English bachelor ranchman within ten miles. She did their washing
and ironing, and never neglected her own, either. She knitted socks
for them, and made and sold quantities of Saskatoon berry jam. When
spring came she had over fifty dollars of her own, with which she
promptly bought a cow. Then late in March they made a small first
payment of a team of horses, and "broke land" for the first time,
plowing and seeding a few acres of virgin prairie and getting a
start.

But her quaintest invention to utilize every resource possible was
a novel scheme for chicken-raising. One morning the children came
in greatly excited over finding a wild duck's nest in the nearby
"slough." Mrs. Henderson told them to be very careful not to
frighten the bird, but to go back and search every foot of the
grassy edges and try to discover other nests. They succeeded in
finding three. That day a neighboring English rancher, driving past
on his way to Brandon, twenty miles distant, called out, "Want
anything from town, Mrs. Henderson?"

"Eggs, just eggs, if you will bring them, like a good boy," she
answered, running out to the trail to meet him.

"Why, you _are_ luxurious to-day, and eggs at fifty cents a dozen,"
he exclaimed.

"Never mind," she replied, "they're not nearly so luxurious as
chickens. You just bring me a dozen and a half. Pay _any_ price,
but be sure they are fresh, new laid, right off the nest. Now just
insist on that, or we shall quarrel." And with a menacing shake of
a forefinger and a customary laugh, she handed him a precious bank
note to pay for the treasures.

The next day Mrs. Henderson adroitly substituted hen's eggs for the
wild ducks' own, and the shy, pretty water fowls, returning from
their morning's swim, never discovered the fraud. [Fact.]

"Six eggs under three sitters--eighteen chicks, if we're lucky
enough to have secured fertile eggs," mused Mrs. Henderson. "Oh,
well, we'll see." And they _did_ see. They saw exactly eighteen
fluffy, peeping chicks, whose timid little mothers could not
understand why their broods disappeared one by one from the long,
wet grasses surrounding the nest. But in a warm canton flannel
lined basket near the Henderson's stove the young arrivals chirped
and picked at warm meal as sturdily as if hatched in a coop by a
commonplace barnyard "Biddy." And every one of those chicks lived
and grew and fattened into a splendid flock, and the following
spring they began sitting on their