Also, once she had saved a settlement
by riding ahead of a marauding Indian band to warn their intended
victims, and had averted another tragedy of pioneer life. Pioneers
proudly told strangers to Jansen of the girl of thirteen who rode a
hundred and twenty miles without food, and sank inside the palisade of
the Hudson's Bay Company's fort, as the gates closed upon the settlers
taking refuge, the victim of brain fever at last. Cerebrospinal
meningitis, the doctor from Winnipeg called it, and the memory of that
time when men and women would not sleep till her crisis was past, was
still fresh on the tongues of all.
Then she had married at seventeen, and, within a year, had lost both her
husband and her baby, a child bereaved of her Playmates--for her husband
had been but twenty years old and was younger far than she in everything.
And since then, twelve years before, she had seen generations of lovers
pass into the land they thought delectable; and their children flocked to
her, hung about her, were carried off by her to the ranch, and kept for
days, against the laughing protests of their parents. Flood Rawley called
her the Pied Piper of Jansen, and indeed she had a voice that fluted and
piped, and yet had so whimsical a note, that the hardest faces softened
at the sound of it; and she did not keep its best notes for the few.
Pages:
308
309
310
311
312
313
314
315
316
317
318
319
320
321
322
323
324
325
326
327
328
329
330
331
332