Part 6 (2/2)

”Why not?” she asked herself. ”I've got two resources. If I can't get office work I can teach. I can do _anything_ if I have to. And it's far enough away, in all conscience--all of twenty-five hundred miles.”

Unaccountably, since Kitty Brooks' visit, she found herself itching to turn her back on Granville and its unpleasant a.s.sociations. She did not attempt to a.n.a.lyze the feeling. Strange lands, and most of all the West, held alluring promise. She sat in her rocker, and could not help but dream of places where people were a little broader gauge, a little less p.r.o.ne to narrow, conventional judgments. Other people had done as she proposed doing--cut loose from their established environment, and made a fresh start in countries where none knew or cared whence they came or who they were. Why not she? One thing was certain: Granville, for all she had been born there, and grown to womanhood there, was now no place for her. The very people who knew her best would make her suffer most.

She spent that evening going thoroughly over the papers and writing letters to various school boards, taking a chance at one or two she found in the Manitoba paper, but centering her hopes on the country west of the Rockies. Her letters finished, she took stock of her resources--verified them, rather, for she had not so much money that she did not know almost where she stood. Her savings in the bank amounted to three hundred odd dollars, and cash in hand brought the sum to a total of three hundred and sixty-five. At any rate, she had sufficient to insure her living for quite a long time. And she went to bed feeling better than she had felt for two weeks.

Kitty Brooks came again the next afternoon, and, being a young woman of wide experience and good sense, made no further attempt to influence Hazel one way or the other.

”I hate to see you go, though,” she remarked truthfully. ”But you'll like the West--if it happens that you go there. You'll like it better than the East; there's a different sort of spirit among the people.

I've traveled over some of it, and if Jimmie's business permitted we'd both like to live there. And--getting down to strictly practical things--a girl can make a much better living there. Wages are high.

And--who knows?--you might capture a cattle king.”

Hazel shrugged her shoulders, and Mrs. Kitty forbore teasing. After that they gossiped and compared notes covering the two years since they had met until it was time for Kitty to go home.

Very shortly thereafter--almost, it seemed, by return mail--Hazel got replies to her letters of inquiry. The fact that each and every one seemed bent on securing her services astonished her.

”Schoolma'ams must certainly be scarce out there,” she told herself.

”This is an embarra.s.sment of riches. I'm going somewhere, but which place shall it be?”

But the reply from Cariboo Meadows, B. C., the first place she had thought of, decided her. The member of the school board who replied held forth the natural beauty of the country as much as he did the advantages of the position. The thing that perhaps made the strongest appeal to Hazel was a little kodak print inclosed in the letter, showing the schoolhouse.

The building itself was primitive enough, of logs, with a pole-and-sod roof. But it was the huge background, the timbered mountains rising to snow-clad heights against a cloudless sky, that attracted her. She had never seen a greater height of land than the rolling hills of Ontario.

Here was a frontier, big and new and raw, holding out to her as she stared at the print a promise--of what? She did not know. Adventure?

If she desired adventure, it was purely a subconscious desire. But she had lived in a rut a long time without realizing it more than vaguely, and there was something in her nature that responded instantly when she contemplated journeying alone into a far country. She found herself hungering for change, for a measure of freedom from petty restraints, for elbow-room in the wide s.p.a.ces, where one's neighbor might be ten or forty miles away. She knew nothing whatever of such a life, but she could feel a certain envy of those who led it.

She sat for a long time looking at the picture, thinking. Here was the concrete, visible presentment of something that drew her strongly. She found an atlas, and looked up Cariboo Meadows on the map. It was not to be found, and Hazel judged it to be a purely local name. But the letter told her that she would have to stage it a hundred and sixty-five miles north from Ashcroft, B. C., where the writer would meet her and drive her to the Meadows. She located the stage-line terminal on the map, and ran her forefinger over the route. Mountain and lake and stream lined and dotted and criss-crossed the province from end to end of its seven-hundred-mile length. Back of where Cariboo Meadows should be three or four mining camps snuggled high in the mountains.

”What a country!” she whispered. ”It's wild; really, truly wild; and everything I've ever seen has been tamed and smoothed down, and made eminently respectable and conventional long ago. That's the place.

That's where I'm going, and I'm going it blind. I'm not going to tell any one--not even Kitty--until, like a bear, I've gone over the mountain to see what I can see.”

Within an hour of that Miss Hazel Weir had written to accept the terms offered by the Cariboo Meadow school district, and was busily packing her trunk.

CHAPTER VI

CARIBOO MEADOWS

A tall man, sunburned, slow-speaking, met Hazel at Soda Creek, the end of her stage journey, introducing himself as Jim Briggs.

”Pretty tiresome trip, ain't it?” he observed. ”You'll have a chance to rest decent to-night, and I got a team uh bays that'll yank yuh to the Meadows in four hours 'n' a half. My wife'll be plumb tickled to have yuh. They ain't much more'n half a dozen white women in ten miles uh the Meadows. We keep a boardin'-house. Hope you'll like the country.”

That was a lengthy speech for Jim Briggs, as Hazel discovered when she rolled out of Soda Creek behind the ”team uh bays.” His conversation was decidedly monosyllabic. But he could drive, if he was no talker, and his team could travel. The road, albeit rough in spots, a mere track through timber and little gems of open where the yellowing gra.s.s waved knee-high, and over hills which sloped to deep canons lined with pine and spruce, seemed short enough. And so by eleven o'clock Hazel found herself at Cariboo Meadows.

”Schoolhouse's over yonder.” Briggs pointed out the place--an unnecessary guidance, for Hazel had already marked the building set off by itself and fortified with a tall flagpole. ”And here's where we live. Kinda out uh the world, but blame good place to live.”

Hazel did like the place. Her first impression was thankfulness that her lot had been cast in such a spot. But it was largely because of the surroundings, essentially primitive, the clean air, guiltless of smoke taint, the aromatic odors from the forest that ranged for unending miles on every hand. For the first time in her life, she was beyond hearing of the clang of street cars, the roar of traffic, the dirt and smells of a city. It seemed good. She had no regrets, no longing to be back. There was a pain sometimes, when in spite of herself she would fall to thinking of Jack Barrow. But that she looked upon as a closed chapter. He had hurt her where a woman can be most deeply wounded--in her pride and her affections--and the hurt was dulled by the smoldering resentment that thinking of him always fanned to a flame. Miss Hazel Weir was neither meek nor mild, even if her environment had bred in her a repression that had become second nature.

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