hair tenderly. “Is it getting on your nerves already, little person?” he asked. “Nothing’s going to go wrong. I’ve been in wild country too often to make mistakes or get careless. Life isn’t a bit harsher here than In the human ant heaps. What does the old, settled country do to you when you have neither money nor job? It treats you worse than the worst the North can do; for, lacking the price, it denies you access to the abundance that mocks you in every shop window, and bars you out of the houses that line the streets. Here, everything needful is yours for the taking. No, little person, I don’t think the law of life is nearly so harsh here as it is where the mob struggles for its daily bread. It’s more open and aboveboard here; more up to the Individual. But it’s lonely sometimes. I guess that’s what ails you.” “Oh, pouf!” she denied. “I’m not lonely, so long as I’ve got you. But sometimes I think of something happening to you—sickness and accidents, and all that.” “Forget it I” Bill exhorted. “That’s the worst of living in this big, still country—it makes one introspective, and so confoundedly conscious of what puny atoms we human beings are, after all. But there’s less chance of sickness here than any place. Wait till I get that cabin built, with a big fireplace at one end. We’H be more comfortable, and things will look a little rosier. This thing of everlasting hurry and hard work gets on everybody’s nerves.” The best of the afternoon was still unspent when the haystacking terminated, and Bill declared a holiday. When the fire had sr ’< to dull embers, and the stars were peeping shyly in the open flap of their tent, she whispered In his ear: “You mußtn’t»think I’m complaining or lonesome or anything, Billy-boy, when I make remarks like I did today. I love you a heap, and I’d be happy anywhere with you. And I’m really and truly at home in the wilderness. Only—only sometimes I have a funny feeling; as if I were afraid. I look up at these big mountains, and they seem to be scowling —as if we were trespassers or something.” “I know.’’ Bill drew her close to him. “But that’s just mood. I’ve felt that same sensation up here —a foolish, Indefinable foreboding. All the out-of-the-way Places of the earth produce that effect, if one Is at all Imaginative. It’s the bigness of everything, and the eternal stillness. It would be hard on the nerves to live here always. But We’re on'.y after a stake —then all the pleasant places of the earth are open to us; with that little old log house up by Pine river for a refuge whenever we get tired of the world at large. Cuddle up and go to sleep. You’re a dead-game sport, or you’d have hollered long ago.” And, next day, to Hazel, sitting by watching him swing the heavy, doublebitted ax on the foundation logs of th'elr winter home, it all seemed foolish, that heaviness of heart which sometime! assailed her. She was perfectly happy. They had plenty of food. In a few brief months Bill would wrest a sack of gold from the treasure house of the North, and they would journey home by easy stages. Why should she brood? It was sheer folly—a mere ebb of spirit. Fortune favored them to the extent of letting the October storms remain In abeyance until Bill finished his cabin, with a cavernous fireplace of rough stone at one end. Followed then the erection of a stable to shelter the horses. Midway of its construction a cloud bank blew out of the northeast, and a foot of snow fell. Then it cleared to brilliant days of frost. Bill finished bls stable. At night he tied the horses therein. By day they were turned loose to rustle their fodder from under the crisp snow. It was necessary to husband the stock of hay, for spring might be late. After that they went hunting. The third. day Bill shot two moose in an open glade ten miles afield. It took them two more days to haul in the frozen meat on a sled. He also laid in a stock-of frozen trout by the simple expedient of locating a large pool, and netting the speckled denizens thereof through a hole in the ice. So their larder was amply supplied. And, as the cold rigidly tightened its grip, and succeeding snows deepened the white blanket till snowshoes became imperative, Bill began tp string out a line of trans.

December winged by, the days succeeding each other like glittering panels on a black ground of long, drear nights. Christmas came. They mustered up something of the holiday spirit, dining gayly off a roast of caribou, For the occasion Hazel had saved the last half dozen potatoes. With the material at her command she evolved a Christmas pudding, serving it with brandy sauce. And after satisfying appetites bred of a morning tilt with Jack Frost along Bill’s trap line, they spent a pleasant hour picturing their next Christmas. There would be holly and bright lights and music—the festival spirit freed of all restraint A day or two after the first of the year Roaring Bill set out to go over one of the uttermost trap lines. Five minutes after closing the door he was back. “Easy with that fire, little person,” he cautioned. “She’s blowing out of the northwest again. The sparks are sailing pretty high. Keep your eye on It, Hazel.” “All right, Blllum,” she replied. *TU be careful.” Not more than fifty yards separated the house and stable. At the stable end stood the stack of hay, a low hummock above the surrounding drift. Except for the place where Bill daily removed the supply for his horses there was not much foothold for a spark, since a thin coat of snow overlaid the greater part of the top. But there was that chance of catastrophe. The chimney of their fireplace yawned wide to the sky, vomiting sparks and ash like a miniature volcano when the fire was roughly stirred, or an extra heavy supply of dry wood laid on. When the wind whistled out of the northwest the line of flight was fair over the stack. It behooved them to watch wind and fire. Hazel washed up her breakfast dishes, and set the cabin in order according to her housewifely instincts. Then she curled up in the chair which Bill had painstakingly constructed for her especial comfort with only ax and knife for tools. She was working on

a pair of moccasins after an Indian pattern, and she grew wholly absorbed in the task, drawing stitch after stitch of sinew strongly and neatly into place. When at length the soreness) of her fingers warned her that she had been at work a k»ng time, she looked at her watch. “Goodness me I Bill’s due home any time, and I haven’t a thing ready to eat,” she exclaimed. “And here’s my fire nearly out.” She piled on wood, and stirring the coals under it, fanned them with her husband’s old felt hat, forgetful of sparks or aught but that she should be cooking against his hungry arrival. Outside, the wind blew lustily, driving the loose snow across the open in long, wavering sibbons. But she had forgotten that it was in the dangerous quarter, and she did not recall that important fact even when she sat down again to watch her moose steaks broil on the glowing coals raked apart from the leaping blaze. The flames licked into the throat of the chimney with the purr of a giant cat. No sixth sense warned her of impending calamity. It burst upon her with startling abruptness only when she opened the door to throw out some scraps of discarded meat, for the blaze of the burning stack shot thirty feet in the air, and the smoke rolled across the meadow in a sooty manner. Bareheaded, in a thin pair of moccasins, without coat or mittens to fend her from the lance-toothed frost, Hazel ran to the stable. She could get the horses out, perhaps, before the log walls became their crematory But Bill, coming in from his traps, reached the stable first, and there was nothing for her to do but stand and watch with a sickening self-reproach. He untied and clubbed the reluctant horses outside. Already the stable end against the hay was shooting up tongues of flame. As the blaze lapped sjviftly over the roof and ate into the walls, the horses struggled through the deep drift, lunging desperately to gain a few yards, then turned to stand with ears pricked up at the strange sight, shivering in the bitter northwest wind that assailed their bare, unprotected bodies. Bill himself drew back from the fire and stared at it fixedly. He lence until Hazel timidly put her hand on his arm. “You watched that fire all right, didn’t you?” he said then. “Bill, Bill!” she cried. But he merely shrugged his shoulders, and kept his gaze fixed on’ the burning stable. To Hazel, shivering with the cold, even close as she was to the intense heat, it seemed an incredibly short time till a glowing mound below the snow level Was all that remained; a black-edged pit that belched smoke and sparks. That and five horses humped tall to the dyivimr wind, stol-

Idly enduring. She shuddered with something besides the cold. And then Bill spoke absently, hie eyes still on the smoldering heap. “Five feet of caked snow on top of every blade of grass,” she heard him mutter. “They can’t browse on. trees, like deer.” He had stuck his rifle butt first In the snow. He walked over to It; Hasel followed. When he stood, with the rifle slung In the crook of his arm, she tried again to break through this silent aloofness which cut her more deeply than any harshness of speech could have done. "Bill, Fm so sorry!” she pleaded. “It’s terrible, I know. What can we dor “Do? Huh!" he snorted. “If I ever have to die before my time, I hope it will be with a full belly and my head in the air—and mercifully swift." Even then she hud no clear Idea of his intention. She looked up at him pleadingly, but he was staring at the horses, his teeth biting nervously at bls under lip. Suddenly he blinked, and she saw his eyes moisten. In the same Instant he threw up his rifle. At the thin, vicious crack of It, Silk collapsed. She understood then. With her hand pressed hard over her mouth to keep back the hysterical scream that threatened, she fled to the house. Behind her the rifle spat forth Its staccato message of death. For a few seconds the mountains flung whlpllke echoes back and forth in a volley. Then the sibilant voice of the wind alone broke the stillness. Numbed with the cold, terrifled at the elemental ruthlessness of It all, she threw herself on the bed, denied even the relief of tears. Dry-eyed and heavyhearted, she waited for her husband’s coming, and dreaded it —for the first time she had seen her Bill look on her with cold, critical anger. For an interminable time she lay listening for the click of the latch, every 1 nerve strung tight. He came at last, and the thump of his rifle as he stood It against the wall had no more than sounded before he was bending over her. He sat down on the edge of the bed, and putting his arm across her shoulders, turned her gently so that she faced him. “Never mind, little person,” he whimpered. “It’s done and over. I'm sorry I slashed at you the way I did. That’s a fool man’s way—ls he’s hurt and sore he always has to Jump on somebody else.” “D-don’t, Bill!” she cried forlornly. “I know it’s my fault. I let the Are almost go out, and then built it up big without thinking. And I know being sorry doesn’t make any difference. But please—l don’t want to be miserable over it. Hl never be careless again.r “All right; I won’t talk about It, hon,” he said. “I don’t think you will ever be careless about such things again. The North won’t let us get away with it. The wilderness Is bigger than we are, and it’s merciless if we make mistakes." “I see that.” She shuddered involuntarily. “It’s a grim country. It frightens me.” “Don’t let It," he said tenderly. “So long as we have our health and strength we can win out, and be stronger for the experience.!? “How can you prospect in the spring without horses to pack the outfit?” she asked, after a little. "How can we get out of litre with all the stuff we’ll have?” “We’ll manage it,’’ he assured lightly. “We’ll get out with our furs and gold, all right, and we won’t go hungry on the way, even if we have no pack train. Leave it to me.” (TO BE CONTINUED.)

Swung the Keen Blade In the Heavy Grass.

She Was Working on a Pair of Moccasins, After an Indian Pattern.