The Chinook

by Ralph Stock

THE CHINOOK

By RALPH STOCK

STRODE's programme was sweetly simple—or perhaps it would be nearer the truth to call it simple.

Crawling from under a mound of blankets into darkness and a temperature that ranged between freezing point and forty degrees below zero, he lit the stove with shavings carefully prepared the previous evening, broke the ice in the water-bucket, and left the kettle to boil while he fed the stable horses and forked hay to the calves by the light of a hurricane lantern.

This might take an hour or two hours, according to circumstance, but it set his blood in motion, and made the singing of the kettle a welcome sound on returning to the shack.

Then to beans and bacon, and bread and syrup, and sometimes a tin of tomatoes, followed by the watering of the stock at ice-holes axed out of the creek, and the possible mending of the shed roof where the weight of snow had been too much for it, and the opening of the corral gates on fine days to let the cattle rustle for themselves, and rounding them up before darkness or a blizzard took a hand in the game, and some wood-chopping, and another meal, and the re-reading of whatever literature the shack contained, and the mound of blankets again.

Multiply this by the number of days in a prairie winter, and you will have some idea of Strode 's programme. It was not exactly his preconceived idea of programmes "out West," but he had learned to distrust preconceived ideas and adapt himself to almost anything, which is the first lesson the prairie has to teach. After all, it was work, and that was what he had come West for.

At Pine Creek's leading dry-goods store a man with a face like crumpled brown paper had said: "Want a job?"

Strode, with equal brevity, had answered "Yes," and in rather less than five minutes he found himself seated beside his employer on a box waggon, jogging over russet-hued plains towards a distant blue line of hills.

The man with the brown-paper face proved to be Ben Hammond, owner of the Z-X, one of those small cattle ranches in the Bad Lands not yet ousted by the encroaching and hated farmer. Here, for two months of glorious Indian summer, Strode had gone quietly and thoroughly to work *at whatever came his way, and when Winter shut down her icy lid with a snap, and the other "hands" had been paid off, Ben Hammond had something to say, and said it in his usual concise fashion:

"You're a quiet kind of guy."

"Think so?" said Strode.

"Yep. Used to living alone, I guess."

"Well, hardly."

"But it wouldn't hurt you any."

"I don't somehow think it would," Strode admitted.

"Well, have a try. You're in charge of the Warlodge winter camp from now on at forty a month."

"But——"

"All right, make it fifty."

"I wasn't kicking at the wages——" Strode began.

"What's eating you, then?"

"Only that I've never run a winter camp in my life."

"Fork hay, can't you?

"Yes."

"Ride enough to bring a few calves in out of the wet?"

"I suppose so."

"Well, then."

"And that was how Strode's programme came into being. It appeared that two men usually undertook this work as a safeguard against loneliness. But, as Ben Hammond explained, it was better business from the Z-X point of view to collect a hard-working, fifty-dollar-a-month lunatic, when Spring came round, than a pair of normal, twenty-dollar "do-nothings" who had scamped their work through fighting over it—as they invariably did.

Strode agreed, and, with an occasional visit from his boss, had run the winter camp for six months now without apparent ill-effect. In fact, he rather liked the life. To bring in the calves, fasten the corral gate, and sit before a red-hot box-stove while a north-west blizzard beat its tattoo on the tiny window pane, afforded him quiet satisfaction. Storms might come and storms might go, but he and his fifty dollars went on—well, if not for ever, at least for another three weeks. Then the Chinook would come like a magic breath, honeycombing snowdrifts and transforming ice-bound creeks into busy torrents, and he would draw three hundred dollars and move on to pastures new, foot-loose and fancy free.

At this stage in his musings, on a wild night of wind and driven snow, there came a knock at the shack door—a gust rattling it, no doubt. Strode stoked the fire with a fresh pine knot and drew nearer to the blaze. Then it occurred to him that the sound was unlike a knock, and a moment later he was at the open door staring into the smother—over a woman's body.

She opened her eyes soon after a sip of spirit had passed her lips, and the first thing she did was to laugh. There were dead-white patches of frost-bite on her chin and cheeks; her hair hung dank upon her forehead where the snow had melted from it; her eyes held cold desperation, and anything less mirthful than her laugh Strode had never heard.

"Not a sage bush," she muttered, gazing about her with dull incredulity. "Not a sage bush."

"No," said Strode. He had been lost in a blizzard himself before now and taken every clump of herbage for a house. "This is the Z-X winter camp. You're safe."

"Safe," repeated the woman, as though the word conveyed little to her. "Ah, yes, safe." Then she slept.

Strode watched her for a while, wondering. There was a wedding ring on her finger; that was all he could fathom about her until he came in from feeding the calves the next morning. She was up then, cooking the breakfast, and it was while she was making the tea that he noticed her wedding ring had gone.

"I've got to thank you," she began.

"Please don't," said Strode.

"All right," she agreed. "You'd do as much for a dog, anyway. My name's Mellor—Edith Mellor. D'you want the rest?"

"Not unless you care to give it me, Mrs. Mellor."

She coloured and glanced involuntarily at her hand.

"You're pretty quick—for a man," she observed. "Well, I'd like you to know that I'm not married to anyone or anything. Mellor s my maiden name, and I'm keeping it from now on. I wonder what else you've noticed," she added quickly.

"Nothing," said Strode, "except that you're still tired out. Let's see what breakfast will do."

But breakfast did little for Edith Mellor. There was a hardness about her, a mocking quality in voice and manner that Strode found vaguely repellent.

"Alone here, eh?" she observed later, while staring through the window at the snow-swept wilderness outside.

"Yes," said Strode.

The woman shuddered and turned back to the stove.

"How you can stand it beats me," she exclaimed vehemently. "It isn't right. Even for a man it isn't right."

"Of course it isn't," said Strode, "any more than it's right for a steeplejack to risk his neck a hundred feet up or a diver twenty fathoms down, but somebody's got to do it."

Edith Mellor flung back her head. "Risk?" she exclaimed. "Who cares for risk, man or woman? It's loneliness that kills, and what do you call that?" A coyote was howling somewhere in the white waste. " But I guess you're right," she added after a pause. "Somebody's got to do these things—only not me, that's all. I'm through."

Strode waited for more, but none came at the moment. The storm still raged. It was evidently one of those three-day inflictions that scourge the prairie as with a lash. His programme was carried out with customary precision, and he was getting ready to move down to the stable for the night when the woman stopped him.

"Where are you going? " she asked.

"Into the other shack," he told her.

"You mean the stable," she corrected. "Why? "

"Well——" Strode was at a loss.

"You stay where you are," commanded Edith Mellor, "or I'll walk straight out of here." And she evidently meant it. "Whoever heard of such a thing? Hang up a blanket, and we'll pretend we're in different hotels. Say, where are you from?"

"England," said Strode.

"Ah," mused Edith Mellor. "Well, you're a gentleman, anyway."

"Thanks," said Strode

"Don't mention it," she returned. "I'm not in the habit of throwing bouquets around, but I like the way you don't ask questions. I wonder what you'd think of me if you knew all."

"I don't see that it would matter much what I thought," said Strode.

"May be not—to you. But it would to me. I should just like to know, that's all."

The woman stared into the leaping heart of the fire, and her face seemed to change, soften. But only for a moment. The next she flung back her head as though caught unawares.

"Not that it'll make any difference to what I'm doing," she added defiantly. "Nothing could alter that."

"Of course it couldn't," said Strode.

"I'm from the South," she went on presently, as much to herself as to Strode. "There's warmth and—company down there. I was doing all right, too—on circuit, song and dance act. Then he came along. One of the best. There's nothing the matter with him—except that he doesn't know when he's beat. You know the kind."

Strode nodded.

"Admire it, likely, same as most. Well, it is all right—until you've got to live with it—alone, on the prairie. We married and came North. We were going to do wonders up here where there's still hay, and grazing, and water. We bought stock with all we'd got, and built corrals and a shack. Proper little home we made of it, too."

"You mean you did," said Strode.

"All right, I did," admitted Edith Mellor. "We used to laugh at rigging up things out of nothing in those days—cretonne and soap boxes mostly. Every time a cow calved we used to dance ring-a-ring-o'-roses around it like a couple of kids, and when one of the team mares foaled, we reckoned we were on the trail to a fortune. I tell you, those were the days!"

The woman's lips curled into a satirical smile at thought of them.

"But I've got a business head on me," she added, turning to Strode, "and that's an awkward thing to have sometimes. It makes you see ahead too clearly. For him the future was always hidden in a rose-coloured mist. Just as soon as this happened, and that happened, we were going back South. But they never did happen, and I began to see they never would. Have you ever seen things that way?"

"Often," said Strode. "That's what life seems to be mostly—waiting for things to happen."

"And when they don't, and you see they never will, what do you do about it?"

"Clear out on the chance of them happening somewhere else," said Strode.

"Of course you do!" flashed Edith Mellor. "Well, that's what I'm doing."

"You mean——"

"I mean that when I hit your door I was on my way South, and I'll be heading South again as soon as this storm lets up. What d'you think of that for a respectable married woman?"

Strode did not answer.

"Awful, isn't it?" came the taunt. "Yet I'm only doing what a whole lot more have wanted to do, but hadn't the sand. You see, I haven't even had the decency to run away with somebody else. That would have given it a 'heart interest,' and folk forgive a whole lot for that No, I'm just running away with myself'—or what's left of me, because I'm heart-sick and bone weary of the whole thing."

The woman's hands were clenched, her lips compressed into a thin, straight line.

"It was a good while before I could bring myself to try and take the heart out of a man," she went on, "but I came to it in the end. I showed him in cold figures that what he was doing led nowhere, and never would. I nagged him. Think of that—alone with a nagger! But I might have saved myself the trouble, He just grinned and kept on keeping on. He's like that."

"He sounds a good sort to me," said Strode.

"Good?" The woman's eyes flashed. "Didn't I tell you he's the best ever? He's a man. Troubles piled in on him like a snow-slide—troubles that I saw coming a mile, and figured out how to avoid. But he didn't avoid them. Didn't seem to want to. He just met them with that grin of his and butted his way through. I've never seen him down and out. Don't believe anyone or anything could put him that way. He's too strong—self-reliant. He made me ashamed of the way I felt about his work. To me, looking back over four years' slavery, and ahead at maybe twenty more, it looked like a bull charging a church. It still looks that way to me, and always will. I've left him to it. He's better without me, anyway. I've got hard—hard. I'm going South in spite of him—in spite of hell. The more difficult the trail, the better I'll like it. I'm righting for my end the way he fights for his."

She went over to the window and pressed her forehead against the frozen pane.

"You've been mighty patient, stranger," she added quietly. "What d'you make of it all?"

Strode looked up at her.

"You'd laugh if I told you," he said, "and I don't like your laugh."

"Well, I don't blame you for that," returned Edith Mellor. "It's got ugly, I guess, like the rest of me. I won't use it, there!"

"Very well," said Strode. "I think that when the Chinook comes——"

"That I'll melt with the rest, eh?"

"Yes."

"You're wrong there," she said with quiet conviction. "You must remember things have worked me up to this. It wasn't impulse, or anything like that. I've seen four Chinooks, and all they did was to remind me that another year had gone by, and that still another was just starting. I must have been travelling North all this time, and I must have reached some place where things are frozen the year round. But now I'm heading South—South! Heavens," she cried suddenly, beating her clenched fists on the window-sill, "will this storm ever let up?"

It ran its full course of three days, then cleared with a suddenness that made the contrast almost overpowering. Under the reflected rays of a coldly brilliant sun the prairie was a sea of dazzling light.

Strode had fed the stock and was standing in the stable doorway, with eyes puckered against the glare, when he caught sight of a solitary black speck moving almost imperceptibly, in a world of light, towards the shack. The binoculars revealed it as a horse and rider. It was not Ben Hammond. And it could be no one else, out there, on the heels of a three-day blizzard, except—

Conjecture merged into conviction. Strode hung up the binoculars and went into the shack.

Breakfast was ready. Edith Mellor was in a ferment to be gone. Wasn't she heading South? The very prospect had brought colour to her cheeks, a feverish brightness to her eye. Ten miles further on she would come to the HYU, and after that the MQ; then there were farms, a whole string of them, clear down to Butte. Crazy? It was just anything that anyone liked to call it, but she was hitting the trail the minute the breakfast things were washed up and the place ridded up a bit. That was the least she could do after Strode's kindness.

As a matter of fact, she was hanging up the dishcloth on a line over the stove when her husband came to the door. He fumbled some time with the latch, but presently stood in the open doorway with hands outstretched, an immense silhouette against the glare.

"Anyone in?" he demanded hoarsely.

"Yes," said Strode.

"Z-X, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"Gave the mare her head. Thought she'd know a shack when she saw one." He took a step forward and stood there, swaying gently. "I'm snow-blind, I guess. Forgot the smoked glasses. Heavens, my eyes!" He crumpled on to the chair Strode set for him and sat with his head on his arm. "Get me some snow, will you, stranger?"

Strode brought him a handful, which he pressed to his eyes, and all the time Edith Mellor stood motionless, staring at the afflicted man as in a trance.

"Ah, that's better," he muttered presently. "But what does it matter, anyway? " His shoulders sagged as under a crushing weight. "I'm finished," he added quietly.

"You'll be all right in a couple of days or less," Strode encouraged him.

"All right?" His sightless eyes ranged the room. "Who cares about this—just a red blanket with pins sticking through it? And there's nothing to see now, anyway? She's gone. Walked right out of the house while I was cutting corral poles—my wife. Can you beat it?"

"Why did she do that?" Strode asked.

There was a pause before the other answered.

"Fancy asking!" he exclaimed bitterly. "But then you don't know her sort, likely. We live up at the north end of this coolie' He laughed shortly. "Take a look out of your own window and tell me if you can see a woman—any woman, let alone her—living with that, and me, and nothing else in the world for four years. I've been figuring things out, and it's a wonder to me she stayed as long as she did."

"What are you going to do about it?" Strode asked.

"Do?" The man's hands were clasped and a-work between his knees. "What can I do? I rode after her like a fool, and look what's happened. If I found her she wouldn't come back. I wouldn't ask her to come back. Her hands were white when she came to me. You ought to see them now! She could play the piano, and sing, and dance, and make more in a month than I can in a year. What is there for her here but washing up, and baking, and washing up again? I tell you the prairie's hard on a woman—hard."

"'For better or worse,' you know," Strode reminded him.

"Oh, it's all right for us to talk that way," objected the other. "We've got our work. It's queer the grip it gets on us, too. We begin to think we're really doing something. It's all I know—how to work, and what's it done but lose me all I was working for?"

"Me?" The man leant back in the chair with his legs asprawl and a bitter smile on his lips. "I've got a few bottles up at the shack. When I get back I'll know what to do with them, that's all."

"And afterwards?"

"Say, you don't want to know much, do you?"

"I was wondering," said Strode, "that's all."

And so apparently was Edith Mellor's husband. His head sank slowly forward till it rested in utter hopelessness upon his chest. So he slept the sleep of exhaustion.

*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*

Strode was watching the calves scamper through the corral gate when Edith Mellor touched his arm.

"How long will he be like that?" she asked.

"It depends," said Strode.

"On what?"

"On you."

Edith Mellor looked Southward over the glistening plain.

"I meant his eyes," she said.

"Oh, a couple of days at the outside."

"And you'll bring him back home?"

"I'll see to that," said Strode.

"You're white," said Edith Mellor, and, turning abruptly, set out through the snow—Northward.

As Strode watched her go, a breath came down from the hills, soft as a caress.

The Chinook had come.