The Call (Stock)

by Ralph Stock

For works with similar titles, see The Call.

THE CALL

By RALPH STOCK

ACCORDING to his father, Jimmy Tate was locoed (i.e. crazy). Even his mother admitted "there was no understanding the boy." So you may imagine his home life on a small ranch in the Cypress Hills.

"'Tisn't that he ain't willing," Mr. Tate informed me during our evening session of stick-whittling and small-talk on the top rail of the horse corral. "The kid tries all right, and he's got sand, but it just don't seem to be in him, that's all."

"What?" I asked.

"Everything," said Mr. Tate, with a gesture embracing the narrow yet spacious limits of life at High Butte. "He, can't ride, and never will, I reckon. Not built for it. Just a natural born sack of oats in the saddle. His young brother does most of the punchin', and his sister brings in the horses. As for chores—well, he does 'em, but you can see his heart's not in the job."

"P'r'aps it's in something else," I suggested.

"Then I'd like to know what," declared Mr. Tate. "My father and his father before him ran stock on this range, and it's the same on the missus's side. If it's been good enough for us all these years——"

"How about your great-grandfather?" I interrupted.

"How about Adam and Eve?" growled Mr. Tate.

"Heredity's a funny thing," I mused.

"Sounds like it," said Mr. Tate. "Maybe that's what's wrong with Jim. Is it hard to cure?"

"Very," said I.

A stick- whittling silence fell between us, and I was aware that, with the peculiar delicacy of dwellers in the wild, Mr. Tate was refraining from further inquiry because he knew there was something radically wrong with myself. As a matter of fact, I had come to High Butte to die, and High Butte didn't let me. But that's neither here nor there.

"Hi!" bellowed Mr. Tate, with an unexpectedness that nearly toppled me from the rail. "Shut that gate before you get up to any monkey tricks."

He was addressing Meg and Clem Tate, thirteen and fourteen respectively, who had driven into the corral a pretty little buckskin cayuse. Clem, inordinately freckled and wiry, was arrayed in full regalia of chaparejos and spurs. Meg looked uncommonly business-like in a short dun-coloured skirt and wide sombrero.

I was speculating on the reason for these unusual happenings, when my glance encountered it in the form of a diminutive but elaborate little person of about thirteen, whom everyone seemed to go to the trouble of addressing as "Millicent." Like myself, she was a visitor to High Butte from "down East," and already the keen, dry air of the prairie had whipped wonders of delicate colouring into the child's cheeks. She stood outside the corral, her small snub nose—no doubt in later years to be termed retroussé—pressed close to the rails, her china-blue eyes wide with excitement. Beside her, and evidently the adoring swain, though at some pains to hide the fact, lounged Jimmy Tate. It was plain that the boy suffered torments of jealousy over the accomplishments being displayed by his more gifted brother and sister inside the corral.

Mr. Tate favoured me with a wink that could almost be heard. "Showing off in front of Millicent," he told me in an aside. "That's what they're doing."

They were, and making a considerable impression by the look of things.

"Oo!" gurgled the small but enthusiastic audience, as Clem swung the lariat in a wide circle above his head. And "Oo!" she cried, hopping ecstatically on either leg as the noose fell cleanly over the head of the loping cayuse, and Clem took a turn on the snubbing-post.

"You're taking a mighty long time over that bridle," boomed Mr. Tate. "What d'you think you've got there—a man-killer?"

How any father can sit on a fence and hurl scathing comment at his offspring while they risk life and limb, it is beyond me to imagine. But he can—and does—out West. Probably if Mr. Tate had been forced to watch Meg and Clem crossing the road of any modern metropolis, he would have been a-dither with anxiety.

The cayuse stood suspiciously still when the saddle was placed on his back and cinched home. He did little even when Clem mounted and contrived to walk him round the corral—a few crow-hops, some dainty side-stepping, and that was all. It looked as if the performance were over, and I said so.

"Don't you be too sure," warned Mr. Tate. "Those quiet ones are always the worst—like the women."

"And is he a real live bronco?" demanded Millicent, when Clem had slithered to earth by way of the pony's tail, and Meg had taken his place in the saddle.

"Bronc nothing," drawled Clem, with a deprecating grin.

"But he bucked, didn't he?"

"Not so that you'd notice it," he assured her. "You're out of luck."

"I think it's fine to be able to ride," cooed Millicent, with upturned, admiring eyes. "Fine!"

Clem jangled his spurs and relapsed into diffident silence at her feet. Jim studied the horizon.

"And after Meg it's Jim's turn, isn't it?" pursued Millicent.

There was an awkward pause, during which Clem dug his heels into the dust of the corral. Then Jim turned slowly. He did everything slowly.

"Yes," he said, "I guess it's my turn now."

Meg and Clem stared at him aghast as he climbed the corral and approached the cayuse with deliberate gait and protruding jaw, but they said nothing, which is distinctly to their credit. There were visitors present. The guilty secret that any member of the Tate family could not ride should be kept as far as they were concerned. That was the position.

"Now there's going to be some fun," Mr. Tate informed me, and there was—if you could take it as such. Personally it struck me as the unfunniest spectacle I had ever witnessed. Jim's ungainly weight had no sooner touched the saddle than the pretty little buckskin cayuse was transformed into a vicious horror on four legs. With the cunning of the Indian-bred pony he seemed to know in a flash that here was something to play with instead of to obey, something that he could shake like a rag doll, jolt into unconsciousness. During a particularly strenuous moment the boy's hands went out, gripping the pummel of the saddle, and a kind of groan came from his father.

"He's grabbing leather!"

I knew this to be one of the deadly sins of horsemanship out West, but at that moment I hated the man who had commented on it.

"You ought to stop this," I snapped at him. "The boy has too much grit to know when he's beat, that's all."

"I said he had sand," admitted his father.

"Well, then, do you want to see him shaken to pieces, pitched, and trampled on before you do anything?"

Mr. Tate favoured me with the whimsical scrutiny he might bring to bear on a performing ant. "You mustn't get rattled about our Jim," he said slowly. "He can take care of himself, or, if he can't, he's got to learn how in this man's country."

Which was true.

"He's bucking now, isn't he?" inquired Millicent.

Clem nodded.

"And Jim's staying on all right, isn't he?"

"Yes, Jim's staying on," sail Clem.

And that was why Millicent clapped her hands frantically, and shouted encouragement in her shrill treble voice to the worst exhibition of horsemanship that High Butte had probably ever seen. And that in turn was why Jim "stayed on" until his nose bled and the pony had bucked himself out. Then he slid from the saddle into a crumpled heap in the middle of the corral.

There was nothing very much the matter with him. He was up and about the next morning, feeding the stable horses and choring generally in his own deliberate fashion. But the lad interested me, and when towards evening I saw him on foot, with a gun under his arm, rounding the butte, I took the liberty of strolling in the same direction. There was a duck-infested lake on the far side, I knew, and it occurred to me to wonder if Jim were any better at the butt-end of a gun than he was on a horse.

Lying in the short grass of the butte-top, I watched him through a pair of binoculars. There was game in plenty, but he passed it by without firing a shot, and trudged on to the end of the lake. There he propped the gun against a boulder, took off his boots and socks, and waded into a clump of rushes that hid him from view.

For a time my binoculars registered nothing but the lake, a desolate place of niggerheads and plaintive curlews. Then out of the rushes crept the ungainly prow of a dugout canoe. It was the strangest thing, here on the arid plains, hundreds of miles from anything in the shape of a boat, to see this quaint craft clear the rushes and skim the surface of the lake with a rag of canvas bellying to the breeze. It took me back to my sailing days, the days worth while, and memories came flocking … But that again is neither here nor there. I lay on that hill top thinking about Jim, and when I had done, it pleased me to reflect that in all the prairies I was probably the only soul capable of understanding him.

It was a delicate business at first, but after sundry voyages on the lake he came to talk readily enough, and listen with almost pathetic eagerness. It transpired that he had made his boat out of a pine log with nothing but an axe, and cut the sail from an old round-up tent. After finding his craft practically unmanageable except before the wind, he experimented, first with a keel, then with leeboards devised out of a sheet of corrugated iron. He had practically discovered for himself, without aid of any kind, the age-old principles of navigation, and practised them, because nothing else in the world, as he knew it, filled the void that was in him.

"You ought to have been a sailor," I told him once, while beating up the lake.

"What's that?" said Jim.

His ignorance of anything beyond the prairie was almost unbelievable until you remembered his environment and upbringing.

"A man who makes his living by doing just what we're doing now," I explained.

He stared at me incredulously for a moment, then delivered himself of his stock phrase in cases of emergency: "Aw, quit your kidding!"

"All right," said I, and relapsed into silence, knowing full well he would not allow it to last long.

"Want to tell me a man can make money this way?" he demanded, hauling in on the sheet as we came about.

"Not much," said I, "but enough."

"I'd like to hear about him," Jim confessed.

"He's usually a stocky sort of man—who can't ride," I began.

"Sounds like me all right," grinned Jim.

"And he's never really content except on the water, though he's always dreaming of one day owning a farm way inland."

"I don't get that," said Jim.

"No. He's difficult to explain, and he can never explain himself. He belongs to the sea," I ended rather lamely.

"What's that like?" was my next facer.

"The sea?" I pondered the matter desperately. "It's water, miles deep, and so big that it makes the prairie look like two cents."

For a moment I thought he was going to repeat his emergency phrase, but he evidently changed his mind.

"And it has as many moods as the wind," I struggled on. "It can be kind, and it can be cruel. Sometimes you love it and sometimes you hate it, but you can never quite shake it off if it's in your blood."

"Kind of a fever, eh?" supplied Jim.

"Yes, something like that."

He nodded understandingly, and remained thoughtful a while.

"What does it look like?" he asked suddenly.

"Ah," said I, and closed my eyes in an effort at visualisation. "It can look like almost anything, according to the way it feels. One day it'll be blue, and another green, and another grey. And it can be like a sheet of glass or like—like a million High Buttes in a snow blizzard."

I thought that rather good, and Jim waited eagerly for more, but words failed me. Try to explain Nature's mightiest phenomenon to one who has never seen it, and you will have some idea of my difficulties.

"Sounds good to me," said Jim, and changed the subject.

"Well, where's the ducks?" said Mr. Tate on my return to the ranch.

Jim and I exchanged the glance of guilty schoolboys, but kept our pact. He had sworn me to secrecy on the subject of the boat.

"What I can't understand," I told him that evening, while bedding down the horses, "is why you keep it so dark. Millicent, for instance. You'd think she would enjoy a sail on the lake. And, for that matter, there's as much in sailing as there is in riding a bronc."

"She'd think it's kid's play," said Jim.

"Well, you could soon show her that it isn't. Let Clem or Meg take the tiller in a squall."

Jim shook his head stubbornly. "You don't know this outfit," he said. "They'd never understand."

As time passed, he grew more silent. Millicent frankly tired of him, and transferred her easy affections to his brother. The voyages on the lake ceased. Instead, he was in the habit of sitting on the butte-top staring southward over his knees—always southward. I remembered that afterwards.

"Well, what about it?" I asked him on one occasion. "There's a nice sailing breeze."

He grinned and dug his heels into the turf.

"Tired of it?"

"Yes," said Jim. And I knew that he lied.

Things came to such a pass with the boy that I determined to have an uncommonly frank talk with his father about him. I was going to explain—in words of one syllable, if necessary—that boys are not always of the same mould; that they may have unaccountable leanings which, unless they are allowed to follow, become obsessions, hampering them throughout life. I was going to be lucid, logical, forceful. I was going to convince Mr. Tate that the best possible thing he could do with Jim was to let him go where he willed and do what he liked, give him a chance to find his feet, and if he failed, take him back into the fold—this last suggestion being in the nature of a sop to parental authority, for I knew that Jim would not fail.

But my admirable intentions fall rather flat in retrospect because I never had a chance of carrying them out. On coming down to breakfast the following morning—late as usual—I found Mrs. Tate in a condition bordering on tears, Clem and Meg strangely preoccupied, and their father evidently boiling with wrath.

"Jim's gone," Mrs. Tate explained.

"Gone?" I echoed fatuously. "Where?"

"That's what we're going to find out," exploded Mr. Tate.

"I can't think why——" Mrs. Tate began plaintively.

"We'll find that out, too," her husband promised. "We're going on a round-up. We'll comb the country for Jim, and when we've found him we'll comb him. Here in this room he'll tell us what's in that bone-head of his so that we'll know. I'll have him earmarked before I've done … Clearing out that way. … On foot, too!"

This last peculiarity of conduct appeared to be the acme of Jim's guilt. He had left three perfectly good saddle horses in the stable and walked away from High Butte.

"Perhaps he's only gone for a stroll," I ventured.

"Stroll?" demanded Mr. Tate. "What's that?"

"Er—a walk."

"What would he want to walk for, except after duck? And he didn't take the gun."

Once more I felt myself subjected to the scrutiny that reduced me to a performing ant. How was I to explain to this man that his son had, no doubt, walked away from High Butte because it was his most natural means of progression, and in order to remove himself as far as possible from everything that the rest of the family considered worth living for? It was hopeless. I gave it up.

"Come, Clem, Meg!" Mr. Tate led his more normal progeny to the stables, where, after a brief conclave, they mounted and rode off in different directions.

They should have found Jim easily enough. On the prairie a pedestrian is such a phenomenon that cattle flee from him at sight or attack him as a menace beyond their ken. I pictured the lad a minute, moving speck on the vast plains, migrating with the instinct of a bird to more desirable climes. I saw him captured in full flight by an uncomprehending and indignant family, and his ignominious return to durance vile. I saw many things that never came to pass, for they failed to round up Jimmy Tate on that day or any other.

The problem of his escape fascinated me, and I went to the lake for a solution. The "boat" was gone. How? Where? Certainly not to the bottom, for the water was no more than three feet at its deepest. I climbed the butte and sat there looking southward, as Jim had done. And there the thing dawned on me. But what a thing! No wonder he had not been found. Who in all the prairies would dream of leaving High Butte by water? Yet that, I somehow knew, was what Jim had done.

And when you came to think of it, why not? The Cypress Hills are a watershed, the birthplace of many a tributary to mighty rivers. Northward they flow at long last into Hudson's Bay; southward, into the Gulf of Mexico. What was to prevent him drifting with the current from Saskatchewan into Montana, and so through the Dakotas southward and still south? Obstacles? What are obstacles to the migrant bird or youth with the call of the sea in its veins?

Where Sucker Creek, a busy stream, left the lake, the rushes were trampled down. Half a mile further on a corrugated iron lee-board lay wedged in the willow stump that had wrenched it from the gunwale. There was no need to look further. "Good luck to him!" said I, and, not without a twinge of envy, retraced my steps to the ranch.

But the matter of Jim's disappearance was not to be so easily disposed of. There was the family, and families have a knack of wearing one down. For three days the abortive round-ups held sway, and I began to feel my position. Was it the right thing to withhold any clue as to Jim's whereabouts from his anxious relatives? Perhaps, after all, he might be persuaded. …

In something of this frame of mind I told Mr. Tate that I was going for one of my prolonged rambles, saddled up my own particular mount—warranted not to indulge in anything more violent than an armchair lope—and set out to follow the tortuous windings of Sucker Creek.

These I followed for the best part of a day without seeing anything more interesting than shoals of the extraordinary fish that give the stream its name, slept at the usual hospitable ranch house, and continued the following morning.

By this time Sucker Creek had merged into the White Mud River and crossed the Montana boundary. Another day, and the White Mud would dissolve into the turgid waters of the Missouri. After that … But surely a loping pony could overtake a drifting log. I began to doubt my own deductions about Jim. He had certainly left High Butte by water, but what if he had tired of such an arduous avenue of escape and taken to the prosaic but speedier freight train at the first opportunity? There would be no tracking him in that case. Also night was coming on, and my noble steed was growing weary. …

Then I saw him. He was squatting over a camp fire in the lee of a cutbank, with the "boat" made fast to a sage bush. He grinned as I approached, and offered me a grilled sucker, which I ate with relish.

"You've come a long way," said I.

"Have I?" said Jim.

"Well, if you want your position, you're in the State of Montana on the White Mud River. Another couple of days and you would have been on the Missouri."

"How d'you mean 'would have been'?" Jim inquired with a hint of obstinacy.

"If I hadn't found you," I suggested lightly.

"I knew you would if anyone did," said Jim. "But I don't see what difference that makes."

"Don't you? Well, I've come to take you back."

Jim prodded the fire with a willow gad. "How are you going to do that?" he asked without a trace of rancour.

I looked at him and rather wondered myself.

"You'll listen to reason," I told him.

"I'm listening," said Jim.

"What you're doing is crazy. Where are you going? What are you going to do when you get there?"

He looked across the river as he had looked out from the butte-top.

"I'm going wherever the old boat will take me," he said. "All this water's going somewhere, I guess, and I'm going with it. I like water."

"I know you do," I admitted. "So do I, but it doesn't make me give up home, family, everything, and set out on a perfectly crazy adventure."

"Doesn't it?" said Jim. "Hasn't it ever?"

"No," I lied.

"Well, it has me," said Jim with quiet content.

I felt that the situation required a fresh approach.

"You ought to think of others," I told him severely.

"I have," said Jim.

"Yes, and given them endless trouble and anxiety looking for you."

"I gave 'em more trouble when I was home. They'll get a feller who can ride now. And as for this anxiety stuff, I'll bet it don't last out the week. Mother 'll get busy with the bread-making, and dad'll say I'm plumb locoed, and that'll be the end of that."

"Then you refuse to come back?" I asserted.

Jim regarded me queerly across the embers of the fire. He seemed to be looking for something.

"Say," he said after a pause, "would you go back?"

"Certainly!" I almost shouted.

"Aw, quit your kidding!" said Jim. "I believe you want to come along, too."

"Look here," said I, when fully recovered from the effects of this preposterous statement, "you think you're pretty smart, don't you? You reckon you'll carry this thing through in spite of hell and all that. But you won't. You don't know what you're up against. You'll sicken of it before long, and come back to High Butte with your tail between your legs."

"Will I?" said Jim. "Then why are you trying to stop me now?"

"Listen to me," I snapped. "I'm doing the talking. I know where you're bound for if you don't. You'll go sliding down this greasy old river until you come to some real live rapids that'll rip your precious boat to slivers and send you to the bottom. Or if you do get away with it, you'll go hungry for days on end and have to bucksaw wood to fill your belly. You may remember how you liked bucksawing wood on the ranch. But never mind that. Say you stick it out——"

"Yes?" prompted Jim where I paused for inspiration. He was sitting with his knees drawn up to his chin, staring at me with wide eyes. I was encouraged to continue, Heaven help me!

"Say you stick it out just from bull-headed obstinacy or natural conceit—I'm not sure which—and get right down to—well, to where most rivers end. What then?"

"What then?" echoed Jim.

"Why, you'll be properly in the soup," I struggled on. "There'll be no one to care a whoop about you in a big city, and you won't be able to catch fish or even bucksaw wood for a living. You'll starve, or be sent back where you belong as a minor."

"What's that?"

"Under twenty-one."

"But won't there be any water there?" inquired Jim.

"Water!" I contrived to laugh derisively. "You'll be up against so much water you won't know which way to turn."

"But——" Jim was about to say something, but evidently changed his mind.

"Oh, yes," I railed, "you think you'll like that just because it is water. But you get a job as galley boy—which is all you could get—under a dyspeptic cook on a coasting schooner, and see what you think about it. Or, better still, try pig-iron polishing on a steam tramp——"

"I will," said Jim.

"You what?" I barked.

"I will," repeated Jim, with his mechanically protruding jaw

"I don't think so," said I with frigid calm "Oh, no, you won't do anything like that."

"Why not," queried Jim, "if I want to?"

"Because you'll think it over to-night, and come back with me to-morrow morning, or I'll tell your people where you are and what you intend to do."

He sat quite still for a moment, staring at his naked feet, then looked up at me in the same queer way that he had done before.

"No, you won't," he said with quiet conviction. "You'll think it over to-night, and not do anything like that."

I could have slain him on the spot and dragged his dead body back to High Butte.

He was right.

I slept better that night than I had done for months—probably because I lay in a horse blanket and slicker on a bed of mud—and woke at dawn ready to open my campaign on an entirely new basis. But the enemy had evidently foreseen this, and saved me the trouble by decamping during the night. The reach was empty of him. I pictured him careering southward at the rate of knots. I witnessed his arrival at New Orleans, his first glimpse of the sea, his first experience of it, no matter under what conditions, and finally his return to High Butte on shore leave with a parrot in a cage. It was all highly absurd, but that is what I saw on my way back to the ranch.

Through the open doorway I caught a glimpse of Mrs. Tate busying herself with a batch of bread. Her husband as seated on the top rail of the horse corral, alternately whittling a stick and watching Clem halter-break a promising gelding.

"Any news?" I asked.

Mr. Tate looked up with the light of positive enthusiasm in his eye.

"The black mare's foaled," he said. "A peach!"

Undoubtedly Jim was right.