| “WELL!
if some women aren’t born just to laugh!”
remarked the station agent’s wife. “Have
you seen that round-faced woman in the waiting-room?”
“No,” replied the
agent. “I’ve been too busy; I’ve had
to help unload freight. I heard some children in there,
though; they were playing and laughing to the beat of
the band.”
“Nine of them,
John! Nine of them, and the oldest just twelve!”
gasped his wife. “Why, I’d be crazy if I
were in her place. She’s come all the way from
Grey or Bruce in Ontario—I forget which—with
not a soul to help her with that flock. Three of them
are almost babies. The smallest one is a darling—just
sits on the bench in there and dimples and gurgles and
grins all the time.”
“Hasn’t she got
a husband?” asked John.
“Of course,” asserted
his wife. “But that’s just the problem now,
or rather he’s the problem. He came to Manitoba
a year ago, and was working right here in this town.
He doesn’t seem to have had much luck, and left
last week for some [Page 221] ranch
away back of Brandon, she now finds out; she must have
crossed his letter as she came out. She expected to
find him here, and now she is in that waiting-room with
nine children, no money to go further, or to go to a
hotel even, and she’s—well, she’s
just good-natured and smiling, and not a bit worried.
As I say, some women are just born to laugh.”
“Have they anything to
eat?” asked the agent, anxiously.
“Stacks of it—a
huge hamper. But I took the children what milk we had,
and made her take a cup of good hot tea. She would
pay me, however, I couldn’t stop her. But I noticed
she has mighty little change in her purse, and she said
she had no money, and said it with a round, untroubled,
smiling face.” The agent’s wife spoke the
last words almost with envy.
“I’ll try and locate
the husband,” said the agent.
“Yes, she’ll get
his address to-night, she says,” explained the
wife; “but no one knows when he will get here.
Most likely he’s twenty miles away from Brandon,
and they will have to send out for him.”
Which eventually proved to be
the case; and three days elapsed before the husband
and father was able to reach the little border town
where his wife and ample family had been installed as
residents of the general waiting-room of a small, scantily-equipped
station. No beds, no washing [Page 222]
convenien- ces, no table, no chairs; just the wall seats,
with a roof above them and the pump water at the end
of the platform to drink from and dabble in. The distressed
man arrived, harassed and anxious, only to be met by
a round-faced, laughing wife and nine round-faced, laughing
children, who all made sport of their “camping”
experience, and assured him they could have “stood
it” a little longer, if need be.
But they slept in beds that
night—glorious, feathery beds, that were in reality
but solid hemp mattresses—in the cheapest lodging-house
in town.
Then began the home-building.
Henderson had secured a quarter section of land and
made two payments on it when his wife and children arrived,
with all their “settlers’ effects”
in a freight car, which, truth to tell, were meagre
enough. They had never really owned a home in the East,
and when, with saving and selling, she managed to follow
her husband into the promising world of Manitoba, she
determined to possess a home, no matter how crude, how
small, how remote. So Henderson hired horses and “teamed”
out sufficient lumber and tar-paper to erect a shack
which measured exactly eighteen by twelve feet, then
sodded the roof in true Manitoba style, and into this
cramped abode Mrs. Henderson stowed her household goods
and nine small children. With the stove, table, chairs,
tubs and trunks, there was room for but one bed [Page
223] to be put up. Poor, unresourceful Henderson
surveyed the crowded shack helplessly, but that round-faced,
smiling wife of his was not a particle discouraged.
“We’ll just build in two sets of bunks,
on each end of the house,” she laughed. “The
children won’t mind sleeping on ‘shelves,’
for the breadwinners must have the bed.”
So they economized space with
a dozen such little plans, and all through the unpacking
and settling and arranging, she would say every hour
or two, “Oh, it’s a little crowed and stuffy,
but it’s ours—it’s home,”
until Henderson and the children caught something of
her inspiration, and the sod-roof shack became “home”
in the sweetest sense of the word.
There are some people who “make”
time for everything, and this remarkable mother was
one. That winter she baked bread for every English bachelor
ranchman within ten miles. She did their washing and
ironing, and never neglected her own, either. She knitted
socks for them, and made and sold quantities of Saskatoon
berry jam. When spring came she had over fifty dollars
of her own, with which she promptly bought a cow. Then
late in March they made a small first payment on a team
of horses, and “broke land” for the first
time, plowing and seeding a few acres of virgin prairie
and getting a start.
But her quaintest invention
to utilize every resource possible was a novel scheme
for chicken-raising. One morning the children came in
[Page 224] greatly excited over finding
a wild duck’s nest in the nearby “slough.”
Mrs. Henderson told them to be very careful not to frighten
the bird, but to go back and search every foot of the
grassy edges and try to discover other nests. They succeeded
in finding three. That day a neighboring English rancher,
driving past on his way to Brandon, twenty miles distant,
called out, “Want anything from town, Mrs. Henderson?”
“Eggs, just eggs, if you
will bring them, like a good boy,” she answered,
running out to the trail to meet him.
“Why, you are
luxurious to-day, and eggs at fifty cents a dozen,”
he exclaimed.
“Never mind,” she
replied, “they’re not nearly so luxurious
as chickens. You just bring me a dozen and a half. Pay
any price, but be sure they are fresh, new
laid, right off the nest. Now just insist on that, or
we shall quarrel.” And with a menacing shake of
a forefinger and a customary laugh, she handed him a
precious bank note to pay for the treasures.
The next day Mrs. Henderson
adroitly substituted hen’s eggs for the wild ducks’
own, and the shy, pretty water fowls, returning from
their morning’s swim, never discovered the fraud.*
“Six eggs under three
sitters—eighteen chicks, if we’re lucky
enough to have secured fertile eggs,” mused Mrs.
Henderson. “Oh, well, we’ll see.”
And they did see. They saw exactly [Page
225] eighteen fluffy, peeping chicks, whose
timid little mothers could not understand why their
broods disappeared one by one from the long, wet grasses
surrounding the nest. But in a warm canton flannel lined
basket near the Henderson’s stove the young arrivals
chirped and picked at warm meal as sturdily as if hatched
in a coop by a commonplace barnyard “Biddy.”
And every one of those chicks lived and grew and fattened
into a splendid flock, and the following spring they
began sitting on their own eggs. But the good-hearted
woman, in relating the story, would always say that
she felt like a thief and a robber whenever she thought
of that shy, harmless little wild duck who never had
the satisfaction of seeing her brood swim in the “slough.”
All this happened more than
twenty years ago, yet when I met Mrs. Henderson last
autumn, as she was journeying to Prince Albert to visit
a married daughter, her wonderfully youthful face was
as round and smiling as if she had never battled through
the years in a hand-to-hand fight to secure a home in
the pioneer days of Manitoba. She is well off now, and
lives no more in the twelve-by-eighteen-foot bunk-house,
but when I asked her how she accomplished so much, she
replied, “I just jollied things along, and laughed
over the hard places. It makes them easier then.”
So perhaps the station agent’s
wife was really right, after all, when she remarked
that “some women were just born to laugh.”
[Page 226]
*
Fact. [back]
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