Chapter 3
Their was neither a Doctor nor a dentist in High Prairie at that time and after Jack got back from Stugeon Lake he decided to go to Edmonton and have some teeth pulled and, have a Doctor look at his foot, and see if there was anything they could do for it.
This was in the Spring of 1917 and he'd hardly been able to sleep since he'd got hurt in the fall of 1914. He had his teeth fixed but the Edmonton Doctors could do nothing for his leg except take it off at the knee. The bones in his leg had grown together and the exposed nerve cause the almost unedurable pain.
While waiting for his false teeth Jack spent his time in the livery stable, the usual place for idle horsemen of that period.
The owner of the stable gave Jack a job clipping horses. That is he clipped the long wornout winter hair off of them. The clipping machine was run by electricity so Jack made a rest for his knee so he could clip a horse and not have to walk around it too much on his crutches. A lot of men brought their horses to Jack to be clipped that Spring and except for appointments with the Doctor or the Dentist he worked early and late. He was contracting so the work pleased him.
About the time clipping horses ended for the Spring, the foreman of the Clover Bar Ranch put a team in the livery barn and after watching Jack clip a refactory horse offered him a job on the ranch during seeding provided he could drive an outlaw horse that the ranch owner possessed, and he couldn't get men who could drive it nor find anyone that would buy it.
Jack firmly believed that he could drive anything that wore horsehide so he hired to the Clover Bar. He dad a shore argument with the ranch foreman the first morning he worked their. Jack was to use four horses on a Sulky plow and be his own boss till he got the the outlaw horse working. The foreman was peeved when he met Jack leading the outlaw horse behind the plow on the way to the field. "I thought I hired you to drive that horse not lead him," the foreman growled.
"And I thought," Jack replied, "that I'd hired out to drive this horse not him and you too. I'll drive him my own way or I won't drive him at all."
At this the foreman left and kept whatever thoughts he had to himself. In the field Jack made no effort to plow for a time after he had hooked the outlaw horse up with the rest of the team.
He contented himself by driving around and around the field with the rest of the men who were plowing. He merely kept the outfit of horses going in their proper place until the outlaw horse had got used to going around the field then let the plow into the ground so gradually that the formerly unmangable horse didn't notice the difference in weight, by noon the horse was working perfectly.
Jack got along good with all the men including the foreman. After the busy time of seeding was over all the men including Jack had been called for the army. Before they went to Barracks for their medical they went to a local bar for some medicine and were all feeling pretty good during the Doctors examination. While the men were stripped Jack was hopping around on one foot tickling any man he could get close too. He made the Doctors so angry that they passed him without an examination. They had told him to report to a training unit at Calgary when one of the men that had been rejected because of a very minor ailment explained to the Doctors that Jack had left his crutches at the barracks door.
This was the end of the army career of High Prairies greatest athlete. At the Clover Bar Ranch Jack had roped a horse by a fluke throw. He know almost nothing of using a lariat but the catch had been so perfect that all the spectators thought he was an expert roper.
After the army had rejected him, Sandy, the Clover Bar foreman, offered him the Stockmans job at better than usual wages. Jack accepted the riding job and spent his spare time practising with a rope until he was fairly handy with a lassoo. He could only use one foot in the stirrup when he was riding and it was his job to break the saddle horses the ranch raised. Where Jack gathered horses out of the willow and poplar brush in 1917 is now part of the Beverly district in Edmonton.
The Clover Bar had good breaking corrals and Jack was a thoroughly trained athleteor he would have never been able to accomplish the things he did.
After he had a horse tied to a post and handled until the horse knew it wasn't going to be hurt and was pretty well over its fear of man he would put it in the shute and saddle it than get on its back. At the opening of the shute gate the horse would naturaly buck a short time when it found itself partly free but with an unacustomed burden on its back. The period of rubbing and petting the horse had gone through at the snubbing post where it wasn't hurt but couldn't get loose had already taken a lot of desire to buck out of it and with Jack's split second timing the horses couldn't throw him and were soon docile enough to be sold.
As soon as a horse was gentle enough Jack rode him into the horse market in Edmonton where horses were being auctioned off every day. The saddle horses to be sold were ridden around the ring to demonstrate their good points and training while the auctioneer called for the bids. Jack demonstrated the training and gentleness of the Clover Bar horses with his crutches tucked under his arm. After the horse was sold he had to get his saddle and bridle and saddle blanket to the street car which was close to the horse market, and after riding a horse into Edmonton he rode a street care back to the ranch where he started training another horse.
Jack finaly quarreled with the foreman and quit the ranch and went back to High Prairie and got a job with his three horses packing for a survey crew that were working on a proposed branch line to Snipe Lake. Handling a string of pack horses is another job not recommended for men on crutches but Jack held it down without trouble. He used his gentle little mare Queen for a saddle horse and his other two horses followed with their packs tied on by Jack's amateur diamond hitch. Other men in the crew had done a lot mor packing than he had and they watched for his mistakes in loading the horses and showed him how to avoid making them in the future.
The railroad was intended to make the timber around Snipe Lake accessable for war use but after a fire had ruined the timber the project was abandoned.
At a Christmas concert held in the home of Mr. & Mrs. Becker Jack was introduced to their daughter Emma and later had supper with them. He was to repeat this procedure often in the near future. Emma went to work for the homestead inspector and during the winter Jack courted her ambitiously all winter.
In the Spring he bought a Sulky plow and rebuilt it into a breaking plow. It was an impossibility for him on crutches to follow the ordinary type of brush breaking plow than in use.
He could ride the Sulky but needed another horse to pull it. Their was a Stallion available so Jack bought him. The owner sold him cheap because the horse was blind. He was a descendant of Dan. Patch, the famous pacing stallion. When Jack got the blind Stallion called Clint home he found he was too fast for the rest of his horses, so Jack worked with a neighbour to get his crop in and used Clint as a saddle horse when he went to see Emma.
After Seeding Jack got a job breaking land for Gus Lutchins and Harry De Visor whose land adjoined High Prairie. On the breaking plow Jack had to get Clint to work with the other horses. Breaking bush land is another job not recommended for cripples but Jack held it down and made a few dollars at it.
With Clint working in the field Jack had no horse to take Emma driving with till Spalding asked him to Exercise his drivers because his barn man was afraid to drive them. Emma and Jack must have been a noted couple those days. A game little man who could only walk on crutches and an attractive plump girl riding in the communities best buggy with the best driving team in the country hitched to it. After finishing breaking land for Gus and Harry, Jack went back to his homestead and broke a few acres for himself.
He was at a dance for returned soldiers that fall when a heavy frost started. He left the dance to go home and cover his potatoes with hay, all the other potatoes in the country froze that night. The hay cover saved the potatoes from the frost, but a neighbours pet moose broke into the garden while Jack was away and ruined the only crop of potatoes in the district.
Jack's Courtship of Emma had ripened into an engagement and after getting her parents consent to the marriage he mailed his parents an invitation to come to his wedding. He had just dropped the invitation to his parents into the mail and at the wicket got a letter telling of his fathers death.
His need of a housekeeper was so bad however it was decided to go through with the wedding. His Mother arrived from Lanark, Ontario for the wedding which was a quiet affair held in th ehome of Emma's parents. Cannon white performed the ceremony. (turn to the black scribblier for more.)
After the weddingJack and Emma and Jacks Mother went to a Ukranian's house where they were to live for the winter and look after the Ukranian's stock while the family worked in a coal mind in Drumhellar. They curtained off a Room for the elder Mrs. Napier. The move to the Ukranian's house foiled the gang who had planned a chivaree. The chivaree party had gone to Jack's homestead but found the place deserted. Jack and Emma used th enext day for their honeymoon. They went to Jack's homestead and dug the turnips.
With the influx of settlers a school was badly needed and their had been a brisk campaign settled by vote the year before Jack and Emma were married. The people had voted for a consolidated school in High Prairie instead of a one room school in each settlement. Those in favor of a school in each settlement had said that there were days when no team could get through with a load. The following thirty years proved them wrong for in that time the school van never missed a day that school was in.
The Prairie River Consolidated School District had been fomred in 1917 but wasn't opened until 1918 due to the wartime shortage of teachers.
Bill Stewart was the first van driver the district hired for the west side He only had one team and all his feed had been frozen. The twenty-two mile trip five days a week over snowed in trails were too much for his team so he formed the habit of stopping at Napier's and changing for one of Jack's teams to rest his own played out horses. Thus Jack had horses on the school van almost from the day it started. Bill wasn't in anyway imposing on Napier's he had merely taken a job that he lacked the horsepower to accomplish and Jack was lending a neighbourly hand.
Bill fought his way over snowfilled trails all winter. He wasn't allowed to ride inside the covered van which was heated slightly with barn lanterns and hot rocks. He had to ride on the outside regardless of the sub-zero temperatures. In spite of Jacks assistance his horses continued to get thinner as winter passed.
When spring came his troubles only changed from fighting snow and cold to battling mudholes and mosquitos. The trails at that time were quagmires from one end to the other, the horses had to pull their loads while sinking to their bellies in the mud. Bill managed to keep the school van on time and get his little bit of crop in. He resigned when school closed for the summer holidays and made the statement that if no child got any more education that he had, and Bill couldn't write his own name, he wasn't killing horsed to get them to school.
Jack had put in about 15 acres of crop that Spring but Emma had to drive the horses on the harrows because Jack couldn't get a harrowcart and it was impossible for him to walk behind the harrows on crutches. He could see by that time that doing his own farming was going to be an impossibility so he bid on the school van. He got the van contract but the school trustees told him he had to have two teams. He bought Bill's van which was an old fashioned surrey, a sort of a democrat with covered body and a door in the back and seats along the sides. It was the first spring wagon used in that school division for a van. The other drivers all used light springless wagons. Spalding was glad to sell Jack an outlaw horse that Jack has used as a driver when he was courting Emma. The hostlers had refused to take the horse called Phil., out of his stall. They had carried water into the loft in buckets and let the bucket down to him with a rope. Jack bought the horse cheap and drove him with the blind Stallion Clint. They made a wonderful team together, well mated and tireless, but Phil remained an outlaw as long as he lived. He would bite, strike or kick at the slightest provocation.
Jack made his fist trip with the van on the first of September nineteen hundred and nineteen. He was driving Clint and Phil and an hour and a half after he left home he delivered hi first load of 6 children at the two room school which was a predecessor of the large modern school that is in High Prairie today. The school at that time was a two story building with one room downstairs and the other upstairs. After delivering the children at the school in the mornings Jack wenthome four miles home and worked on his farm till two o'clock in the afternoon when he went back to town and picked up the children an took them home.
There had been a rumor that a Doctor was coming to High Prairie and Jack kept a close watch out for him because Emma was pregnant and needed medical attention. Jack searched fruitlessly for the doctor the morning he was supposed to arrive and overtook two returned soldiers on his way home, the soldiers were afoot and looking for homesteads and Jack insisted on them coming home to dinner with him. One of the soldiers turned out to be the Doctor the community had waited for so hopefully. At dinner that day a lifelong friendship started between Napiers and Dr. Mac.Intyre. The Dr. examined Emma after dinner and said she should go to an Edmonton hospital to have her baby. Jack took Doc. and his friend out to look over some land that was open for homesteading and on there way the two men discovered that they were from the same part of Ontario. The men talked while time sped past, neither of them thought of the van that should have been started for town at two o'clock. When Dr. Mac Intyre looked at his watch it was an hour past van starting time. Jack arrived home in a mental state that was locally described as a dither to find that Emma's sister that was staying with them had taken the van and was doing Jacks job for that afternoon. Doc. had found land that had suited him under Jacks direction and he and his companion left. Later Doc. and his family moved to High Prairie, his companion elsewhere.
It was almost time for Emma to go to Edmonton to have her baby and Jack was trying franticaly to borrow some money for the trip. Money has always been a scarcity in a homestead country and their had been no threshing done yet that fall so though Jack got more sympathy than he could use he couldn't get money anywhere. There were plenty of people who were willing to help him out but they were in the same financial condition as he was.
Spaulding stopped Jack on the street one morning after he had delivered his load of children at the school. "At last there is a man in town that can loan you the money you need, Jack", he said by way of greeting, " a bank is just opening up here, come on over and I'll introduce you to the manager."
With the introduction over Spaulding told the banker to loan Jack whatever money he needed. Jack asked for two hundred dollars to tide him over. Since the banker was moving the bank equipment into a building and Jack wanted to get back to work on a threshing outfit they didn't bother to fix the usualy papers that morning.
"Your the first customer we've had since we moved into town so we'll fill out the papers when I get more time," the banker said.
Jack drew one hundred dollars for Emma's trip and hospital expenses and left the other hundred on deposit. He happily went back and told Emma to get ready to go to the hospital. The money didn't solve all his problems but it reduced those of coming parenthood to a minimum. The pain in his leg remained almost unendurable and he had to do all his walking on crutches He was milking two cows and had some pigs to feed. One of the older schoolgirls drove the gentle team on the van while Jack put in full days on a threshing outfit with Clint and Phil. It is no minor accomplishment for a man on crutches to drive a run away team and pitch bundles on a threshing outfit but Jack did it and after Emma left for Edmonton he went home every night to tend to his cows and pigs.
With the carelessness in such matters that had been born in his years on the frontier Jack hadn't gone to the bank to sign the statement for his loan. He had borrowed the money and he owed it. Since he had got the loan he'd been working steadily at good wages for himself and his team while the neighbour girl had driven the school van and Jack just hadn't had time to go to town and sign the papers. One morning however when the girl driver had stayed home to help her mother with their own threshers Jack was hurrying back to the threshing outfit to get in a few hours work before driving the van on the afternoon trip he met the bankers on the street. The banker had a bank statement sheet in his hand. On his face he wore that awful look of a banker who has been betrayed
"Mon" he almost screamed in broad Scotch "Do you never intend to honour your obligations." Its two weeks since I made you that loan and never a scratch of the pen to show for it."
Inside the bank they made anodd pair On one side of the desk sat an irate Scotch banker while across from him sat a good-natured cripple who with his tongue in his cheek, poured acid into the banker's wounds.
As the banker took down Jack's statement and discovered his liabilities far outweighed his assets his broad Scotch broadened futher and his language grew worse. Jack owed money on his cattle, he owed on the van itself and he owed for one of his horses. About all the banker could see that he owned was the coming baby, and he didn't seem interested in that, even when Jack told him he was hoping for a boy.
As Jack continued, in soothing tones to pour an acid that is particularly painful to bankers the mans look absolutely strickened.
"And to think you were vouched for by one of the towns most influencial citizens," he groaned.
More because he wanted to get back to the threshing outfit for a few hours work than from sympathy for the overwrought banker, Jack finaly relented and told him he had the van contract by the year, and he had enough wages coming from threshing to pay back the hundred dollars he had drawn from the bank.
This may have improved the banker's temper It didn't improve his language and at the knowledge that while Jack had been sitting in his office hi could have been making more money on the threshing machine he amost grew beserk.
"What are you doing here" he demanded unreasonably, "Sitting on your fanny when you coudl be on the machine and making money. Get out of here and back to the field where you belong." With that he tore up Jack's statement and Jack went back to help the overworked crew.
Emma arrived home wit her baby son John, on the twentieth of October (insert: 1919) and found a foot of snow on the ground and the threshing crew at their place with Mrs. Smith cooking for them. Napier's were the last stook threshing job around High Prairie that fall. There were still some stacks to thresh after Napiers were finished. Moving the old upright steam engine that the threshermen crew used for power, it took the entire threshing crew and eight horses all one day to move a mile through the deep snow to the first stacks that were to be threshed.
Jack settled down to his van driving job and the weather settled down to be cold with a vengeance. The van rules required that the driver ride outside. He wasn't allowed to share with the children the little warmth there was inside the van from heated stones and barn lanterns as well as blankets. The other drivers could get one of the older children to drive the team while they walked behind the van to warm up but Jack couldn't walk, was sentenced to freeze like a man rather than run like a dog. He didn't quite freeze, though he suffered indescribable agony when the could penetrated his crippled foot. With the continued cold and snowstorms, the trails getting worse Jack finaly decided that if he couldn't run like a dog he could probably growl a lot worse so he called for a showdown on the stove question. The legal objection to a stove was that the van might upset and catch on fire with a children inside.
The cold agonizing Jacks foot caused the burning question of a stove inside the school van to be settled at last in favor of Jack's desires. He was allowed a coal stove in front of the van.
**Insert in pencil: He built 4 different vans I can remember of before having a motor school bus in 1948 or 1949 than we moved into town where he drove a bus to Little Smokey and in 1951 we moved to Mc. Lennan where he drove bus to Donnely for a couple years than from Mc. Lennan to High Prairie when he retired in May 1960 off the bus. and drove Taxi when off duty for 2 or 3 years.
He could ride the Sulky but needed another horse to pull it. Their was a Stallion available so Jack bought him. The owner sold him cheap because the horse was blind. He was a descendant of Dan. Patch, the famous pacing stallion. When Jack got the blind Stallion called Clint home he found he was too fast for the rest of his horses, so Jack worked with a neighbour to get his crop in and used Clint as a saddle horse when he went to see Emma.
After Seeding Jack got a job breaking land for Gus Lutchins and Harry De Visor whose land adjoined High Prairie. On the breaking plow Jack had to get Clint to work with the other horses. Breaking bush land is another job not recommended for cripples but Jack held it down and made a few dollars at it.
With Clint working in the field Jack had no horse to take Emma driving with till Spalding asked him to Exercise his drivers because his barn man was afraid to drive them. Emma and Jack must have been a noted couple those days. A game little man who could only walk on crutches and an attractive plump girl riding in the communities best buggy with the best driving team in the country hitched to it. After finishing breaking land for Gus and Harry, Jack went back to his homestead and broke a few acres for himself.
He was at a dance for returned soldiers that fall when a heavy frost started. He left the dance to go home and cover his potatoes with hay, all the other potatoes in the country froze that night. The hay cover saved the potatoes from the frost, but a neighbours pet moose broke into the garden while Jack was away and ruined the only crop of potatoes in the district.
Jack's Courtship of Emma had ripened into an engagement and after getting her parents consent to the marriage he mailed his parents an invitation to come to his wedding. He had just dropped the invitation to his parents into the mail and at the wicket got a letter telling of his fathers death.
His need of a housekeeper was so bad however it was decided to go through with the wedding. His Mother arrived from Lanark, Ontario for the wedding which was a quiet affair held in th ehome of Emma's parents. Cannon white performed the ceremony. (turn to the black scribblier for more.)
After the weddingJack and Emma and Jacks Mother went to a Ukranian's house where they were to live for the winter and look after the Ukranian's stock while the family worked in a coal mind in Drumhellar. They curtained off a Room for the elder Mrs. Napier. The move to the Ukranian's house foiled the gang who had planned a chivaree. The chivaree party had gone to Jack's homestead but found the place deserted. Jack and Emma used th enext day for their honeymoon. They went to Jack's homestead and dug the turnips.
With the influx of settlers a school was badly needed and their had been a brisk campaign settled by vote the year before Jack and Emma were married. The people had voted for a consolidated school in High Prairie instead of a one room school in each settlement. Those in favor of a school in each settlement had said that there were days when no team could get through with a load. The following thirty years proved them wrong for in that time the school van never missed a day that school was in.
The Prairie River Consolidated School District had been fomred in 1917 but wasn't opened until 1918 due to the wartime shortage of teachers.
Bill Stewart was the first van driver the district hired for the west side He only had one team and all his feed had been frozen. The twenty-two mile trip five days a week over snowed in trails were too much for his team so he formed the habit of stopping at Napier's and changing for one of Jack's teams to rest his own played out horses. Thus Jack had horses on the school van almost from the day it started. Bill wasn't in anyway imposing on Napier's he had merely taken a job that he lacked the horsepower to accomplish and Jack was lending a neighbourly hand.
Bill fought his way over snowfilled trails all winter. He wasn't allowed to ride inside the covered van which was heated slightly with barn lanterns and hot rocks. He had to ride on the outside regardless of the sub-zero temperatures. In spite of Jacks assistance his horses continued to get thinner as winter passed.
When spring came his troubles only changed from fighting snow and cold to battling mudholes and mosquitos. The trails at that time were quagmires from one end to the other, the horses had to pull their loads while sinking to their bellies in the mud. Bill managed to keep the school van on time and get his little bit of crop in. He resigned when school closed for the summer holidays and made the statement that if no child got any more education that he had, and Bill couldn't write his own name, he wasn't killing horsed to get them to school.
Jack had put in about 15 acres of crop that Spring but Emma had to drive the horses on the harrows because Jack couldn't get a harrowcart and it was impossible for him to walk behind the harrows on crutches. He could see by that time that doing his own farming was going to be an impossibility so he bid on the school van. He got the van contract but the school trustees told him he had to have two teams. He bought Bill's van which was an old fashioned surrey, a sort of a democrat with covered body and a door in the back and seats along the sides. It was the first spring wagon used in that school division for a van. The other drivers all used light springless wagons. Spalding was glad to sell Jack an outlaw horse that Jack has used as a driver when he was courting Emma. The hostlers had refused to take the horse called Phil., out of his stall. They had carried water into the loft in buckets and let the bucket down to him with a rope. Jack bought the horse cheap and drove him with the blind Stallion Clint. They made a wonderful team together, well mated and tireless, but Phil remained an outlaw as long as he lived. He would bite, strike or kick at the slightest provocation.
Jack made his fist trip with the van on the first of September nineteen hundred and nineteen. He was driving Clint and Phil and an hour and a half after he left home he delivered hi first load of 6 children at the two room school which was a predecessor of the large modern school that is in High Prairie today. The school at that time was a two story building with one room downstairs and the other upstairs. After delivering the children at the school in the mornings Jack went
There had been a rumor that a Doctor was coming to High Prairie and Jack kept a close watch out for him because Emma was pregnant and needed medical attention. Jack searched fruitlessly for the doctor the morning he was supposed to arrive and overtook two returned soldiers on his way home, the soldiers were afoot and looking for homesteads and Jack insisted on them coming home to dinner with him. One of the soldiers turned out to be the Doctor the community had waited for so hopefully. At dinner that day a lifelong friendship started between Napiers and Dr. Mac.Intyre. The Dr. examined Emma after dinner and said she should go to an Edmonton hospital to have her baby. Jack took Doc. and his friend out to look over some land that was open for homesteading and on there way the two men discovered that they were from the same part of Ontario. The men talked while time sped past, neither of them thought of the van that should have been started for town at two o'clock. When Dr. Mac Intyre looked at his watch it was an hour past van starting time. Jack arrived home in a mental state that was locally described as a dither to find that Emma's sister that was staying with them had taken the van and was doing Jacks job for that afternoon. Doc. had found land that had suited him under Jacks direction and he and his companion left. Later Doc. and his family moved to High Prairie, his companion elsewhere.
It was almost time for Emma to go to Edmonton to have her baby and Jack was trying franticaly to borrow some money for the trip. Money has always been a scarcity in a homestead country and their had been no threshing done yet that fall so though Jack got more sympathy than he could use he couldn't get money anywhere. There were plenty of people who were willing to help him out but they were in the same financial condition as he was.
Spaulding stopped Jack on the street one morning after he had delivered his load of children at the school. "At last there is a man in town that can loan you the money you need, Jack", he said by way of greeting, " a bank is just opening up here, come on over and I'll introduce you to the manager."
With the introduction over Spaulding told the banker to loan Jack whatever money he needed. Jack asked for two hundred dollars to tide him over. Since the banker was moving the bank equipment into a building and Jack wanted to get back to work on a threshing outfit they didn't bother to fix the usualy papers that morning.
"Your the first customer we've had since we moved into town so we'll fill out the papers when I get more time," the banker said.
Jack drew one hundred dollars for Emma's trip and hospital expenses and left the other hundred on deposit. He happily went back and told Emma to get ready to go to the hospital. The money didn't solve all his problems but it reduced those of coming parenthood to a minimum. The pain in his leg remained almost unendurable and he had to do all his walking on crutches He was milking two cows and had some pigs to feed. One of the older schoolgirls drove the gentle team on the van while Jack put in full days on a threshing outfit with Clint and Phil. It is no minor accomplishment for a man on crutches to drive a run away team and pitch bundles on a threshing outfit but Jack did it and after Emma left for Edmonton he went home every night to tend to his cows and pigs.
With the carelessness in such matters that had been born in his years on the frontier Jack hadn't gone to the bank to sign the statement for his loan. He had borrowed the money and he owed it. Since he had got the loan he'd been working steadily at good wages for himself and his team while the neighbour girl had driven the school van and Jack just hadn't had time to go to town and sign the papers. One morning however when the girl driver had stayed home to help her mother with their own threshers Jack was hurrying back to the threshing outfit to get in a few hours work before driving the van on the afternoon trip he met the bankers on the street. The banker had a bank statement sheet in his hand. On his face he wore that awful look of a banker who has been betrayed
"Mon" he almost screamed in broad Scotch "Do you never intend to honour your obligations." Its two weeks since I made you that loan and never a scratch of the pen to show for it."
Inside the bank they made anodd pair On one side of the desk sat an irate Scotch banker while across from him sat a good-natured cripple who with his tongue in his cheek, poured acid into the banker's wounds.
As the banker took down Jack's statement and discovered his liabilities far outweighed his assets his broad Scotch broadened futher and his language grew worse. Jack owed money on his cattle, he owed on the van itself and he owed for one of his horses. About all the banker could see that he owned was the coming baby, and he didn't seem interested in that, even when Jack told him he was hoping for a boy.
As Jack continued, in soothing tones to pour an acid that is particularly painful to bankers the mans look absolutely strickened.
"And to think you were vouched for by one of the towns most influencial citizens," he groaned.
More because he wanted to get back to the threshing outfit for a few hours work than from sympathy for the overwrought banker, Jack finaly relented and told him he had the van contract by the year, and he had enough wages coming from threshing to pay back the hundred dollars he had drawn from the bank.
This may have improved the banker's temper It didn't improve his language and at the knowledge that while Jack had been sitting in his office hi could have been making more money on the threshing machine he amost grew beserk.
"What are you doing here" he demanded unreasonably, "Sitting on your fanny when you coudl be on the machine and making money. Get out of here and back to the field where you belong." With that he tore up Jack's statement and Jack went back to help the overworked crew.
Emma arrived home wit her baby son John, on the twentieth of October (insert: 1919) and found a foot of snow on the ground and the threshing crew at their place with Mrs. Smith cooking for them. Napier's were the last stook threshing job around High Prairie that fall. There were still some stacks to thresh after Napiers were finished. Moving the old upright steam engine that the threshermen crew used for power, it took the entire threshing crew and eight horses all one day to move a mile through the deep snow to the first stacks that were to be threshed.
Jack settled down to his van driving job and the weather settled down to be cold with a vengeance. The van rules required that the driver ride outside. He wasn't allowed to share with the children the little warmth there was inside the van from heated stones and barn lanterns as well as blankets. The other drivers could get one of the older children to drive the team while they walked behind the van to warm up but Jack couldn't walk, was sentenced to freeze like a man rather than run like a dog. He didn't quite freeze, though he suffered indescribable agony when the could penetrated his crippled foot. With the continued cold and snowstorms, the trails getting worse Jack finaly decided that if he couldn't run like a dog he could probably growl a lot worse so he called for a showdown on the stove question. The legal objection to a stove was that the van might upset and catch on fire with a children inside.
The cold agonizing Jacks foot caused the burning question of a stove inside the school van to be settled at last in favor of Jack's desires. He was allowed a coal stove in front of the van.
**Insert in pencil: He built 4 different vans I can remember of before having a motor school bus in 1948 or 1949 than we moved into town where he drove a bus to Little Smokey and in 1951 we moved to Mc. Lennan where he drove bus to Donnely for a couple years than from Mc. Lennan to High Prairie when he retired in May 1960 off the bus. and drove Taxi when off duty for 2 or 3 years.
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