CHAPTER XV

The New Resident

BLAKESON’S FERRY was a main-line depot. A small branch from here served a number of rural places, of which one was Nine Springs.

Blakeson’s had quite a historic past, if legendary lore might be believed. It was here, some fifty years ago, that an Englishman named Blakeson came to settle with a large family, consisting of nine sons and four daughters. The Salish Indians, resenting this invasion of their territory, immediately sought to wipe out the intruders, and several encounters followed, in each of which the intrepid settlers came off victorious, for every one of the family, down to the youngest child, was expert in the use of firearms.

Finally, feeling that the finger of fate was in it, the Indians desisted from aggressive warfare; then Blakeson, who was a man of business, approached them with offers of work, for which wages should be paid. But the lordly red man has a soul above toil, and the Salish tribe to a man would have turned their backs on the offer, but for the sight of the “wages,” which Blakeson proposed to pay in kind.

These took the form of gay red blankets, bright-hued cottons, gleaming knives, and other similar temptations to industry.

Even then the red man might have stood aside, and gone without these treasures which had labour for their price. But there were the red women to be considered; and the Salish squaws, driven to toil from babyhood, decided _en masse_ that they might as well work for wages, when such were to be had, as work for no reward at all. So Blakeson got his labourers, who, although they were only women, proved quite as satisfactory as their men might have done, if work had not been an indignity which no red man would face.

But that was all over and past long ago, and there was only the name of Squawlands, by which the wide tract of cleared ground by the river was known, to remind one of the old story now.

Gertrude Lorimer thought of it, as she stood among a throng of other passengers waiting for the main-line cars to come along and stop. All the stories of the trials and tribulations of early settlers appealed to her by force of contrast between the past and the present. Present-day immigrants had only the forces of nature to repel and overcome, while if a solitary Indian did happen to appear on the scene, he was regarded very much as a curiosity and an object of charity, but certainly with no trepidation.

Then her attention was disagreeably recalled to the present by the jostling of a big fat man who was dressed like a miner, but who, when he apologized for his rudeness, spoke as a gentleman might have done.

Gertrude might have thought no more about the man and the incident but for the familiar and unpleasant leer which accompanied the courteously worded apology. Drawing herself up with a haughty movement, she turned away, just as a young man, dressed in similar fashion, exclaimed angrily, as he dragged at the fat man’s arm—

“Haven’t you the sense to know a lady when you see one?”

The young man’s voice had the same cultured intonation, and Gertrude, noticing it, supposed they must be immigrants fallen on hard times, and when she was sufficiently remote from the man who had jostled her, she turned to have another look at them. They had been joined now by an old man with bowed shoulders and a querulous, drawling voice, who spoke in rough tones, and was plainly just what he looked—an illiterate countryman; and the only noticeable thing about him was that the other two seemed to be in his command, and had to do his bidding.

The train came in at this moment, and, entering a car, she settled herself just behind a young man who had a five-years-old child on his knee.

Gertrude, having parted so recently from the little brood at Lorimer’s Clearing, was just in the mood for making friends with any child who crossed her path, and before ten minutes had gone by, had the little fellow in her arms, and was taking off the keenest edge of her home-sickness by amusing him.

Then the conductor passed up the car with an abrupt inquiry if there were a doctor on board.

“I am a doctor; what is wanted?” said the young man whose child Gertrude held.

“An old man has got a hurt and is bleeding heavily; wants binding up, or he’ll peg out,” answered the conductor, laconically, and then added, as if by an afterthought, “End car but one.”

“I’ll come,” said the young man, springing up; then, suddenly remembering the child, hesitated, looking at Gertrude.

“I will take care of the boy until you come back,” she said, answering the unspoken request, and smiling into the stranger’s face.

“Thank you,” he replied briefly; then laid his hand on the child’s shoulder, “Be a good boy, Sonny,” he said, and, lifting his hat to Gertrude, passed out of the car in the wake of the conductor.

“I always am a good boy,” explained the child, looking up into Gertrude’s face with innocent, candid eyes, “except when I am bad.”

She laughed outright. “That is what most of us are, Sonny, good except when we are bad, or bad except when we are good.”

“Are you bad sometimes?” he demanded, with a wondering look.

“Very often, I’m afraid; but I get good again as soon as I can, because being bad is horrid.” And she shrugged her shoulders, as if to emphasize the discomfort of the condition.

“Fader isn’t ever bad,” the boy remarked, with a pitying look at Gertrude as if he were very sorry for her.

“That is very nice,” she answered. Then she immediately absorbed him in a game of cat’s-cradle, being fearful lest he should begin to cry if allowed time to think about his father’s perfections just now.

But Sonny was laughing merrily at his success in cat’s-cradle when a little later his father re-entered the car.

“Look, fader, Sonny can do it most beautiful!” he shouted gleefully, insisting on going through the whole performance again in order that his father might witness his cleverness.

“It was kind of you to look after the laddie,” the young man said to Gertrude. “A doctor is never quite like other men, you see, and he must go where he is wanted regardless of everything, so Sonny has to be left occasionally.”

“I hope it was not a serious case,” she said, more from politeness than from any special interest in the man who had been hurt.

“No; only a flesh cut, although rather a deep one. The old man, evidently a countryman and a bit of a tartar, boarded the cars with two others at Blakeson’s Ferry—that was where you came on too, I believe. He commenced finding fault with his companions, and kept it up until one of them struck at him with a sharp-edged tin mug, and gave him a nasty cut over the eye.”

“I remember seeing that group at Blakeson’s, and the old man was quarrelling then,” Gertrude replied.

“A regular truculent old fellow, I should say, and quite equal to hitting back when he gets the chance. However, he gave me a half-dollar fee for my trouble, so I must not complain of my first paying patient in this part of the world,” the young man said, with a smile.

“Have you come to settle?” Gertrude asked, with the quick sympathy and interest which the native Canadian always feels for a new-comer.

“Yes; I’m going up into a mining district, and have been advised to settle at Bratley, which is on a branch line from Lytton, I believe. Do you know the place?”

He leaned forward as he put the question, and Gertrude was struck by the likeness between him and his child.

“I am going there,” she replied. “But I’m afraid you won’t find much work at Bratley; it is such a small place, only about ten or twelve houses round the depot, and the nearest mines are five miles away, and nearer to Roseneath than Bratley.”

“The question is, whether there is another doctor in Bratley or near it?” he said, setting his square jaw in lines of sterner determination.

“I have never heard of there being one, either at Camp’s Gulch or Roseneath,” Gertrude replied.

“Very well; I shall at least have what they call a sporting chance, then,” he said, his stern face relaxing into a smile, “while those of you who are my friends and well-wishers can occasionally fall ill out of pure neighbourly kindness, so that I can keep my hand in at the gentle art of healing.”

Gertrude laughed; then cradled the child, who had fallen asleep, still closer in her arms.

“I don’t expect there will be any necessity for that. As soon as it is known through the neighbourhood that a doctor is in residence, all sorts of needs will be cropping up, and instead of your neighbours falling ill in order to give you employment, it is much more likely that they will have to turn to and nurse the patients who are brought from a distance and dumped upon your hands to repair.”

“Ah, that is a good idea. I hadn’t thought of bringing the mountain to Mohammed in that fashion,” he said quickly. “Of course, if there is no doctor in the neighbourhood there would be no hospital either, and one would be as necessary as the other in a wild district like this.”

“Quite as necessary,” she answered. “They have terrible accidents at the mines sometimes, and there is nowhere for the poor fellows to be taken care of, so they have to lie in their miserable shelters, which are not worth the name of huts, until they get better, or die.”

“Ah, it would be uphill work, I dare say; but plainly there is room for me here, and that is the main thing I wanted to know,” he said, drawing a deep breath.

“There is always room in Canada, I think, for everyone,” she answered, with a touch of land-pride in her tone.

“There ought to be, for it is big enough,” he said. Then he was silent for a long time, looking out of the window with an absorbed gaze, which, however, saw nothing of the scenery through which they were passing. Presently he roused himself with a start, and, turning towards her again, said, in a courteous manner, “My name is Russell—Charles Russell; would you mind telling me yours?”

“I am Gertrude Lorimer,” she said simply; adding, with a blush, “but my home is not at Bratley, although I live there when I am at work. I am the telegraph operator at the depot.”

He bowed, thanked her, and would have taken Sonny into his own arms then; but the child sleepily protested, clinging fast to his comfortable resting-place and refusing to be moved.

“Please let him stay. I have brothers of my own as young as Sonny, and it has been a great wrench to leave them,” she said, looking up at him; but quickly dropping her gaze again, because her eyes were swimming with tears.

He made no further attempt to take the child then, understanding as if by instinct that there was some pain behind of which she could not speak.

In reality, it was not the parting with Teddy and the baby which had tried her most, nor even the straining clasp of Flossie’s thin arms about her neck, but the sad patience on her father’s face, and the unsteadiness in his voice when he had said to her—

“I wish you could have stayed on at home for a while, Gertrude; it is lonely having you go away.”

“Let me stay, father,” she had cried. “I will wire from Nine Springs to headquarters that I can’t come back.”

“No, no, child; it would never do—your mother wouldn’t like it,” he answered; and nothing that she could say would move him. Only when she had boarded the cars, and been carried from his sight, the weary patience of his look remained in her memory to haunt her.

Her father was a broken man, she knew; the shock of the double bereavement and his severe sickness had undermined a constitution already worn down by hard work and rough living. If only she could have stayed at home to cheer him with her presence how thankful she would have been! But Mrs. Lorimer had willed it otherwise, and in that house it was the mother who decided everything.

There was a wait at Lytton when they changed cars again; and afterwards, on the run to Bratley, Gertrude was wondering, with a little trepidation, how Nell would meet and greet her.

Nell was a dear good girl, of course; hard-working, devoted, and self-sacrificing to a most extraordinary degree. But she was not refined or elegant in her manners, and her fearful old clothes added to her awkwardness. Suppose she should rush out from the office with a loud impulsive greeting when the cars stopped, how Dr. Russell would stare and wonder!

Gertrude shivered at the mere thought of such a thing; then reviewed Nell by the mental pictures taken during the time she was at Lorimer’s Clearing, doing two people’s work in a house of invalids. Nell’s hair had always been rough, her face not invariably clean, while her clothes! But Gertrude shrugged her shoulders and tried not to think of it at all, only the worst of it was, the more she tried the less was she able to banish the subject from her mind, until at length it became such absolute torture that beads of perspiration came out on her brow.

Dr. Russell, looking at her now and then with a grave, intent gaze, wondered at her secret agitation; but it is probable that he would have wondered still more if he had known its cause, for Gertrude did not look like a girl who would be influenced by a littleness of this description; but then, every heart has its own feelings, which no outsider can even guess at.

The cars slowed down at Bratley, and, holding Sonny in her arms, Gertrude rose from her seat and went out on to the rear platform. Dr. Russell was close behind her, laden with bags and bundles.

One or two other passengers only were alighting here, although the train was packed with miners going on to Roseneath, where a mining boom was on just now.

Sam Peters touched his cap in recognition, gave her a melancholy smile, and immediately bestowed his attention on her trunk, as if that, after all, were the only thing in life worth living for.

Gertrude was a little surprised, even a trifle resentful in her thoughts, for surely Nell might have come out of the office to greet her, and, quite forgetting her agitation on the subject a few minutes before, she was disposed to regard the want of welcome as a grievance.

Suddenly a girl in a well-cut dark grey skirt, and a pretty blouse with a fluttering red ribbon, came darting out from the office, and seized upon Gertrude with a sort of whirlwind of greeting.

“Oh, my dear, how lovely to see you again! Who is this? At the first glance I thought you had brought Teddy with you, and I was dreadfully disappointed when the second look showed him to be a stranger.”

Was this well-dressed, eager-faced girl really Nell? Gertrude gave a little gasp of amazement as she looked at her; then straightway became heartily ashamed of those grudging thoughts which had tormented her all the way from Lytton to Bratley.

“Dear Nell, how you have altered and improved!” she exclaimed. “No, it isn’t Teddy, but a deputy little brother, borrowed to ward off home-sickness. Is he not a darling? and his name is Sonny Russell.”

Nell wanted to make friends with the child too, but Sonny, in an unwonted fit of shyness, put his face down on Gertrude’s shoulder and was not to be beguiled from there.

At this moment the train began to move on again, the pace quickening with each car that slid past.

“Why, there’s Nell!” exclaimed a fretful, high-pitched voice.

Nell turned sharply at the sound of her name in a voice she remembered full well, but there was no one to be seen, and the cars were speeding on to Roseneath.