His Royal Nibs

His Royal Nibs by Winnifred Eaton Reeve

His Royal Nibs follows an unnamed Englishman who arrives, dusty and improbably tweed-clad, on foot at the O Bar O ranch in the Alberta foothills, having stampeded a herd of steers merely by appearing in the road. Foreman Bully Bill, half as a joke to liven up the ranch, hires the stammering, unfailingly cheerful stranger, who answers only to the nickname "Cheerio." Despite being given the most degrading chores and subjected to constant hazing by the hands, Cheerio proves himself: he fells an improbable number of trees with a hand axe, breaks a vicious outlaw bronco, rescues a mired purebred heifer worth $1,500 using an improvised lariat system, and eventually beats the ranch bully, Holy Smoke, in a fight after enduring repeated goading. He carries a battered grip containing a locked portfolio of drawings and a gold locket holding the photograph of a woman named Nanna, for whom he says he came to Canada to make a home. P. D. McPherson, the eccentric rancher-genius who owns O Bar O, is famous for both his prize cattle and grain and for his chess obsession; he neglected his children's formal schooling in favor of a self-styled "School of Nature," so his son Sandy and daughter Hilda grew up skilled riders and ropers but starved for books, feeding their minds on bunkhouse dime novels and the encyclopedia. Hilda, eighteen and fiercely proud of her ignorance of the wider world, takes an instant, inexplicable dislike to Cheerio, reading his manners and his devotion to the locket as proof of effete, aristocratic condescension. Sandy, however, becomes Cheerio's devoted companion on fossil-hunting rides along the Ghost River, where Cheerio secretly maintains a hidden cave studio and paints vivid portraits of the ranch, its Indian neighbors from the Morley Reserve, and, obsessively and only from memory, Hilda herself. A shared reading of Dumas's The Three Musketeers, begun after Hilda is caught secretly borrowing Cheerio's book, draws brother, sister, and Englishman into nightly storytelling sessions, and Hilda's hostility begins to soften into a confused, resisted attraction. The turning point comes at the branding corral: Cheerio, overwhelmed by a blood phobia rooted in a traumatic wartime memory of freezing in battle and being taken prisoner after destroying an enemy machine-gun post, faints and is overheard mumbling what sounds like a confession of cowardice in France. Bully Bill fires him on Holy Smoke's urging, and Hilda publicly denounces him as a coward. Brought before P. D. for formal dismissal, Cheerio instead challenges the old man to a nightly chess match for his job, since P. D.'s mail has just brought a long-awaited invitation to challenge Chicago's champion for a cross-border title by November 30th. Cheerio proves a formidable player, beating P. D. game after game, and the ranch's chess obsession becomes local and then newspaper news via reporter Duncan Mallison, who discovers Cheerio's hidden cave paintings and, through an old clipping, learns his true identity: he is the presumed-dead heir of Lord Chelsmore, who enlisted as a common soldier and vanished after his father died and his fiancée married his younger brother. Mallison, moved by Cheerio's decency, suppresses the story at his editor's indulgence. Meanwhile P. D.'s repeated chess losses erode his confidence and threaten his health, worrying Hilda even as she still nurses resentment toward Cheerio; ranch hands grow restless waiting for the delayed fall cattle roundup while P. D. remains absorbed in the matches. Tension with Holy Smoke escalates, culminating in his attempt to lasso Hilda from ambush near a pasture gate; Cheerio, drawn by some instinct, arrives to rescue her, and the shared danger and his tender concern finally break down Hilda's defenses, leading her to recognize that she loves him. Alone in her room afterward, she wrestles with jealousy over the still-mysterious Nanna and fear that Cheerio may already be committed to another woman.

By Winnifred Eaton Reeve · First published 1925 · Genre: Romance, Western Fiction, Comedy · 27 chapters · 61,021 words

First lines

Along the Banff National Highway, automobiles sped by in a cloud of dust, heat, noise and odour. They stopped not to offer a lift to the wayfarer along the road, for they were intent upon making the evergrowing grade to Banff on "high."

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Western fiction · ranch fiction · Canadian literature · Alberta foothills · Rocky Mountains · 1920s · post-World War I · war veteran · English protagonist · class conflict · hidden identity · romance

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His Royal Nibs is listed on Textopian as a novel by Winnifred Eaton Reeve, dated 1925 CE.

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