CHAPTER XVIII.
_When the North Wind Blows._
November came in with a blizzard; one of those sudden, sweeping whirlsof snow, with bitter cold and a wind that drove the fine snow-flourthrough shack walls and around window casings, and made one lookspeculatively at the supply of fuel. It was such a storm as brings anaftermath of sheepherders reported missing with their bands scatteredand wandering aimlessly or else frozen, a huddled mass, in somewashout; such a storm as sends the range cattle drifting, heads downand bodies hunched together, neither knowing nor caring where theirtrail may end, so they need not face that bitter drive of wind andsnow.
It was the first storm of the season, and they told one another itwould be the worst. The Double-Crank wagons were on the way in with abunch of bawling calves and cows when it came, and they were forced tocamp hastily in the shelter of a coulee till it was over, and to walkand lead their horses much of the time on guard that they might notfreeze in the saddle. But they pulled through it, and they got to theranch and the corrals with only a few calves left beside the trailto mark their bitter passing. In the first days of cold and calm thatcame after, the ranch was resonant day and night with that monotonous,indescribable sound, like nothing else on earth unless it be thebeating of surf against a rocky shore--the bawling of nine hundredcalves penned in corrals, their uproar but the nucleus for theprotesting clamor of nine hundred cows circling outside or standingwith noses pressed close against the corral rails.
Not one day and night it lasted, nor two. For four days the uproarshowed no sign of ever lessening, and on the fifth the eighteenhundred voices were so hoarse that the calves merely whispered theirplaint, gave over in disgust and began nosing the scattered pilesof hay. The cows, urged by hunger, strayed from the blackened circlearound the corrals and went to burrowing in the snow for the ripenedgrass whereby they must live throughout the winter. They were drivenforth to the open range and left there, and the Double-Crank settleddown to comparative quiet and what peace they might attain. Halfthe crew rolled their beds and rode elsewhere to spend the winter,returning, like the meadowlarks, with the first hint of soft skies andgreen grass.
Jim Bleeker and a fellow they called Spikes moved over to the Bridgerplace with as many calves as the hay there would feed, and two menwere sent down to the line-camp to winter. Two were kept at theDouble-Crank Ranch to feed the calves and make themselves generallyuseful--the quietest, best boys of the lot they were, because theymust eat in the house and Billy was thoughtful of the women.
So the Double-Crank settled itself for the long winter and what itmight bring of good or ill.
Billy was troubled over more things than one. He could not help seeingthat Flora was worrying a great deal over her father, and that therelations between herself and Mama Joy were, to put it mildly andtritely, strained. With the shadow of what sorrow might be theirs,hidden away from them in the frost-prisoned North, there was nodancing to lighten the weeks as they passed, and the women of therange land are not greatly given to "visiting" in winter. The milesbetween ranches are too long and too cold and uncertain, so thatnothing less alluring than a dance may draw them from home. Billythought it a shame, and that Flora must be terribly lonesome.
It was a long time before he had more than five minutes at a stretchin which to talk privately with her. Then one morning he came in tobreakfast and saw that the chair of Mama Joy was empty; and Flora,when he went into the kitchen afterward, told him with almost arelish in her tone that Mrs. Bridger--she called her that, also with arelish--was in bed with toothache.
"Her face is swollen on one side till she couldn't raise a dimple tosave her life," she announced, glancing to see that the doors werediscreetly closed. "It's such a relief, when you've had to lookat them for four years. If _I_ had dimples," she added, spitefullyrattling a handful of knives and forks into the dishpan, "I'd plug thethings with beeswax or dough, or anything that I could get my handson. Heavens! How I hate them!"
"Same here," said Billy, with guilty fervor. It was treason to one ofhis few principles to speak disparagingly of a woman, but it was inthis case a great relief. He had never before seen Flora in just thisexplosive state, and he had never heard her say "Heavens!" Somehow,it also seemed to him that he had never seen her so wholly lovable. Hewent up to her, tilted her head back a little, and put a kiss on theplace where dimples were not. "That's one uh the reasons why I likeyuh so much," he murmured. "Yuh haven't got dimples or yellow hair orblue eyes--thank the Lord! Some uh these days, girlie, I'm going t'pick yuh up and run off with yuh."
Her eyes, as she looked briefly up at him, were a shade lessturbulent. "You'd better watch out or _she_ will be running off with_you_!" she said, and drew gently away from him. "There! That's ahorrid thing to say, Billy Boy, but it isn't half as horrid as--Andshe watches me and wants to know everything we say to each other, andis--" She stopped abruptly and turned to get hot water.
"I know it's tough, girlie." Charming Billy, considering his ignoranceof women, showed an instinct for just the sympathy she needed. "Ihaven't had a chance to speak to yuh, hardly, for months--anything butcommon remarks made in public. How long does the toothache last as ageneral thing?" He took down the dish towel from its nail inside thepantry door and prepared to help her. "She's good for to-day, ain'tshe?"
"Oh, yes--and I suppose it _does_ hurt, and I ought to be sorry.But I'm not. I'm glad of it. I wish her face would stay that way allwinter! She's so fussy about her looks she won't put her nose out ofher room till she's pretty again. Oh, Billy Boy, I wish I were a man!"
"Well, _I_ don't!" Billy disagreed. "If yuh was," he added soberly,"and stayed as pretty as yuh are now, she'd--" But Billy could notbring himself to finish the sentence.
"Do you think it's because you're so pretty that she--"
Flora smiled reluctantly. "If I were a man I could swear and _swear!_"
"Swear anyhow," suggested Billy encouragingly. "I'll show yuh how."
"And father away off in Klondyke," she said irrelevantly, passing overhis generous offer, "and--and dead, for all we know! And she doesn'tcare--at _all!_ She--"
Sympathy is good, but it has a disagreeable way of bringing all one'stroubles to the front rather overwhelmingly. Flora suddenly dropped aplate back into the pan, leaned her face against the wall by the sinkand began to cry in a tempestuous manner rather frightened CharmingBilly Boyle, who had never before seen a grown woman cry real tearsand sob like that.
He did what he could. He put his arms around her and held her close,and patted her hair and called her girlie, and laid his brown cheekagainst her wet one and told her to never mind and that it would beall right anyway, and that her father was probably picking away in hismine right then and wishing she was there to fry his bacon for him.
"I wish I was, too," she murmured, weaned from her weeping and talkinginto his coat. "If I'd known how--_she_--really was, I wouldn't everhave stayed. I'd have gone with father."
"And where would _I_ come in?" he demanded selfishly, and so turnedthe conversation still farther from her trouble.
The water went stone cold in the dishpan and the fire died in thestove so that the frost spread a film over the thawed centre of thewindow panes. There is no telling when the dishes would have beenwashed that day if Mama Joy had not begun to pound energetically uponthe floor--with the heel of a shoe, judging from the sound. Even thatmight not have proved a serious interruption; but Dill put his headin from the dining room and got as far as "That gray horse, William--"before he caught the significance of Flora perched on the knee of"William" and retreated hastily.
So Flora went to see what Mama Joy wanted, and Billy hurried somewhatguiltily out to find what was the matter with the gray horse, andpractical affairs once more took control.
After that, Billy considered himself an engaged young man. He wentback to his ditty and inquired frequently:
"Can she make a punkin pie, Billy boy, Billy Boy?"
and was very nearly the old, care-free Charming Bill
y of theline-camp. It is true that Mama Joy recovered disconcertingly thatafternoon, and became once more ubiquitous, but Billy felt thatnothing could cheat him of his joy, and remained cheerful underdifficulties. He could exchange glances of much secret understandingwith Flora, and he could snatch a hasty kiss, now and then, and whenthe chaperonage was too unremitting she could slip into his hands ahurriedly penciled note, filled with important nothings. Which made abright spot in his life and kept Flora from thinking altogether of herfather and fretting for some news of him.
Still, there were other things to worry him and to keep him fromforgetting that the law of nature, which he had before defined to hisown satisfaction, still governed the game. Storm followed storm witha monotonous regularity that was, to say the least, depressing, thoughto be sure there had been other winters like this, and not even Billycould claim that Nature was especially malignant.
But with Brown's new fence stretching for miles to the south and eastof the open range near home, the drifting cattle brought up against itduring the blinding blizzards and huddled there, freezing in the open,or else plodded stolidly along beside it until some washout or couleetoo deep for crossing barred their way, so that the huddling andfreezing was at best merely postponed. Billy, being quite alive to theexigencies of the matter, rode and rode, and with him rode Dill andthe other two men when they had the leisure--which was not often,since the storms made much "shoveling" of hay necessary if they wouldkeep the calves from dying by the dozen. They pushed the cattle awayfrom the fences--to speak figuratively and colloquially--and drovethem back to the open range until the next storm or cold north windcame and compelled them to repeat the process.
If Billy had had unlimited opportunity for lovemaking, he would nothave had the time, for he spent hours in the saddle every day, unlessthe storm was too bitter for even him to face. There was the line-campwith which to keep in touch; he must ride often to the Bridgerplace--or he thought he must--to see how they were getting on. Itworried him to see how large the "hospital bunch" was growing, andto see how many dark little mounds dotted the hollows, except whena new-fallen blanket of snow made them white--the carcasses of thecalves that had "laid 'em down" already.
"Yuh ain't feeding heavy enough, boys," he told them once, before hequite realized how hard the weather was for stock.
"Yuh better ride around the hill and take a look at the stacks,"suggested Jim Bleeker. "We're feeding heavy as we dare, Bill. If wedon't get a let-up early we're going to be plumb out uh hay. Thereain't been a week all together that the calves could feed away fromthe sheds. _That's_ where the trouble lays."
Billy rode the long half-mile up the coulee to where the hay hadmostly been stacked, and came back looking sober. "There's no usesplitting the bunch and taking some to the Double-Crank," he said. "Weneed all the hay we've got over there. Shove 'em out on the hills andmake 'em feed a little every day that's fit, and bank up themsheds and make 'em warmer. This winter's going to be one of our oldsteadies, the way she acts so far. It's sure a fright, the way thisweather eats up the hay."
It was such incidents as these which weaned him again from his singingand his light-heartedness as the weeks passed coldly toward spring.He did not say very much about it to Dill, because he had aconstitutional aversion to piling up agony ahead of him; besides, Dillcould see for himself that the loss would be heavy, though just howheavy he hadn't the experience with which to estimate. As March camein with a blizzard and went, a succession of bleak days, into April,Billy knew more than he cared to admit even to himself. He would lieawake at night when the wind and snow raved over the land, and picturethe bare open that he knew, with lean, Double-Crank stock driftingtail to the wind. He could fancy them coming up against this fence andthat fence, which had not been there a year or two ago, and huddlingthere, freezing, cut off from the sheltered coulees that would havesaved them.
"Damn these nesters and their fences!" He would grit his teeth at hishelplessness, and then try to forget it all and think only of Flora.