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Beyond the Marshes
by
And now we hitch up Golddust, and are off through the glorious yellow light and purple haze of this September afternoon. Golddust is the missionary’s horse, and evidently the missionary’s weakness. His name, and as his owner thinks his speed, his spirit, and other characteristics, he inherits from his sire, Old Golddust of Western racing fame. Old Golddust, if he has transmitted his characteristics, must have been a horse of singular modesty, for his son continues resolutely unwilling throughout this drive to make any display of his nobler qualities. By an extraordinary piece of good fortune, due to an evil but unfair report of Golddust in his young days, “they didn’t know how to handle him.” the missionary had bought him for twenty-five dollars! One result of the deal has been an unlimited confidence on the part of the missionary in his own horse-dealing instinct. It is quite true that Golddust has not always shown his present mild and trustful disposition. Indeed, the missionary goes on to tell how, being loaned for a day to a brother missionary up west, the horse had returned in the evening much excited, but not much the worse, with a pair of shafts dangling at his heels. The missionary brother did not appear till the day following, and then in a shocking bad temper. “He was a Methodist brother, and didn’t understand horses”; and the happy, far-away look in the face of his present owner led me to doubt whether that day’s exploit had lowered Golddust in his estimation.
Meantime we are drinking deep of the delights of this mellow afternoon. On either side of our trail lie yellow harvest fields, narrow, like those of eastern Canada, and set in frames of green poplar bluffs that rustle and shimmer under the softly going wind. Then on through scrub we go, bumping over roots and pitching through holes, till we suddenly push out from the scrub, and before us lie the Marshes. There they sweep for miles away, with their different grasses waving and whispering under the steady blowing breeze, first the red-top, then as the soil grows wet the blue-joint and the swamp grass, and out of the standing water the dark green reeds, and farthest in the tall, wild cane bowing its stately, tasseled head. These red-top and blue-joint reaches are the hay-lands of the settlers about.
Skirting the edge of the Marshes, we push again through straggling scrub, then past more marshes, and into woods where we follow a winding trail till it leads us into a little clearing. In the center of the clearing stands a cluster of log buildings–stables of different kinds, milk-house, the old shanty, and at a little distance the new house, all looking snug and trim. Through the bars we drive into the yard filled with cattle, for the milking time is on.
A shy lad of ten, with sun-burned, freckled face and good blue eyes, comes forward and is greeted as “Donald” by the missionary.
“Hello, Donald, how are you?” I ask, opening the conversation. Donald looks at me and is inaudible, meanwhile unhitching Golddust with marvelous rapidity.
“How many cattle have you, Donald?” I venture again.
Donald evidently considered this a reasonable question, for he answers in delicious Scotch:
“Abou-e-t the-r-r-h-ty.”
What a pity we can find no spelling to reproduce that combination of guttural and aspirate and the inimitable inflection of voice. It is so delightful that I ask him again, and again the answer comes with even more emphasis upon guttural and aspirate, and an added curve to the inflection:
“Abou-e-t the-r-r-h-ty.”
My heart goes out to him, and watching his neat, quick work with Golddust, I begin to understand the look of thrift about the yard. It is the mark of the “weel daein” Scot.
We go up to the door of the new log house. Before the door are two broad, flat stones washed clean. “Scotch again,” I say to myself. Had I not seen them in many a Scotch village in front of the little stone cottages, thatched and decked with the climbing rose!