British -- Canada -- Fiction; Love stories; Ranchers -- Canada, Western -- Fiction
Then he turned away to the stables, where Jimmy, who came in with an
armful of clothing, found him rubbing down the Cayuse with unusual
solicitude, in spite of its attempts to kick him.
"I guess you'll have to change," he said. "Those things aren't decent,
and you can put the deerskin ones on. The old man's a high-toned
Englishman going camping and fishing, and, by what she said, the younger
girl's struck on frontiersmen. When you get into that jacket you'll look
the real thing."
Brooke had no great desire to look like one of the picturesque
desperadoes who are, somewhat erroneously, supposed, in England, to
wander about the Pacific Slope, but as he mended his own clothes with
any convenient piece of flour bag, he saw that his comrade's advice was
good.
When he entered the shanty Jimmy had supper ready, but he realized, as
he had never done since he raised its log walls, the comfortless squalor
of the room. The red dust had blown into it, it was littered with
discarded clothing, lines and traps, and broken boots, while two
candles, which flickered in the draughts, stuck in whisky bottles,
furnished uncertain illumination. He had made the unsteady table, and
Jimmy had made the chairs, but the result was no great credit to either
of them, while nobody who was not very hungry would have considered the
meal his comrade laid out inviting. Still, his guests had evidently no
fault to find with it, and during it the girl whose pony he had led
once or twice glanced covertly at him.
She saw a tall man with a bronzed face of not unpleasant English type,
attired picturesquely in fringed deerskin which had crossed the
mountains from the prairie. He had grey eyes, and his hair was crisped
by the sun; but while he was, she decided, distinctly, personable and
still young, there was something in his expression which puzzled her. It
was neither diffidence nor embarrassment, and yet there was a suggestion
of constraint about him which his comrade was wholly free from. Brooke,
on his part, saw a girl with brown eyes and hair who held herself well,
and had a faint suggestion of imperiousness about her, and wondered with
an uneasiness he was by no means accustomed to what she thought of him,
since he felt that the condition of his dwelling must show her the
shiftless life he led. Still, he shook off that thought, and others that
troubled him, and played his part as host, talking, with a purpose, only
of the Canadian bush, until, when the meal was over, Jimmy, who felt
himself being left out, turned to the guests.
"A little whisky would have come in to settle those fried potatoes
down," he said. "I would have offered you some, but my partner here
slung the bottle into the river just before you came."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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