The Woman from Outside [On Swan River]. Footner Hulbert
![The Woman from Outside [On Swan River] - Footner Hulbert](limg_read903698.jpg "The Woman from Outside [On Swan River] - Footner Hulbert")
Causton, conscious of his importance, made a dramatic entrance with the mail-bags over his shoulder, and cast them magnificently on the counter. Even up north, where every man cultivates his own peculiarities unhindered, Ben was considered a “character.” He was a short, thick man of enormous physical strength, and he sported a beard like a quickset hedge, hence his nickname. He was clad in an entire suit of fur like an Eskimo, with a gaudy red worsted sash about his ample middle.
“Hello, Ben! Gee! but you’re slow!”
“Hello, fellows! Keep your hair on! If you want to send out for catalogues in the middle of winter you’re lucky if I get here at all. Next month, if the second class bag’s as heavy as this, I’ll drop it through an air-hole—I swear I will! So now you’re warned! I got somepin better to do than tote catalogues. When I die and go to hell, I only hope I meet the man who invented mail-order catalogues there, that’s all.”
“You’re getting feeble, Ben!”
“I got strength enough left to put your head in chancery!”
“What’s the news of the world, Ben?”
“Sarge Lambert’s got a bone felon. Ally Stiff lost a sow and a whole litter through the ice up there. Mahooly of the French outfit at the Settlement’s gone out to get him a set of chiny teeth. Says he’s going to get blue ones to dazzle the Indians. Oh, and I almost forgot; down at Ottawa the Grits are out and the Tories in.”
“Bully!”
“God help Canada!”
While Gaviller unlocked the bags, Ben went out to tie up his dogs and feed them. The trader handed out letters to the eager, extended hands, that trembled a little. Brightening eyes pounced on the superscriptions. Gaviller himself had a daughter outside being “finished,” the apple of his eye: Captain Stinson had a wife, and Mathews the engineer, an elderly sweetheart. The dark-skinned Gordon Strange, Gaviller’s clerk, carried on an extensive correspondence, the purport of which was unknown to the others, and Father Goussard was happy in the receipt of many letters from his confrères. Even young Stonor was excited, who had no one in the world to write to him but a married sister who sent him long, dutiful chronicles of small beer. But it was from “home.”
The second-class bag with the papers was scarcely less exciting. To oblige Ben they only took one newspaper between them, and passed it around, but in this mail three months’ numbers had accumulated. As the contents of the bag cascaded out on the counter, Stonor picked up an unfamiliar-looking magazine.
“Hello, what’s this?” he cried, reading the label in surprise. “Doctor Ernest Imbrie. Who the deuce is he?”
“Must have come here by mistake,” said Gaviller.
“Not a bit of it! Here’s the whole story: Doctor Ernest Imbrie, Fort Enterprise, Spirit River, Athabasca.”
It passed around from hand to hand. A new name was something to catch the attention at Fort Enterprise.
“Why, here’s another!” cried Gaviller in excitement. “And another! Blest if half the bag isn’t for him! And all addressed just so!”
They looked at each other a little blankly. All this evidence had the effect of creating an apparition there in their midst. There was an appreciable silence.
“Must be somebody who started in last year and never got through,” said Mathews. He spoke with an air of relief at discovering so reasonable an explanation.
“But we hear about everybody who comes north of the Landing,” objected Gaviller. “I would have been advised if he had a credit here.”
“Another doctor!” said Doc Giddings bitterly. “If he expects to share my practice he’s welcome!”
At another time they would have laughed at this, but the mystery teased them. They resented the fact that some rank outsider claimed Fort Enterprise for his post-office, without first having made himself known.
“If he went back outside, he’d stop all this stuff coming in, you’d think.”
“Maybe somebody’s just putting up a joke on us.”
“Funny kind of joke! Subscriptions to these magazines cost money.”
Stonor read off the titles of the magazines: “The Medical Record; The American Medical Journal; The Physician’s and Surgeon’s Bulletin.”
“Quite a scientific guy,” said Doctor Giddings, with curling lip.
“Strange, he gets so many papers and not a single letter!” remarked Father Goussard. “A friendless man!”
Gaviller picked up a round tin, one of several packed and addressed alike. He read the business card of a well-known tobacconist. “Smoking tobacco!” he said indignantly. “If the Company’s Dominion Mixture isn’t good enough for any man I’d like to know it! He has a cheek, if you ask me, bringing in tobacco under my very nose!”
“Tobacco!” cried Stonor. “It’s all very well about papers, but no man would waste good tobacco! It must be somebody who started in before Ben!”
Their own mail matter, that they had looked forward to so impatiently, was forgotten now.
When Ben Causton came back they bombarded him with questions. But this bag had come through locked all the way from Miwasa Landing, and Ben, even Ben, the great purveyor of gossip in the North, had heard nothing of any Doctor Imbrie on his way in. Ben was more excited and more indignant than any of them. Somebody had got ahead of him in spreading a sensation!
“It’s a hoe-axe,” said Ben. “It’s them fellows down at the Landing trying to get a rise out of me. Or if it ain’t that, it’s some guy comin’ in next spring, and sendin’ in his outfit piecemeal ahead of him. And me powerless to protect myself! Ain’t that an outrage! But when I meet him on the trail I’ll put it to him!”
“There are newspapers here, too,” Stonor pointed out. “No man coming in next spring would send himself last year’s papers.”
“Where is he, then?” they asked.
The question was unanswerable.
“Well, I’d like to see any lily-handed doctor guy from the outside face the river trail in the winter,” said Ben bitterly. “If he’ll do that, I’ll carry his outfit for him. But he’ll need more than his diploma to fit him for it.”
At any rate they had a brand-new subject for conversation at the post.
About a week later, when Hairy Ben had started back up the river, the routine at the post was broken by the arrival of a small party of Kakisa Indians from the Kakisa or Swan River, a large unexplored stream off to the north-west. The Kakisas, an uncivilized and shy race, rarely appeared at Enterprise, and in order to get their trade Gaviller had formerly sent out a half-breed clerk to the Swan River every winter. But this man had lately died, and now the trade threatened to lapse for the lack of an interpreter. None of the Kakisas could speak English, and there was no company employee who could speak their uncouth tongue except Gordon Strange the bookkeeper, who could not be spared from the post.
Wherefore Gaviller welcomed these six, in the hope that they might prove to be the vanguard of the main body. They were a wild and ragged lot, under the leadership of a withered elder called Mahtsonza. They were discovered by accident camping under cover of a poplar bluff across the river. No one knew how long they had been there, and Gordon Strange had a time persuading them to come the rest of the way. It was dusk when they entered the store, and Gaviller, by pre-arrangement with Mathews, clapped his hands and the electric lights went on. The effect surpassed his expectations. The Kakisas, with a gasp of terror, fled, and could not be tempted to return until daylight.
They brought a good little bundle of fur, including two silver fox skins, the finest seen at Enterprise that season. They laid their fur on the counter, and sidled about the store silent and abashed, like children