His Royal Nibs quotes

As he raced through the gate, Bully Bill perceived the cause of the revolution of his herd. Directly in the path of the animals was a strange figure.

Not the weary footsore tramp common to the trail.

Not the nervy camper, applying at O Bar O for the usual donation of milk and eggs. Neither neighbour, nor Indian from Morley. Here was a clean tweed-clad Englishman, with a grip in his hand.

Eye to eye he faced that roan steer, whose head sank loweringly, as he backed and swayed toward that moving mass behind him, all poised and paused for the charge.

Time was when the Englishman had been in another kind of a charge, but that is a different story, and France is very far away from Alberta, Canada.

As the dumbfounded cowpuncher raced wildly in his direction, the man afoot did a strange thing. Raising on high his grip in his hand, he flung it directly into the face of the roan steer.

Hootmon applied his spurs to his horse’s flanks, and cantered up the hill in the direction of the corrals, there to recount to an interested audience old Bully Bill’s discomfiture and amazement.

Things move slowly in a ranching country, and not every day does the Lord deposit a whole vaudeville act at the door of a ranch house.

Sandy, seeking to curry favour with the confounded foreman, winked at him broadly, and then deliberately pricked the rump of the unfortunate Silver Heels with a pin.

There was not a trace of a smile on Bully Bill’s face as he solemnly looked down into the anxious blue eyes of the applicant.

“They’s the makin’s of a damn fine cowboy in you,” he said.

A smile broke all over the somewhat pinched face of the strange tramp. That smile was so engaging, so sunny, so boyish that the cowpuncher returned it with a characteristic grin of his own.

He’d “think it over.” He’d “see about it some day, maybe,” and he “wasn’t so damned cussed sure that it would benefit the world to produce cheap wheat at the present time. This way out, gentlemen! This way out!”

He was a rude old man, was P. D. McPherson.

In a way, he was obliged to be so, for otherwise he would have been enormously imposed on.

P. D. proposed only the slightest excursion into these elementary subjects.

Nature, so he declared, addressing the assembled farmers at a special meeting, was the greatest of all teachers, a book into which one might look, without turning a single leaf, and learn all that was necessary for the knowledge of mankind.

He was convinced, so eloquently proclaimed P. D., that school such as the world knew it, was antiquated in its methods and wholly unnecessary and wrong.

D., that school such as the world knew it, was antiquated in its methods and wholly unnecessary and wrong. To teach the young the secrets and mysteries of nature—that alone was needed to produce a race of supermen and women.

One timid little woman arose, and asked what “supermen” meant, and the huge, rough father of the family of ten replied that it meant “men who liked their supper.”

The meeting broke up in a riot—so far as P. D. was concerned, and his neighbours departed with his wrathful imprecations ringing in their ears.

Then when some of his original ideas were just beginning to take substantial root in their young minds and systems, P. D. fell a victim to a new and devastating passion, which was destined to hold him in thrall for the rest of his days.

Chess was his new mistress, alternately his joy and his bane.

Even his children were forgotten in the shuffle of events, and, turned upon their own resources, they grew up like wild young things, loose on a great, free range.

It should not be inferred from the foregoing that P. D. necessarily neglected his ranching interests.

Chess was a periodic malady with him. The ranch was a permanent institution.

O Bar O was the showplace of the foothills and a matter of pride to the country.

In her room, she faced herself in the wide mirror and revealed a remarkable circumstance so far as she was concerned. Tears, bitter and scorching, were running down her face. Clinching her hands, she said to the tear-stained vision in the mirror:

“It’s just because I hate him so! Oh, how I hate him. I never knew anyone in all the days of my life that I hated so much before and I’d give anything on earth if only I could just hurt him!”

Hurt him she did, for the following evening when he brought her horse, saddled and ready for her, to the front of the ranch house, Hilda, in the swinging couch on the verandah apparently deeply absorbed in a dictionary, looked up coolly, and inquired what …

“It’s just because I hate him so! Oh, how I hate him. I never knew anyone in all the days of my life that I hated so much before and I’d give anything on earth if only I could just hurt him!”

Hurt him she did, for the following evening when he brought her horse, saddled and ready for her, to the front of the ranch house, Hilda, in the swinging couch on the verandah apparently deeply absorbed in a dictionary, looked up coolly, and inquired what the hell he was doing with her horse.

“Wh-why I th-th-thought you would be coming with us as usual,” said the surprised Cheerio.

“Holy Hens!” went on Hilda’s brother. “Half the guys in this country’s got a case on her! I don’t know what they see in her. Should think you’d have more common sense than to pile along in too.”

“Hilda’s eyes,” said the Englishman softly, “are as b-brown as loamy soil. They’re like the dark earth, warm and rich and full of promise.”

“Oh, my God—frey!” groaned Sandy and rolled clear down the grassy slope on which they had been sitting to the more intelligent and sane company of Viper, a yellow and unlovely cur who was, however, the private and personal property of Sandy.

All of that morning,

Hilda McPherson was dead to the world.

Lying on the great fragrant heap in the hay loft, she lost herself in the meshes of one of the most entrancing romances that has ever been penned by the hand of man.

“No, you don’t fit,” she said slowly.

“It takes a man with guts to stand our life⁠—a dead game sport, and not⁠—not⁠—”

She left the sentence unfinished, leaving the epithet to his imagination. She turned her back upon him. He limped to the house. For a long time he sat on the steps, his head in his hands.

“Awfully sorry, sir. I’d jolly well like a game, b-b-but the fact is, I’m—er—what you call in Canada—hiking.”

“Hiking⁠—nothing,” muttered P. D., as he set his own side into place.

“I allow you the Whites, sir. First move, if you please.”

“I congratulate you, sir,” said the defeated one. “You play a damned good game.”

For the first time in his chess life, P. D. McPherson had been soundly licked.

“Here’s to him, as you say, but he ain’t got a chance. That Cheerio duke ain’t no amachoor.”

Alberta, as all the world is beginning to know, is a gambler’s paradise.

In this great boom land, where every day brings its new discoveries of gold, oil, coal, silver, salts, platinum and all the minerals this world of ours hides within herself, one tosses a penny on life itself.

“Four games for you, sir.” After another noisy clearing of throat:

“Tides turn, sir. Tides turn. He ‘laughs best who laughs last.’ ”

“Oh, rather,” agreed Cheerio eagerly.

Autumn came late to Alberta that year, and in the month of November, the cattle were still upon the range. The experienced cowman in Alberta is never deceived by the long sun-laden days of however warm an Autumn.

Well he knows that the climate of Alberta is like unto a temperamental woman whose tantrums may burst forth into fury even while her smile lingers.

It is no uncommon thing in Alberta for a period of warm and balmy weather to be electrically broken by amazing storms and blizzards which spring into being out of a perfectly clear blue sky. Sometimes they last but a few hours;

She had reason for believing him to be unworthy—a man who put to a crucial test, had failed miserably; one who had confessed to a flagrant and criminal weakness.

She had judged him relentlessly, for youth is cruel, and love and jealousy create a torment which is hard to bear.

Now she understood and a gasp of rage escaped her. The man had attempted to rope her. The lariat had fallen short!

She, Hilda McPherson, daughter of O Bar O, to be lariated like a head of stock!

As she watched the rope slowly being coiled in, the sickening thought rushed upon her that presently it would be thrown again, and that second throw might fall true.

Like a tidal wave, the girl’s anger overwhelmed her.

Hell, which the proverb assures us, hath no fury like a woman scorned, raged indeed in the ungoverned breast of the girl of the ranching country.

She was neither equipped by nature or training with those feminine defenses that might have shielded her. She was in a way as uncivilized as the savage woman who beats her untrue mate.