Presently grandfather comes in: a pleasant-faced man, dark as an Indian, but bearded like a white man; a stalwart of seventy, without a white hair. Not a word of English can he speak, though long ago he travelled as guide with an English hunter through the Rocky Mountains. In quite good French, he spins out reminiscences. He knew Louis Riel in the trouble of 1870—knew him so well that he strongly opposed inviting him back in 1884. But when the invitation was given, and the man he despised was leading his kinsfolk into hopeless rebellion, our friend took up his gun and fought like the rest at Batoche.
They are all most hospitable, these dusky folk of Sixty-mile Bush. “If you want wood for your camp-fire,” says the spokeswoman, “take all you need from our log pile. And aren’t you tired of sleeping on the prairie? The stable is dry and clean—the horses run out all summer—and there is plenty of hay in the stacks. Have you had enough of slough water? Here’s a pail of fine water from the well.” To be sure they have no yeast bread, but for a trifle we get one of their mighty bannocks—oval slabs, eighteen inches by twelve, and an inch thick—with a big lump of home-churned butter and a jug of fresh milk.
Crossing another stretch of treeless plain in the morning, we notice fresh wagon tracks leading away from the trail. We turn aside and follow one of these tracks, but it ends suddenly on the edge of a deep wooded coulee, where some new settler has gone to cut logs for his first shack. Exploring another fresh trail, we come upon a brown patch of newly broken land, with a brand-new box of a house in the middle, and the beginnings of a well dug beside it; but we have had our trouble for nothing, for the owner, after doing as much as this in compliance with the easy homestead law, has returned to the States for the winter, intending to come back for good next year.
Better luck farther on. Here is a house that is clearly inhabited, for we see through the window a loaf of bread on a shelf and a pile of wood by the stove. Now we country folk in the West don’t like a visitor to turn away just because we are out when he calls, especially near meal times. We leave the key over the door to welcome him by proxy, and if he knows anything about our ways he will reach up and find it at once. Most of us, in fact, don’t lock our doors at all; there is no need. . . . Oh, yes, there are exceptions. Now and then a low-down individual, or a whole family without one conscience to the dozen, will descend like a blight on a neighborhood; until they are driven out or reformed, things have a habit of disappearing; but in most parts we trust each other perfectly. . . . Putting up my hand, I find the hospitable key. We go in and make ourselves at home, lighting a fire for our bacon, and helping ourselves to bread and butter and potatoes by way of a change. Departing, we leave twenty-five cents apiece on the table; but we know that if the hostess had been at home she would almost certainly have refused the money.