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.
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, hotheaded 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 Tibet, 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 lifelike 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
