Part 6 (1/2)
Jake threw a querying stress on the word _sisters_, but it was against all nature to be offended at him. Had we resented his remark he would have laughed our seriousness out of court. But we decided to see some of the adjoining sections.
Sixteen appealed to Jack. We could have taken the west half, and so, working together, we would have had a mile furrow. The gully also touched sixteen, and would have given us the same advantages as Jake claimed for the sections he had recommended. However, we found him very fixed in his preference for Fourteen and Twenty-two, and finally we accepted his arguments, and set out to make a more detailed survey of the land. The gully angled between the two quarters, taking scarce an acre off either of them. A jolly stream, brown with the gra.s.s of its banks, gurgled along its bed.
I knelt down to try the water; there was the taste of snow, but there was also the harder, sharper note of spring water mingled with it.
”Runnin' water like that is worth a thousand dollars on any man's farm,” Jake declared. ”An' come up this way. Wait till I show you somethin'.”
The ”something” proved to be a widening in the valley, where was a considerable growth of small willows and poplars. ”Fence posts and fire wood,” said Jake, ”an' on railroad land too, that won't be sold fer years. You'll have 'em all cut down before then. That timber's worth another thousand, or half that, anyway.”
I thought of the great pine back on the old farm in Ontario, and the ”timber” looked to me like gads and switches. None of it was tall enough to reach out of the little valley and show a green tip to the bald surface of the prairies. But we were not in Ontario now; we were in a land where even a three-inch tree was not to be despised.
”An' here's somethin' more,” he said, setting an example for us by walking stealthily on his pudgy legs through the clumps of willows. At the other end of the wooded s.p.a.ce we found a little pond opening out, and a score of wild ducks drowsing placidly on its smooth surface. The bright colorings of the drakes, the beautiful archings of their necks, and their graceful movements on the water held us for a moment in silent admiration.
”An Englishman,” Jake remarked, when we had turned back, ”would take this farm fer the duck pond alone. They're the dangdest people ever was fer wantin' to kill somethin'. He don' care if his farm is all sand or wallows, 's long as there's somethin' to shoot, the Englishman don't.
But fer a Yankee it mus' be every acre wheat land. He don' care fer nothin' but the long green.” Jake paused as though to think over these national characteristics.
”I dunno which is the worst,” he said at length. ”I reckon us Canadjuns is about right, with a little o' both.”
”It has been said that a Canadian is half Englishman and half Yankee,” I remarked. ”What do you make of it?”
”Nothin' to it,” was Jake's emphatic answer. ”When a Canadjun is enjoyin' an argyment with a Yankee he's all English, an' when he's pullin' off a deal with an Englishman he's all Yankee, an'----”
”He gets the sixty pounds,” said Jack.
Jake braced himself on his short, stout legs, and made a gesture that might have been interpreted as a belligerent att.i.tude. He ended it by flapping his arms in imitation of flying, and emitting a series of caws.
Jack was duly suppressed. ”Let's get to business,” he said. ”Explain this soil. Will it grow anything, and if so, what?”
”Let's find a badger-hole,” said Jake, and we had little trouble in locating one. ”Now look at this. This hole goes down five, six, seven feet, maybe more, in the ground. Look what his nibs has kicked out.
Fine, loamy, sandy soil, not too light an' not too sticky, all the way down. That goes plumb to Kingdom Come. Course, the top is a little darker, on account o' the gra.s.s roots, but it's all soil. None o' yer down-east three inches-o'-muck-an'-a-rock-bottom to that.”
Jake took a fresh chew of tobacco and looked out over the greenish-brown prairie. It certainly was a picture to kindle the imagination. Almost as level as a floor, one could have seen a jack-rabbit jump anywhere within a mile. The little gully was quite lost in the vista; you would not dream of its existence until you came right upon it. In no direction was there a sign of life, but far on the horizon a whiff of smoke hung like a fading pennant in the still sky.
”I have it figgered out like this,” Jake continued, ”an' my figgers is right; this land is worth more than any gold mine between h.e.l.l an'
Whoop-up. When you take the gold out o' a mine you ain't got nothin'
left, but you can take gold out o' this mine next year, an' the year after, an' the year after, fer ever an' ever, an' there's still as much there as when you started--if you farm it right.”
Our inspection satisfied us in every particular. Jake explained, as we already knew, that we would have to build separate shacks on the two quarters, to comply with the law about sleeping on the land claimed.
”But you can build one stable in the gully fer the live stock,” he added; ”the Gov'ment don' care where _they_ sleep, jus' so's the homesteader himself is sufficiently oncomfort'ble.”
We smiled over his interpretation of regulations which, as we knew, were necessary to prevent the wholesale blanketing of the free lands by people who had no intention of living on them.
”Now we better pick a second an' a third choice, jus' in case some one slips in ahead o' us on this,” said Jake, and we spent the afternoon driving about and making fresh locations. Much of the land was already taken up, Jake told us, and although there were as yet no signs of settlement we would see a great change by fall.
Jack spoke of the disadvantage of the alternate sections of railroad land, which were not given away free, but which had to be bought. ”They are an obstacle to close settlement,” he said, ”and I guess loneliness is about the worst thing there is to contend with on these prairies.”
”Perhaps,” said Jake, ”but they're an advantage, too. They give the homesteader a lot of free pasture an' hay land, fer instance. An' in a few years, when you have had some good crops an' caught the bug fer big farmin', you'll be mighty glad o' the chance to buy Fifteen or Twenty-three.”
We camped on Fourteen that night, and Jack and I were filled with plans for our shacks and our stable. The shacks would be up on the prairie level, on opposite sides of the gully, in full view of each other, and about a hundred yards apart. The stable would be in the gully, close to the road allowance, sheltered from the winds, and convenient to water.