SEEDS OF PINE

By

JANEY CANUCK

Author of
"Open Trails", etc.

"A handful of pine-seeds will cover mountains with the green majesty of the forest, and I, too, will set my face to the wind and throw my handful of seed on high."
—Fiona Macleod

TORONTO
THE MUSSON BOOK COMPANY LIMITED

Copyright, Canada, 1922
THE MUSSON BOOK COMPANY, LTD.
PUBLISHERS
TORONTO

Affectionately dedicated to
my four brothers;
Thomas R. Ferguson, K.C.
Gowan Ferguson, M.D.
Harcourt Ferguson, K.C.
Honourable Mr. Justice W. N. Ferguson

CONTENTS

SEEDS OF PINE

CHAPTER I

WESTWARD WITH THE GRAND TRUNK PACIFIC

"'What went ye out into the wilderness to see?' They answered thus, 'So that we might not see the city.'"—SIR WILLIAM BUTLER.

The new steel trail the railway men are laying from Edmonton leads away and away, I cannot say whither. For these many days I have had an anxious desire to follow it and the glories thereof. I am tired of this town and of the electrical devices that appear and re-appear in the darkness like eyes that open and shut—wicked eyes that burn their commercial message into my very soul. I am sick of these saucy, swaggering streets and of sundry of the townspeople. Come you with me and let us travel down the ways through the heart of the summer! We shall have breeze and sun in our eyes, and breeze and sun in our hearts. If you like not the prospect, pray, come no further, for we be contrary the one to the other and no way-fellows.

As we climb on the train this morning, it seems as though our quest for quiet is to be cheated by the wallowing wave of humanity that threatens to submerge us. Who are these close-nudged folk and whither away?

She who runs may read them for hard-headed, white-handed men in search of "prospects"; brown-throated homesteaders; real-estate agents out for talking points and for snap fortunes; mining engineers with dunnage bags—young fellows all in the full force of life—these, and "the gang," who are ill-looking men and rather dirty. The gang fare forth to work on the railway grades. They are always ganging—that is going—for the words are strictly synonymous. The gang going to the city meet the gang coming out. And so in everything they are retroactive, and fight much, and swear, to give weight to their differences of opinion. In one thing only is the gang agreed, no navvy has yet been found who disputed the axiom that the Boss is a yellow canine.

There is a sprinkling of women, too, and we talk to each other in the friendly manner of the country. A couple of them are half-breed girls, with drooping feathers and skirts that have a hiss. Surely their men are industrious Indians. Both are cinched into their clothes like a cayuse into its pack-saddle. Both have skin the colour of brown coffee into which milk has been poured, and always they are fussing with their pinned-on curls. "The judicious Hooker" once watched some women doing this, and he said they were "a-dilling and burling their hair." No one may ever hope to strike out a more apt expression. The younger of the girls has an indiscreet mouth and desirous eyes. I should not be surprised, if one of these times our little brown woman found these to be a mortgage on her soul somewhat difficult of discharge. And the usury, little woman, it troubles me, the usury!

The farmer's wife who shares my seat came to this province ten years ago from the United States. Her husband made entry for a homestead and she built the house, outbuildings, and fences on it, and bought the implements with money she had saved from school-teaching. The first year, their crop was frozen; the second, it was hailed out; and the third, a spark from the threshing-machine burned their wheat stacks. Their horses died and they had to incur debt for others. All this time, the woman supported the household with the returns from her poultry yard and dairy. These last years have been fat ones, thus enabling them to save sufficient money to send two of their sons to the business college in Town. The eldest girl is walking with the young man on the adjoining farm and a wedding is brewing.

To my thinking, this homely, ill-accoutred woman is something like a heroine, and it is a pity the end of her troubles is not yet. Her husband, who appears to be a flabby-spirited fellow, has always wanted to, and has finally decided that he will sell the farm and go to the town to keep a boarding-house. She is opposed to the move and has been in the town endeavouring to protect her interests in the property, but finds she is unable so to do. Because of this she has decided to buy the farm from him and has the agreement ready for his signature. I am astounded by her hardihood. She has the soul of a warrior. If the recalcitrant spouse refuses to sell—no, I won't tell what she intends doing, for I am willing to wager you, even to the half of my kingdom, that he sells.

The woman is proud, I can see, and accordingly careful to enlarge on her man's good qualities, but it takes no acuteness to read through her assurances that he is a pessimist and one who always draws tails in the toss of life.

The readers who have come with me thus far may here swing off key, but, People Dear, you would be wrong; she is not chastising him; she is mothering him. It is a remarkable trait in the make-up of a good woman that she can, in critical junctures, not only be her own mother but may also act in this capacity to the husband of her children. It is this same office the Holy Ghost performs in the Trinity.

The newsy is giving the last call to breakfast. He is a full-lifed young man, with a cock-o'-my-walk air. I would not be surprised if he were hatched out of the egg of a pouter-pigeon. He serves meals as far as Edson, from whence we will be transferred to a construction train and trust to manna being rained down from heaven. His tables are crowded with guests, and we sit close like kernels on an ear of corn. For breakfast, there is tea; there is coffee; there are pork chops, and other fat foods which are made palatable by the sprightly addition of sour pickles. Indeed, you may credit me, this breakfast is not one to be sniffed at. I drink pannikins of tea that is very strong and green, and fearlessly ask for more. If there is a happier woman in the North than myself, I have never heard of her. I quite agree with you; our pouter-pigeon serves the public far more effectually than do the cabineteers, or even the bishops.

We are yet in the wheat belt and the wheat is at flood-tide. When I see a large stand of grain that is breast-high I say, "Well done, Good Fellows!" and "Haste to the in-gathering!" The field hears my salutation to the sowers and bows a million heads to me. And it says, shibboleth! shibboleth! (If you would pick up the talk of the fields you must be still and listen.)

The Hebrews, with ears a-tilt, caught this whisper, and so their word for an ear of wheat was "shibboleth." It was this word the Ephraimites lisped and so betrayed themselves to Jephthah. The difference was only one of an aspirate. What they said was sibboleth.

Now, while one can tell the sound of ripe wheat, no word is exactly descriptive of the odour thereof. When I am not tired my pen almost catches it. The odour is an intangible something between dryness and colour, and the sign that expresses it can only be revealed.

It is the mental habit of people to think of wheat as only so many bushels of inert matter that is bought and sold on margins by half-mad men, whereas, in all the world, wheat is the thing most richly alive. It won't die, not for thousands of years. We would put jars of wheat in the corner-stones of our state buildings, even as the Egyptians buried it in tombs of rock. It is the only food we could pass down the centuries to posterity, and apart from its scientific value, there is little doubt posterity would appreciate the gift infinitely more than those stupid name-lists of still stupider people. The grain should be of the highest grade, with the name of the grower and the exact location of his farm added thereto.

Yes! let us tuck away these northern wheat grains till England becomes a republic; the United States a kingdom; and until the yellow peril has turned white. Let us lay them safely aside for that day when labour and capital have become one, or till a still later epoch when instead of sex in soul, there shall be soul in sex. Then take them out, Posterity, and crush them into a sacramental wafer that all the world may eat of it as a loving pledge from the twentieth century.

If you think this too long to wait, perhaps you will recall that while the seven sleepers slept, Cæsar was superseded by Christ. Now, the time they slept was for the lives of three men.

In handling wheat, you have doubtless noticed that it is not only alive but possesses a markedly developed will-power. It is ever resisting conquest. They tell me that in the part of the exchange called the pit, you cannot beat back wheat. Some men have succeeded for a while, but always it has rolled in and smothered its erstwhile victors. Try to hold a handful and the task is well-nigh impossible. It slides through your fingers and causes your palm to open involuntarily. It wearies a man to hold wheat tightly for long. Oats may be held and other cereals, but not wheat. Its tendency is to fall to the ground and reproduce. Thus, it is age-old but still eternally young. It is the true Isis and no one has lifted its veil. I tell you men, there is something uncanny and almost wicked about a thing that refuses to die, and it so small as a grain of wheat.

As a whole, this country is not beautiful, but now and then, there come striking pictures. Here are pleasing lakelets a-flush with ducks; tall cotton-woods which I name the maidens because of their fluffy hair—these, and lush meadows, over which range regiments of asters, sunflowers, and yarrow. It is a magic lantern fantasia with an occasional muskeg to represent the waits between views. On the muskegs the trees are so thin and straight they fairly scratch your eyes.

Oh! but it is hot this day, and every leaf seems a green tongue thrust out with thirst. The sun is making amends for his insulting reticence of last winter. The Indians call him Great Grandfather Sun, but why, I do not know.

The houses of the homesteaders are built of poplar lumber, weather-stained and ugly. Others are of logs chinsed with mud and moss. All are small and favourable neither for hospitality nor reproduction. Some day, when a large acreage is under crop, pretty bungalows with brave red paint, will edit the scene as in the older and more settled districts of the north.

At every station, land seekers get out and disappear into the trees as if the country ate them up, and, indeed, I am not so sure but it does.

A baby gets off too—a new baby that has come from the city hospital is being brought home. You would fancy a baby was a miracle the way the men look at it and ask questions. Her name is Annette. She was born on duck-day. Her father works in a saw-mill. We crowd to the window to watch him meet Annette, for we would see the gladness on his face. He is an admirably strong man, with the hard sinews of a wolf. He has surely gone through the mill to some effect. I think he likes Annette, but he looks most at the small mother and he has the mate tone in his voice.

The women ask me concerning my husband, and I say, "Oh yes! I have a husband up here, somewhere—a big, fair man—I wonder if you have seen him."

They are discreetly silent, but I can see they are hoping I'll catch him. This is not a case of duplicity on my part but rather of kindness. It is one's stoutest duty to convey colour and snippets of gossip of women, who, for the long winter months to come, are to remain in these wilds. You must understand that gossip is not wicked up North. Besides, this word actually means a sponsor at baptism—an office recognized by all the world as one of unimpeachable respectability.

At Wabamun there is a great sweep of forest, but, a year ago, a great fire raged here and large patches of burnt trees assault the eyes. Hitherto, the homesteaders have had a two-handed harvest, one from their lovely lake and the other from the land, but, nowadays, their richest harvest comes from the summer tourists, who are building up a popular resort at this point. Summer girls are trespassing on the berry-patches, once the sole preserve of Indian maidens, and Ole Larsen's fishing grounds are full open to sailing yachts and electric launches. Such fish as Ole could catch, and such fish as his Frau could cook! Always, I bowed my head over my plate and said the Indian grace, "Spirit, partake." Ole can tell where the fish are to be found in certain seasons by the movements of the birds. The fish feed on flies and rise to the surface for them, whereupon a t gull or duck will fall with plummet-like pounce. White-fish bite in the autumn. "Yumping yiminy, dey yust do."

The remains of the railway construction camps have almost disappeared, and only the bleached bones of horses mark out the long trail of the grading gangs.

Here are the grades I descended a couple of years ago while prospecting over this ground. What slopes these are to put a horse down. They are like those described at St. Helena, upon which you might break your heart going up or your neck coming down, with the additional risk of being arrested as a trespasser. On this place where we once ranged for coal-rights, the real-estate agents have sub-divided the surface into desirable building lots, that sell from three to five hundred dollars the lot.

One day, this lake shore will be a hive of industry, for deep in her loins Mother Earth had hutched her riches of coal and fire-clay, and, mayhap, more minerals that are precious. Once, in drilling here, our men came upon black sand with a showing of gold, but it petered out, after a couple of inches. It was with great difficulty they were persuaded to go on with the drilling instead of going to town to file on claims.

Already there are several towns along this lakefront—that is to say, towns consisting of three or four tents or houses. In the earlier days of the North each settlement was commenced with a fort, now it is begun with a railway station. The next building to be erected is the station agent's house, which is quickly followed by a restaurant, and a general store with a post-office. This is the axis from which the homesteaders radiate into the surrounding country, and, presto! before you know it, there is a bank, an implement shop, a church, a hotel, and the other conveniences of modern civilization including mortgages.

Already you may see trails like long black welts across the land—trails that appear to fare forth without any preconceived plan and to hold a lure in their far reaches for happy-go-idlers like you and me. There is no telling what we might find on them a goodish way off. The only straight trails made in this North land are made by the engineers, and as you look down the lines you may readily see that they lead into the sky. I like greatly the unthanked, unknown engineers who beat out these paths for the people who are to come after. No trumpets herald their coming, or announce the leagues they have herded behind, but I tell you these fellows are a commonwealth of kings, and we may as well stop here for a moment and stand at salute.

And after the engineers came the builders with their sinews of steel to bind the trail. It is this steel strength that makes the land to bud and blossom. It is creative. Well and truly has a builder said that the land without population is a wilderness, and the population without land is a mob. Yes! it is a steel idol we worship in this country and not one of gold, and we do refuse to grind it to powder and drink thereof, no matter what any Moses or Aaron may say.

This last hour I have been in mind-to-mind talk with a young Englishman who does not think much of Canada. He speaks of our dismal respectability, our tombstone virtues, and our provincial small-mindedness. We call our gardens yards, and have no manners to speak of. Indeed, nothing but a major operation could remedy our boorishness.

Now, all he says is quite true but I don't believe it; besides, his English-sure way of summing us up is irritating to my sense of patriotism.

In some places up here he has had to sleep in puppy's parlours, which means with his clothes on. This must have been uncomfortable in that he still wears leather puttees which are the true hall-mark of men from the British Isles. He talked about our cold winters and how unbearable they were, just as if the cold were not the sepia the North shoots forth to protect herself from joyous loafers. I did not say this, for one cannot be polite and patriotic at the same time, and it is well to be polite ... only I remarked that one of these cold days we will shut off the Gulf Stream instead of sending it out to heat up England.

I have no doubt he has private means, for he has travelled widely and is a well-educated man. He came here to have a go at homesteading. "Have you succeeded?" I ask. He does not reply except to ejaculate, "Farming—my hat!" whereupon we both laugh, he at the Canadians and I at the English.

The average youth from England finds it trying to be stripped of precedent, and there is nothing approximating Canadian homestead life in London. We too often forget this and so fail to make allowances for his prejudices and lack of adaptability. Our government mounts him and puts his foot in the saddle, but he must set the pace himself. One can hardly expect the government to do more, but yet, it seems a pity so much excellent material is annually lost to the Dominion because we have not the time or means to work it up. It will take some years to manipulate the crude European immigrants into the mental and physical trim of this Britisher and to inculcate them with equally high political standards. We do not recognize this, or maintain an easy passivity to it, until at some election crises our hearts fail us for fear because of the preponderance of the foreign vote in educational and moral matters.

And the Englishman and I speak of subjects of grave import, and of how it is not seemly that we trade too freely with foreign peoples (especially with the States of the American Union), neither is it loyal to our most Christian King, George V. "Wealth at the expense of loyalty is not a thing to be desired," says the Englishman, "and Colonials do well to preserve the integrity of the Empire," to which dictum I make no reply, not being able to gainsay him. I could wish though that he tell me how we are to avoid so doing.

This dear lad would go into literary work if we read anything in Canada besides statistics, sporting news, and crop forecasts. In the contemplation of our sordid practicability, he is lost in astonishment. "No, madam, I shall not do it, and I shall tell you my reason," says he. "If you write with a sense of life or colour along will come some weighty, grim fellows whose business it is to write stock quotations—leaden creatures, believe me—and they will distinctly sniff and sneeze out the word 'impressionistic,' by which they mean fanciful. Sons of bats! If once they tried to frame an impression in black and white they might have some proper comprehension of the word. Any uncouth man can state facts, but it is the telling what the facts stand for that hurts. A coarse man cannot take impressions except from a closed fist, which impression he would probably describe as a 'dint in the pro-file.' Such an one hears no farther than his ears, although, in not a few cases, this might be no inconsiderable distance."

"No, I will not become the local littérateur," continues the lad, "to be received by the community with a mingling of pride and sarcasm. I tell you what I will do: it is better to be a real-estate broker, in that all conditions tend to what you Colonials call 'a dead sure thing.' It is the only business in which a man reaps where he does not sow. I will surely be a real-estate man. This I will be."

We are come to Edson now—the terminus of the passenger route—but I am going to describe it in another chapter, for it would be ungrateful to bulk it with other events because of the sense of adventure I enjoyed from my visit thereto.

CHAPTER II

A FRONTIER POST.

The new world which is the old.—TENNYSON.

Have I told you about Edson and its prospects? No! ah, well, never mind, I shall do so by and by, when I have talked to the citizens.

While biding my time for a seat at the lunch-counter, I will walk up and down the station platform. Every minute men are arriving to await the out-going train to the city. They come and come, apparently from nowhere, till there are quite a hundred of them. Of course, they really come from up the street (I should have said from the streets, for there are two, or, perhaps, three streets), having recently arrived from the grading camps somewhere up in the mountains. We are going there to-morrow, or maybe the next day, and then we shall see the habitat of these battling, brown-throated fellows who nose the stream of flesh-pots and feed on hunks of brawn.

The men philander about, or sit on the platform planks, and loll lazily against the sun-warmed wall. They count their money, smoke, and talk, but on the whole they are quiet. Also they stare at me like they were gargoyles and whisper the one to the other. This is not because of rudeness—not at all! Even the white armoured Sir Galahad would find it difficult to be knightly in the circumstances. For months they have done naught save stake out and measure up, shovel gravel, dig ditches, set transits, sweat and swear, for a railway, you may have heard, is built with heavier implements than batons, pens, or golfsticks. No woman has come near them except certain will-o'-the wisps whom the Mounted Police did straightway turn back to town. Their lives have been filled full of contest, hardship, and loneliness, so that every mother's son desires, above all else, that some woman (she may be either saint or sinner) put her hands upon him and tell him he is a truly fine fellow and worthy to be greatly loved. This is why they will give her all their money and not because they are of the earth very earthy.

Do you waggle your head at me! Do you? Then I care not a straw. It only means you do not comprehend the ways of men at our frontier posts.

Some men are here preparing to take the wagon trail to Grand Prairie in the Peace River District. This trail, they tell me, is one hundred and fifty miles long, and may be traversed in six days, a journey which from other points formerly took as many weeks. Hitherto, it has seemed the faraway edge of the world, a place for none save the adventurous blooded and sturdy, but in this day it seems to lie at our very door, for, in the North, one hundred and fifty miles is merely a stone's cast. In the spring, fifteen thousand homesteads will be thrown open for entry, so that presently it will seem that all creation is trekking this way.

And why not? It requires no fore-vision to know that the land has a future above anxiety. Up this trail there is a new world to be possessed, an unequalled empire, in which men may go hither and yon as they please. It gives my feet a staccato movement to think of it. Some city folk there are who might fear the trail, but this were foolish. It is good to ride on a long trail and laugh out loud for sheer joy. On the trail, the ear of Society is closed and there are smoked goggles on her eyes.

I have been talking to a stripling from Nova Scotia, who has been here these four months. When first he came, there were but three girls in the village; now, there are eighteen. As a result of this increased immigration, the weekly dance is better attended and is more amicable.

Besides his outfit, this Nova Scotian is taking in a year's provision to his homestead, and so has been working to secure a sufficiency of money. He hopes to get a steading that will one day become a town site. This is the dream of every northern farmer: it is the gold at the foot of the rainbow. Perhaps, my Boy o' Dreams may find it. Who can say? Providence keeps a closer eye on farmers than we imagine. As yet, the boy has not persuaded any girl to accompany him to Grand Prairie. I would go myself only (I had the reason a minute ago but it has escaped me); what was it? Oh yes! I remember now, I am already married. The Land of Cockaigne could not have been situate in the North, for in that most blessed land every Jack has his Jill and found no difficulty in keeping her. No! it was never in this latitude.

I went to two hotels before I could find a room. I should have registered at once instead of loitering at the station. In the first hotel they could eat me, but to sleep me was out of the question. In the second, a stout well-looking German—or, as I prefer to call him, a coming Canadian—took possession of me, remarking in one breath, but with an air of great punctilio, "You would in my house put up? Der conductor-man he so told me you to me might come. This my wife is. You should become to each other known. She a bed for you will get—water!—towels!—whatsoever Madam she may desire."

"Urbanity" is the one word that fits the German, my host. His Frau, who is of the pure Teutonic type, has a heart of great goodness, with emotions that lie close under the exterior.

All might have been well with me at this hotel, but, unfortunately, in descending the closed-in stairway, I stepped on a sleeping cat and plunged headforemost to the bottom.... "Der drouble mit you," says my host, "a crick in der back is." The cat's "drouble" seems to be paralysis.

Some one has said that reserve is a sign of great things behind. Sweet Christians! this is entirely true; I realized it to the full while holding back the tears and assuring the assembled household I was not even jarred. I am proud of the way I behaved, and sorry my own folk were not there to see. Now, they will never believe it.

One of the maids brought me brandy which I did not drink, but after awhile, my hostess fed it to me in what she called canards. You dip a lump of sugar into the cognac and transfer the lump to your mouth—that is all. You could never believe how nice they taste, or how curative they are for "crick" in the back.

Before long I am able to limp down the street and call on the doctor. I used to know him in days when we both lived farther south. But any way, a previous acquaintanceship would have made no difference. We do not need introductions at a frontier post like this, for there is an undercurrent of good fellowship which understands that the stranger who talks to you is not necessarily a scalawag, with subtle designs on your purse or your person. Any one who fails to grasp this plainly obvious fact is either a newcomer or a solemn humbug.

This doctor has charge of the hospital car that lies in the station yard, and most of his time is spent travelling from camp to camp down the line of construction. I saw the car to-day, or rather I nosed it, for the smell of iodoform came siftingly through like dry cold. It is owned and operated by the railway company for the benefit of their employees. At certain stations along the line, the company have placed cottage hospitals where emergency cases are treated. Those who have fevers or require major operations, are usually taken to the city.

Long ago, when the earlier railroads were being constructed it was not possible to supply such life-saving appurtenances, so that nothing remained for the wretched fellows but to drag themselves away and die like hurt dogs. There is a current aberration that the golden age was "once upon a time," but, in my opinion, it is here and now, or at least it will be when every municipality has instituted classes to teach policemen the difference between drunkenness and a fit. I will say a prayer about this some of these days. One must be business-like.

As he builds up and smokes a cigarette, the doctor tells me that the navvies and teamsters have a singularly critical taste in the matter of medicine. They do not like tablets or medicine with an innocent flavour. Unless it be distinctly pungent, they feel cheated.

"Do you accede to their demand?" ask I.

"I do, Good Lady," says he. "It is modesty that prevents my describing to you the excellency of my flavours" (and here he assumed a truly sagacious air): "my medicines have 'nip' to them and a body that is really desirable. They are indescribable, but most they approach the little girl's definition of salt—'that which makes potatoes taste bad when you do not eat it with.'

"I see, Dear Lady, you are still of inquisitive mind," says this Man of Medicine. "Yes! I can see that and I dare say you will put me in a book, so I shall not rise to your questions—not I! Let us prefer to talk of how we shall invest our money when we sell our lots, and things like that."

"Real-estate is a valuable asset in this place," continues he, "if you buy it 'near in' on the original town site, but three miles out of the subdivisions, it is equal in value to a pop-corn prize. And yet who can say? Who knows? In these new places, the bread we cast on the sub-divisions has a way of returning to us in meat and pie and cake. It is often the height of wisdom to be foolish. That singularly unattractive person on the doorstep across the way—the shrunken, hollow-stomached one—has made much money in buying and selling."

"Do you believe me?" he asks with some trace of heat; "then pray heaven speak!" For I have fallen into silence. But I will not speak—not one word—but only smile in an enigmatical way, for the stop I am pulling out is one of intended indifference. It is about the navvies and teamsters I would talk and not of hollow-stomached men who gather much money.

The doctor rolls up two cigarettes and offers me one.

"You will smoke?" asks he.

"No!" says I, "not till I am sixty."

"Let me see your palm and your nails. Humph! Lady, you had better start now as a mere matter of expediency. Why not try this one? Where's the use of a mouth and an index finger if you do not smoke?"

Now, I cannot say why I do not smoke, except that there are so many reasons why I should, and so I return to our first topic and ask, "Does your medicine make the men well again?"

"No, no, decidedly no!" he replies—"they allow me to hold no such illusion. The talismans they carry, work the cure—a bear's tooth, a lucky penny, or the image of a calendar saint. A snake's rattle is a panacea for anything but a broken heart. Time was when men only choked on grape seeds as did the old poet chap, Anacreon, but in these days, the navvies get appendicitis from them. It would be offensive to suggest other causes, in spite of the fact that most of them never taste grapes. No! it would not be right for me to put my patients in the wrong and shockingly poor policy."

"Have you much trouble with drunkenness?" I query.

"Not a great deal!" he makes answer, "for the Mounted Police have a disconcerting habit of probing into bales of hay and of finding false floors in wagons. They have fifty-fox power, these police fellows, although I have heard tell that a gallon or more of whisky has been within roping distance of them and escaped. A bottle that gets by them is worth ten dollars, but the navvies declare whatever it costs it is worth it. But, dear me, there are other liquids for inordinate and uncritical thirsts, such as——"

"Your medicine?" I suggest, whereupon our conversation abruptly ends, for he will be no longer beset by me; and he will not give me a bottle of liniment for "crick" in the back; no, not if I die in Edson, without even a graveyard started wherein to bury me. He supposes Providence knows his business, but how ever woman came to be made is a mystery far beyond his wit's end.

Huh! Huh! I am tingling to scratch this man's eyes out, but I only call him a brown pirate.

Do you think I care so much as a snap of the fingers for the medicine of this spiteful doctor of the countryside? Not a bit of it! One of the navvies will give me a talisman if I cannot find the cordial tree for which I search. It grows in the North, and the fruit gives life to strong people and faintness to the weak. It was Théophile Tremblay who told me about it. He lives always in the woods. Once, he found the tree but he was afraid to eat of it, for how could he know whether he was strong or weak? He has heard tell that, in the tree, there is a wood's-woman and that sometimes she laughs aloud, but he thinks it may be a soul or something like that.

The only drawback to happiness is the peculiar impermanence of its character. Happiness is a large, comely person, but, withal, as elusive as the smallest sprite. Such hours of pain as I spent last night on this wretched sagging bed—I who was so happy only yesterday—with nothing to look at save a little lamp with a flame like a bleary red eye. Truth to tell, it was the eye that looked at me. It stared till I became hypnotized, when by the blessing of God, I fell asleep.

This morning, I am consumed between a desire to get up and one to lie still. In all such crises of the will, it is better to follow the line of least resistance, and so I lie in bed. My hostess brings me an amazingly pungent liniment which she calls "Herr the Doctor's medisome." It came last night, but Daisy, who is a waitress, neglected to deliver it. Perhaps the sarcastic advice which the doctor set down for me under the word "Poison," may have frightened Daisy.

"She a lump is, that Daisy!" says the Frau. "Believe me, Madam, for I know. I tell her a thing to do and she doing it keeps on, till I to stop tell her. Then I to her explain that she is not for ever to stop, nor for ever on to go, and all the time, about everything, I have her so to tell."

The Frau pours on the liniment with generous measure and rubs me till I prickle with it, and feel for all the world like a wet newspaper caught in a wire fence. She rubs me with a used-to-things way until I beg her to desist. I should not be surprised if Herr the Doctor took this means of venting his spitefulness on me.

The Frau tells me she had a vision once. I wish to experience a vision, or a miracle, but nothing comes to me save presentments which have their terrible plain origin on the basis of cause and effect. Her vision was about heaven. She saw heaven quite distinctly and the streets were really made of gold. There were no children there, but only men and women, so that there must be a special Paradise for boys and girls. The Frau believes heaven will be a failure because there is no division of the sexes provided for. How, she would like to know, could a woman enjoy heaven with men there all the time looking at everything she does. It would be an impossible situation.

After awhile, Daisy brings me a meal. There is a tremendous finality about the way she sets down a tray. Daisy, in spite of her name, is not so much a housemaid as what they used to call a stout serving wench. She is courtly neither in figure nor manners. Her hair is puffed out over her ears and drawn down low, till her head looks like the husk of a hazel nut. But what odds? Daisy is splendidly plebeian and really of more value to the community than a writing person who falls downstairs. She cannot see for the life of her how I happened to come out here, and so I am apologetic and find it necessary to explain. She asks permission to try on my hat and tells me she has ordered a new one from Edmonton. It is to have three "ostridge" feathers.

To assure me that the cat I stepped upon is not dead, she descends to the kitchen and returns with it. The cat seems all right except that it sags in the middle, but Daisy says this is because it has just been fed. I am glad I did not kill it, in that I always associate a cat with Diana Bubastis, the Egyptian goddess who presided over childbirth, and who was represented with a feline head. Indeed, Bubastis is said to have transformed herself into a cat when the gods fled from Egypt—a play of gods and women and cats that has continued even to this very day.

After dinner, I am able to go down to the sidewalk where I fribble away the hours agreeably enough. It is a sun-shot afternoon, but the air is cool to one's skin, and grateful after the scorching heat of yesterday.

Some civil engineers who came in on the train with me are playing baseball on the road. These are no æsthetic feeblings, these merry gentlemen, but a sturdy breed, upstanding and handsome, with skin like the colour of well-seasoned saddles and a smell of burnt poplar in their hair. I think the rough clothes they wear throw their good looks into relief. Or it may be that the people are better looking in the North and have better physiques. It must be so, for the South has in all ages drawn upon the northern blood for rejuvenation just as, in these days, they need hard wheat to tone up their softer varieties.

I write of them as merry gentlemen because this fornight agone I had been watching them make ducks and drakes of their savings. When they come to Town, which they do once or twice a year, they cannot be accused of nearness. Each mother's son holds to the amended maxim of this country, "Hard come, easy go." "Jack ashore," I called one the other day. "Possibly so! Possibly," answered the delicious boy, "but I prefer to think of myself as March—in like a lion and out like a lamb."

The whole Town is a foraging pasture for the engineers on vacation. They buy everything they do not need, from gramaphone records and swearing parrots to Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. They yell into the telephones as if it were a lung tester, and it makes their hearts dance like daffodils to hire taxicabs for the day, boxes at the theatre, and to give suppers and dances to all and sundry of their acquaintances. Neither are they laggards in love. They are vastly appreciative of the girls, and I am told go sweethearting with a directness there is no possibility of misunderstanding. It is well the girls do not take them too seriously, for they are roving bachelors all, and would seem to be as faithful as the poet who vows his love for Kate, and Margaret and Betty and Sweet Marie.

Yet, once in a blue moon, an engineer and a girl make decision "to be man and wife together," and to live in a shack on the Residency, much to the annoyance of the townsmen, who dislike the engineers, being inordinately jealous of them.

The game of baseball which the engineers carry forward on the highway is strenuous rather than scientific. Things that are considered important in the league matches have no significance here. As I watch the pitch and toss of the ball, it occurs to me that this game has filtered down the ages from the primeval woods where orang-outangs threw nuts from tree to tree. They pitch them that the young lady 'rangs might admire their cleverness and good form. You may credit me this was the way of it.

A Chinaman and some Indians are also watching the game. The Indians think it fine fun, and fetch and carry the lost balls like spaniels retrieving sticks. I like the Indian men for several reasons, but chiefly because they are shrewd riders; have a sovereign indifference to appearance, and never quarrel over theology.

The game of ball was not completed, the interest of the players being diverted by a blindly vindictive fight between a staghound and a bulldog. I did not see the conclusion of the fight, but the honours lay with the bulldog. "For you must know, Dear Lady," explains one of the engineers, "that all things considered, the grip on the throat is an eminently practical one."

CHAPTER III

TO THE BUILDERS

To the builders of the highway, that skirt the canyon's brink,
To the men that bind the roadbed fast,
To the high, the low, the first and last,
I raise my glass and drink!—EVELYN GUNNE.

As yet, there is no passenger service from Edson to the End of Steel. Several day coaches are run, but they are chiefly for the use of the engineers and workmen. This is how I happen to be the only woman aboard pulling out for the mountains across this newly-made trail.

Do not misunderstand me; it is the railroad that is new. The trail that runs by its side was an old one when Columbus discovered America, and beaten deep with feet, and also it is a long trail, for it leads through to the Pacific Ocean. For centuries, it was the only mark of human interference in this waste that is world-old. It is a trail of lean hunger and bleeding feet, one that has ever been prodigal of promise, but wary of accomplishment. Surely this is so, for once over it stumbled and swore those half-mad men known as the Caribou Stampeders—these, and other unwept, unhonoured fellows who fared into the wilderness for what reasons even the wise Lord knoweth not. If the bones of the red and white folk who have travelled this long, long street were stood upright, I doubt not they would make a fence of pickets for us all the way.

I have no sooner thought this thing than it happens there is a dry stirring and, in an eye-wink of time, the dead men have taken on flesh and colour. They must have been keenly near. Grim, plainish fellows are they, not unlike the gang around me, but rougher-clad and more hairy. They are powerful and full-lifed men, I can see that, and the rough-necked one with the trail stride and mop of curly hair is Alexander MacKenzie, a Scotchman from Inverness, but late of Messrs. Gregory & Co.'s counting-house. He is "down North" endeavouring to open out a trade with the Indians, obtaining a foothold they doubtless call it; his masters, the Nor'-West Fur Company—for monopolists are always sensitive to terms. His is a continental errand (mark this well), for he is the first white man to cross the Rockies, and to tell us what lies over and beyond the hills where the sun goes down. Honour to Alexander MacKenzie, Esq., of Inverness, say I! Some day, when Messrs. the Publishers give me fuller royalties, I shall surely build a cairn to him on the height of land e'er it falls away to the Western Sea.

This man lived more than a century ago, and yet, as his figure fades back into nothingness, we see this other figure close by. It is David Thompson, the Welshman, who has recently discovered a river, and has called it by his own name. Also, he has captured the Astoria fur-trade, and has established a trading post, which future generations will know as Kamloops.

And here is Sir George Simpson, Resident Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company. He likes to travel with pipers who go before him, piping as he enters a fort in order that Lo, the Red Man, may be properly impressed.

The ugly person with the harshly aggressive features is Sir James Douglas. He looks as fully open to convincement as a stone pavement. This spalpeen near by is none other than young Lieutenant Butler of Ireland. He is gathering material for a volume he proposes to call The Great Lone Land. I like the way he carries his head. Who runs may read him for a fighter with a fighter's build.

But on they go, and on, this long procession of pioneers, till we can only call out their names as they file by—Dr. Hector, Daniel Harmon, Viscount Milton, Alexander Henry, Dr. Cheadle, and other lean, laborious fellows, long since passed into the shadows. Dead men do tell tales. You may hear if you care to listen.

And what a strange thing has come to pass in these latter months! The tenuous, twisting trail—that very old trail—has been superseded by a clean white road that is like to a long bowstring. Its impotent, creeping life has given way before the gallant onslaught of pick and spade, chain and transit, and before monstrous lifting machines which have other names, but which are really leviathans.

Hitherto, it may be said of this land what was once said of Rome, that the memory sees more than the eye. This is no longer true. Before we realize it, Baedeker will be setting down a star opposite the name of a fashionable hotel in the Athabaska Valley, and the whole of this morning world, from end to end, will be spotted with a black canker of towns. Right glad am I to go through it this day with a construction party, and for my own satisfaction to mentally tie together the threads of the Past and Present. And who knows but in a century from now some curious boy in one of these towns may find this record in an attic rubbish-heap, and may rejoice with me over the knotted threads. (I love you, boy! you must know this.)

My fellows of the Way, who are young engineers, tell me the peculiarity of each cut and grade and the difficulties they encountered. They do not speak of stations but of "Mile 48" or "Mile 60," by which they mean 48 miles from Wolf Creek. The railway, when completed, will measure 3,556 miles. They talked of other matters mathematical, much to my bewilderment, but from which I, for myself, ultimately deducted that while the genie who built Aladdin's palace in a night was the champion contractor of fairy-tale countries, he is not to be mentioned in the same breath as these master-men who blaze out this metal highway towards the sea.

Each engineer lives on a residency which is twelve miles long, and it is his duty to supervise the work of grading in his division. This duty occupies about eighteen months, when he is moved on to another residency.

The men placed in a residency camp are an engineer, an instrument man, a rod man, two chain men and a cook. Over these camps, there are placed the chief engineer at Winnipeg; the divisional engineer at the End of Steel; and assistant divisional engineers, who may locate at different points from fifty or sixty miles apart.

The grading itself is built by contractors, and sub-contractors, down to station men, who with the aid of spades, picks and wheelbarrows, built a hundred feet. All these are paid by the yard and according to the nature of the soil or rock. The station men work from five in the morning until nine or ten at night, and make from five to ten dollars a day each. The blasters are known by the uneuphemistic title of "rock-hogs."

The first engineers who scouted had a hard time in their unsplendid isolation, but now that the rails are catching up, life on the residencies is more pleasant than one might imagine. The shack is fairly warm and comfortable and the Powers that Be supply to the men an abundance of the best food procurable, with a reasonable portion of dainties. The Powers doubtless recognize the distant advisability of keeping the engineers and their assistants in health and temper, for after all, nothing is so expensive as sickness. Still, the men are by no means petted. It is true that one engineer has a pair of sheets, but these are the talk, and possibly the envy, of all the residence's on the line. When visitors come to his residency they sleep between the sheets, while their chivalric host betakes himself to the long desk that is built for map work.

Each residency has a gramophone, and some of them have small menageries, including pet bears. In the summer, after hours, the men have outdoor games such as baseball and tennis. They have been able on several occasions to secure a sufficiently large attendance of women to have a dance. It may happen that the engineer is married and that his wife has girl-visitors, which party may be augmented by a visiting contingency from the residency twelve miles further down the grade, or some such fortunate happening as this. It is a heyday, I can tell you, when this happens.

They do not quarrel in the residencies as missionaries do at their posts, although a man sometimes gets moody. All through the winter they talk over everything they did when last in town, and what every one else did. Between times, they can watch the married engineers and declare how much better the bachelors are situated. Purple grapes were ever sour. They told me about other things, but I forget them; besides, they are secrets.

One of the engineers gathers me some flowers at a wayside station, concerning which the others, with full-throated laughter, propounded riddles.

"When did he ast-er?" "How much did the rose raise?" "Who gave Susan her black eye?" These, and other problems of peculiar interest to young bloods, the solution of which we shall never know till flowers learn to speak plainer.

The riddle, "Why does the willow weep?" elicits a discussion on music, and on the sound of the wind in the pines. One man says he has read somewhere that violin makers construct their instruments out of the north sides of trees. He does not know if this be true, but I think it must be, for the urging of the north wind in the trees and the soft calling of the violin, are one and the same. They both allure to a land where no one lives. You must have observed this yourself.

One rueful rascal with no civic conscience, and an overweening appreciation of his sex, gives it as his opinion that this is an ill-reasoned theory. He declares the sound to be a screeching crescendo that has its origin in an implacable quarrel between the wind and the pines. The wind is a suffragette, a woman of determined grievance, who would be better of bit and bridle and possibly of gag. She makes the pine a butt for her insult and ridicule and a target against which she lashes the hail and drives her shrewish snow. When not grappling his throat with her plaguing, pestilent fingers, it is only because she is recoiling to strike again. She calls this "a spell o' weather."

It is a bitter monologue this leather-fleshed, lathy-framed fellow gives me, and I takes it as a body blow, but I answer not a word, for I have heard it said, or perhaps I have read it, that the meek will own the earth; besides—you can try it yourself—nothing so puzzles the understanding of mortal man as a woman who refuses to go on defence. Her silence fills him with a gnawing uneasiness similar to that one feels when he has swallowed a tack.

And yet I would like to tell him he has overstated his case; to point out that the trees are cross-grained to the wind; that their green spectacles prevent their seeing things in proper perspective, and that they are deep-rooted in obsolete prejudices. Sir Pine cannot escape being an intractable old person, seeing that woman's suffrage was not the rule seventy-five years ago, or more, when he was born. Yes! I should have liked to say this, but it is almost as equal satisfaction to score a verbal chicane.

I think, perhaps, the men felt my silence more than I intended, for they argue the anti-suffragist out of countenance, although I have no doubt they secretly and sincerely agree with him. To change the subject, one of them brings me a caged squirrel he is taking to his residency. Punch is a well-groomed squirrel and has an immoderate tongue. His owner says that in the mountains these red squirrels collect and dry mushrooms. They group them on a rock, or fix them in the forks of young trees, ultimately banking them in hollow logs. He is trying to tame Punch, but then we have all heard of the American who tried to tame an oyster.

Punchinello is as active as pop-corn in a pan. He is a squirrel with a job, and not nearly so light-minded as he looks. His job is to go round and round on a wheel but never to make progress, for the wheel is so swung that it revolves with him. I am appalled by the absolute inutility of it. What a life! What a life! Wearing out a wheel and himself at one and the same time. "Let him go when you get to the woods," say I, "it will be kinder. You have heard of those Eastern folk, who, when they wish to praise Allah, buy birds and set them free."

"No! I have not heard," he replies; "tell me about them."

"There is no more to the story, that is all."

"But I don't see the application when a fellow does not want to render praises. I invested part of my savings at the races and the tenor of my success was markedly uneven. I bought town lots, hoping to sell before the second payment—'Stung'—Yes! it's as good a word as any. The father of my best girl has cursed me to the tenth generation."

"For what?"

"Oh! for a newspaper item which concerned me. I will allow it would have been just as well had it not appeared, but there it was! There it was! No! I cannot see any special reason why I should set the squirrel free. Besides" (and here he speaks softly and with a kindly persuasiveness, as if he had butter in his mouth), "this Punchinello is a sweet-toothed fellow, and the cook will feed him daintily; he has no store set by for the winter; no drey, no mate; he is not properly furred for exposure, and he would not know how to protect himself against the hawks and stoats. Surely, you would not have him go free? I tell you the thing would be cruelty itself, and I will not do it."

You see, he does not know this matter is a personal one with me, I mean the wheel that goes round and never gets anywhere. If he did it would probably make no difference, for the peculiarity about his arguments are their sincerity and wisdom. I always did suspect that Providence was a large serene young man with a strain of steel in him.

At Bickerdike, all the engineers I knew got out. Some are stationed here; some await orders, but most of them go down the branch line that is under construction from this point. Bickerdike is largely a tent town, although, as yet, it is the metropolis of the Grade. I heard one man on the train tell another it was "one of these here high-society places where folks dance on a plank floor and don't call off the figures." I promise to visit at Bickerdike on my return trip with some friends I have not seen for years. No matter where you come from, it would be almost impossible to drop off at any of these little frontier posts without meeting some one you knew elsewhere, so representative is the population of this Northern country.

At each post the same question is asked the newly-arrived passenger. "Well, what's the news along the road?" To-day the news concerns a wash-out near the End of Steel, and doubts are expressed as to the possibility of our getting through.

At Marlboro, the people are talking of their cement industry, and at the next station lumber is the topic. They are making the lumber out of spruce. The small logs have been converted into railway ties. Some of them are crossed. If ever you have "taken out" ties you know what this means. As you likely haven't, I'll tell you. The railroad contractor, when he rejects a tie, crosses the end of it with a blue or red pencil. Once an acquaintance of mine, by name Jerry Dalton, took out a cut of ties in the Province of Saskatchewan. One day Jerry—an accurate man rather than a placid one—was stamping about somewhat more rampageous than a baited bull.

"What is the matter now, Man Jerry!" I asked; "you are always having a big sorrow."

"Sorrow ith it?" lisped Jerry at the top of his tall voice. "Look at them d—— ties (begging your pardon, ma'am). Look at them ties! Does that turkey-faced, muddle-headed idjit of a contractor think I'm running a Catholic themetery? Crosses ith it? It's crosses he's after giving Jerry! Troth! an' it's a crown I'll be puttin' on him." ...

And so as I look at this pile of crossed logs by the wayside, I am wondering who is the rascal responsible for the Catholic themetery.

These mills belong to a Northern timber chief whose large holdings have made them turbulent. They have called him a timber-wolf, and other names that are smart rather than polite. As a matter of fact, any man who pays the government dues and converts the trees into lumber for the use of the settlers, deserves all the emoluments that can possibly accrue. On account of floods and fires, lumbering is a precarious industry, and the majority of operators fail thereat or carry a nerve-grinding overdraft at the bank.

And did you ever stand on the heights and watch a rising, ripping flood bear out your booms and incidentally the year's logs? If you have, my good little man, you'll be sensible to something closely approximating a tender regard for the timber-wolves. This play of lamb and wolf is frequently disastrous to the wolf.

I would like to rest off here to see the whip-saw bite into the logs; to watch the long white boards as they fall from the carriage, and to drink in their refreshing odour, for the whole essence of the North is concentrated in the odour of the spruce.

Big Eddy takes its name from the whirlpool formed by the confluence of the McLeod River and the Sun Dance Creek. The creek is an impetuous, capering stream that leaps to the McLeod as a little laughing girl would throw herself into the arms of her father. This is the fairest tarrying place I have seen this way, and fit for a ball-room of the dryads. Down in the valley beside the great bridge, the divisional engineer has built him a wide house of logs, with hospitable porches and chimneys that suggest generous fireplaces. I covet his right, title and ownership thereto. They say this engineer is seventy-eight years old, but I don't believe it.

"Beyond all doubt he is," says one of the train officials; "believe me, he has eaten up his teeth at the work of building roads, and he has a heart of great goodness."

"A strong man, is he?" I ask.

"Why, I cannot say, only that he sticks to his work and takes the trail with the best of them. The men say he is 'sun-ripened,' which I am convinced means something praiseworthy, for every man is his friend."

The Canadian Northern Railway Company is running a line immediately parallel to this of the Grand Trunk Pacific, and as I look out of my window I can see the men at work on the rival road. They are the primal ploughers of the land, these railway fellows, and can cut a valley out of a hill, like it were the rip of a brutal blade. To my thinking, this is an enterprise of high heart and bravery..... And yet, as I watch them at work, heaping up a grade, they seem small to me, and paltry, like dirty boys intent on nothing more serious than mud-pies. In some places, they build through marshy dunes that are coppery-brown and tawny-red. Walking in these places is like walking upstairs all the way, or like treading in deep straw, forms of exercise most certainly concomitant with heart disease and a hackney gait. Westward they go and Westward, these uncouth moving pictures of the landscape, that change well-nigh as quick as those on a canvas, but always it is a picture of a grade, a new cut, a gridiron of ties, and long, long trails of steel. I tell you, these trails are the heartstrings of the North.

But you must not think that the only builders are the men. The horses, mules and oxen help. Some folk there are who mislike the oxen, but these are foolishly prejudiced and ill-informed. The ox, it is true, has a tiresome straddling gait, and his brain is small in comparison with the bulk of his head, but contrariwise he retains a stolid reliability that keeps him at his job. Once inspanned, he has no desire to kick over the traces or to explore foreign parts; he doesn't bite his trace-mate, or engage in any of those little playful jinks so strangely peculiar to northern horses and northern men, not he ... the ox is a good sort, and one who strictly attends to business. He is an animal that walks in the light. There are northern men who will doubtless resent these remarks, so I may as well explain that my comparisons have been prompted by the conduct of "the gang" which offends my sense of decency.

The "happy low lie down" all over the car in various stages of intoxication. How hideous they are with their unshaven faces, open mouths and yellow teeth! Abroad they are silly; at home they are heart-scalds. As they sprawl over the floor like huge primeval toads, I am consumed by a desire to kick them with my boots. Drunkenness is a disgusting, unfleshed sin.

And yet, these prostrate fellows are hardly more offensive than those still able to sit up and debate about nothing. As controversialists they remind me of the characters in Alice through the Looking-Glass, who want "to deny something and don't know what it is." When any over-wise babbler feels himself worsted in an argument, he says to his opponent, "You are a liar." While fairly popular, this argument can hardly be considered a logical one. It can be claimed, however, to cover the whole ground, and to be a masterpiece of brevity.

One fellow, who reeled through the car in a molluscous invertebrate condition, stopped by my seat to tell me he was my friend for life. He was old enough to have known better, and I was glad when a glorious, tall stranger collared the fellow and hurtled him down the aisle like a hockey-player would hurtle the puck.

Soon afterwards the train's agent, a civil-spoken young man, came into the car and took me into his caboose. I knew something fortunate would happen on this journey.... And to think it came just as my nomad spirit had failed me, and I was utterly crumpled with weariness and hunger.

I would here desire to reiterate my belief that Providence is a large, serene young man, with a strain of steel in him.

CHAPTER IV

BEHIND THE HILLS.

"Behind the hills, that's where the fairies are,
Behind the hills, that's where the sun goes down."

I fell asleep in the cupola of the caboose and dreamed that my head was a rubber band holding too many notes, and that it was going to snap any second. "Hit's the bloomin' haltitude in your 'ead, Ma'am," explained a Cockney later, and I expect he was right, for we have made an ascent of over one thousand feet since leaving Edmonton.

When I awake the train is standing stock-still. Here is the trouble! the heavy rains have been playing havoc with the newly-made grades that have hardly been shaken down to stay, and progress is necessarily slow till the proper ballast has been laid on. Outside, on the grade, the fireman is swearing with remarkable precision. His language is not exactly that described by the Prayer-book as "comfortable words," but then, a man who fires up with slack coal when the thermometer is sometimes thirty degrees below zero naturally becomes proficient in the use of secular expletives.

I open my window above him and say very distinctly, "Wicked man! swear not by the Lord Christ." Then I lean back so that he may not see me. It must have surprised him to hear such a reproof in this no-woman's land. Out he goes and looks up and around, and up again, but I keep well hidden. That writer who conceived the horror of The Wandering Voice was no nid-noddy fellow, I can tell you.

As I was thinking this very thing, a voice close behind said to me, "Wicked woman! play not the oracles," and almost I fell out of the cupola with fright. It was the glorious tall stranger, and he was laughing mightily. I almost hated him. Indeed, I quite hated till I saw the joke and laughed too.

He had been reading in the opposite bunk and, incidentally, watching so that I might not roll out, for it is a high climb to the cupola bunk, and there are no sides to it. He says that he is an engineer and that the boys who left the train at Bickerdike gave him instructions to see that I got through all right. Did I say mean things awhile ago about certain northern men? Did I? Well then, I am a spiteful jade and my tongue should be split.

He has yellow fruit for me, and cherries, but hands them out carefully, for the smell of steam from the stove shows that dinner is deliciously imminent. The cook is turning cakes on a pan with a spat like the sound of clog-dancers on the stage. He turns them with a grace and intelligence which I may never hope to equal. I have an idea his elbow and wrist work on ball-bearings.

The glorious tall stranger whose name is not Burney (but it will do as well as any other) tells me he was reared down by the Miramichi River. He went back East to see his mother last Christmas, but it took her some days to get used to the grown man who had left home a lad. I can see this thing in my mind's eye. His mother is very clever and has a beautiful face. He need not have told me this. It is true of every man's mother "back home."

Burney was among the first men who scouted for the railway to the West and helped run the try-lines. Falling into the pose of the raconteur—one very natural to the northman—he tells me tragic things, and some that are both tragic and humorous.

One of these was about a Mounted Policeman who was sent out from his post to bring in a murderer. It was terribly cold weather, the mercury almost falling out of the tube. Now, the wanted murderer is the wariest game in the world, and to take him in those mountains one needs boldness and caution in the right proportions—that is to say ninety-nine per cent. of the former, and one per cent. of the latter. The policeman who was sent out was only a stripling, but there was no yellow in him save the streak on his trouser-legs. The round journey was one hundred and twenty miles, but, alone and unaided, he brought in his man, not even waiting to sleep. Almost immediately on a fresh mount, he again started out from the post, but this time to bring in the corpse. The second hundred and twenty miles were terribly long and arduous ones, and the cold cut like a blade. By shutting your eyes you can see and feel this thing: the two frost-covered horses plodding through the bleak and sterile mountains that are grim as eternity—no sound save the cry of starveling wolves, or the white whine of the sleepless wind, these and the sharp-drawn breath of the men. No! we must be mistaken. Only one man breathes, the other seems strangely still, and his lips are tight shut. There is something peculiarly defective in his stony eyes and stony face. If you look closer you can see he is roped close to the horse, and that he doesn't give to the lope.... God of men and beasts! that is a dead man that rides through the snow, and he rides to confront his slayer.... And when the two reached the police post, the live dare-doing man was found to be terribly exhausted from hunger, lack of sleep, and the long, long ride, so that his brittle nerves were like to snap in two. This was how they came to give him the stimulants which in some way (it is not for a tattling civilian to say the way) had not entirely worn off when he was summoned to give evidence at the inquest.

The auditory consisted of engineers, and chainmen from the residencies who resented this grim sitting with a murderer, a judge and accuser, and the white, stark man on the table, whom presently they would put to bed with a spade. They were sitting austerely upright with grave faces as became the occasion, when it came upon them suddenly that the police stripling was intoxicated. It is true he faced the judge with an uncompromising attitude and stood erect, and "at attention" as if a perpendicular rod braced his body from his crown to his heels, but when the judge's glance wandered for the fraction of a moment, the stripling would wink prodigiously at the engineers, and in an unholy manner that threw them into suppressed convulsions. The thing was grievously grotesque. It was as though a stone altar-saint had suddenly awaked and had put his fingers to his nose in a way that was sinister. Comedy with her wry face was peeping through a tragic mask. It is a way of hers.

It was not until the judge observed the policeman constantly dropping his papers and picking them up in a stiff unjointed way, that the reason of the court's commotion became apparent to him.

"What is the rest of the story?" you ask. I do not know. I am a reviewer of books and never go so far as the end.

Sirs and Mesdames, but it is an athletic feat climbing out of the cupola of a caboose. I stepped on the shoulder of Burney, who is admirably strong, and then down to a chair. The brakesmen enter the cupola off the roof and have a way of sliding to the floor backward. It looks easy, and if I were alone, I would surely try it.

There were four of us for dinner, and we had pork and beans, beefsteak, potato-cakes, rolls, peaches and coffee. The butter was tinned, but withal toothsome, and so was the milk. The butter is shipped here from Nova Scotia, and is supplied to all the camps on the road. I help the cook clear away the dishes, but he thinks me rather unhandy, for I upset both the sugar and salt. He comes from Kilmarnock in Scotland, and is a nice lad, I can see that. He has a thicket of hair that stands erect from his head like a growth of young spruce, and he always looks as if he had just heard some good idea. His latest idea, he confides, is a job with the purveyors who contract for the supplies for all the grading camps on the line.

Hitherto, I have always looked upon a caboose as something commonplace, but now, I know it may be truly a Castle of Indolence. I have a sweet tooth for this kind of life, and have no objection to continuing it for a month. Journalists, and important people with stamped passes, go on private cars, but the advantage of mediocrity is that you can travel in a caboose and need not view the scenery as a commercial commodity. When I can think of what to say, I will write a story called "The Romance of a Railway Van." Its setting will be in the hills. The heroine will be a southern girl of probably twenty summers (with a corresponding number of winters). She shall be no fine die-away lady, but middling strong and built to go out in all weather. Each move of the romance will be made by invisible kelpies, ogres and dryads, who will say "Ha! Ha!" and "Ho! Ho!" and who will clap their hands when the wicked flourish, or valour wins against the odds. But I never could think this story out, so I pass it on to you.

At the McLeod River the grades begin to spy into the mountains. These mountains have all the bewilderment of an elusive dream, and in the thin northern air seem nearer than they really are. There is a come-hither look about them. It is well, at first, to thus see from a distance, for to stand against a mountain is to lose one's sense of proportion and symmetry.

At Prairie Creek the road runs high up on a ridge to the south of the Athabaska Valley, so that it looks like a ribbon of steel basted on to the hills. The Athabaska River is wide and swift here, and has what the Japanese call the language of line. The Cree Indians call it the Mistahay Shakow Seepee, meaning thereby the great river of the woods. A semi-spectral mist rises off its waters, as if it were an incense to the mighty spirit, Manitou.

It would be well if I, one of the first of the tourists who, world without end, will travel through these hills, could tell how they impress me, but I am crushed into a wordless incompetency. I cannot speak the language of this land nor interpret its spirit. These hills of White Alberta have something to say, but they will not say it. It must be true what the essayist wrote, that you cannot domesticate mountains.

There appears to be no life here, nor any form of sentience, but when it is dark, the grizzly bear, the lynx, the moose, and other night-things, will move out for purposes of life or death.

Alexander Mackenzie, who entered these defiles one hundred and twenty-five years ago, wrote down that the Atnah Indians believed all this land was made by a mighty bird whose eyes were fire, the noise of his wings thunder, and the glances of his eyes lightning. This bird created all things from the earth except the Chipewyans, who were made from dogs. Now the Chipewyans and the Atnahs were not on borrowing terms.

These were the times when the Indians were as plentiful in the Athabaska Valley as dandelions in a meadow, and they told this Mackenzie of Inverness how, in the good old days, their ancestors lived till their throats were worn out with eating and their feet with walking.

The Athabaska Valley is enclosed by a circle of the hills, the two most prominent of these being Roche Perdrix, or Folding Mountain, and Roche Miette. The latter peak takes its name from the French word roche, meaning "rock," and miette which is the Cree for sheep, this because of the mountain-sheep which make it their home. It is 8,000 feet high (I give you the height because it is not legal to go down the line without so doing). Somewhere, near here, at Fiddle Creek, at a height of 1,200 feet above the railway, there are wonderful hot springs concerning which Burney talks learnedly. I pretend to understand all about sulphuric anhydride, and carbon dioxide, and 127 degrees Fahrenheit, but do not really know if there are things which should be remembered or forgotten.

Other of the peaks which enclose the Valley are Roche Ronde, Roche Jacques, Bullrush and Roche Suette. Off to the west, the range of hills silhouetted against the sky is known as the Fiddle Back Range. These are crowned with snow, but as the sky changes, take to themselves its moods—coral-red, opal, stone-blue and a mellow, purple glow, which blend and shift like the weird fantasy of the auroral lights.

It is an idea of mine that these hills are the lair of the running winds which for past eons have swept in bitter streaks across the prairies, winnowing them like a thresher would winnow grain. Seven-leagued boots have they and no man has tracked them down. How could a man when they fling dust in his eyes? They are the bitter scouts of the North who fight as they go. I have no doubt their home is hereabout. It might be found if we had time to stay, but this would take too long, for you must surely understand these winds are non-resident to a degree that is nothing short of scandalous.

At this point, we ought in all propriety to talk about Brule Lake, which is not a lake at all, but an enlargement of the river. We should nudge each other and remark that this is Jasper Park; that it consists of 5,450 square miles, and that it is held in perpetuity for the nation. I should ask, "Why do they call it Jasper Park?" and you, my fine fellow-farer, should tell me how old Jasper Hawes was one of "the gentlemen adventurers" of the Hudson's Bay Company, and doubtless a purposeful man and clever. "But why do they call this defile 'the Yellow Head Pass?'" I should further query, whereupon you ought to reply, "I perceive you are an untaught person else you had heard how this Jasper Hawes had hair the colour of September wheat in the sheaf, so that the Indians called him 'Tete Jaune' or 'Yellow Head,' much after our mischievous manner of turning about on the street to look after a lady who is flaxen."

Yes! we should say all this, and more, but it might sound like the private car "write-up," so we had better not. Besides, our engine has come to a sit-still and will not go a step farther. The gossip we heard at Bickerdike about the wash-out has been verified. The officials in the private car are in no very graceful temper over this landslide, and some of the men on the firing-line who dug and blasted and built the grade, are going to have their hearts cut out because of it.

The trouble is that these vastly particular officials conceive of the mountain into whose body they have slashed as a dead thing—dead as pickled pork—whereas it is splendidly alive. Because of the malapert efforts of the builders, the mountain has shaken its monstrous sides with laughter till the tears ran adown its face and washed out their puny sticks and stones. One might hint this to the officials, but one is scared to. They belong to the unamiable sex and are showing an anger highly disproportioned to the cause. Indeed, I saw a very special official put the hot end of his cigar in his mouth. Sometime to-night, a few flat cars will come from the End of Steel to convey the gang thither. The gang will climb up one side of the wash-out and down the other, and I will too, if the train's agent will let me, but from his hard-baked, non-committal manner, I glean he is predetermined to take me back to Edson in the caboose.

The men have lighted a fire in the hills, and this fire seems to be the kernel of the land. Strange elemental figures appear and disappear in the darkness as though they were performing unnamed, unholy rites. They seem human but, perhaps, they are spirits, for I have some splendid clues that these mountains are the haunted house of the world.

Here, there are eyes that watch you all the time, but they are hidden; and if you have a listening ear you may hear voices that call. The gods come close in the hills. They go whispering about in the night and calling your name.

Foolish folk there are who say that the world is old, and that all its songs are sung. There is a new song that can never be told, else I would tell it to you. Only it may be heard.

A man whose face is covered by the dark is spinning a yarn about an engineer lad on this grade who truly loved an Indian girl. This is what he says—

"She died a week ago, and the lad was with her. It is a beautiful story, but I know another like hers. It is about a butterfly that had specks of gold on its wings."

I did not see the gang climb down the crevasse and up the other side, but I heard the low lorn echo from the train roll up along the crags and die away in the snows. The train's agent said I could go to the End of Steel if I insisted, but I was not to insist. This is why I am travelling back to Edson. Only I am disappointed much, but he says I may come again soon, when no one shall disallow me. It would have been all right for me to go with the gang, and I could have taken care of myself: any woman could who has been years and years "in society."

The agent and the Scotch boy have made a bed for me on a wide bench with my blankets and cushions. If little private, the bed looks wholly comfortable.

"You'll be after loosenin' your collar," says the young person from Kilmarnock as he fluffs up another cushion, "an' ye 'ull be takin' off baith your shoes an' your stockin's. I'll be keepin' the daftie loons out o' the car till ye get a bit o' sleep."

For the benefit of the nervous readers I may add he does not say, "ye'll be layin' off your bloose," but these are such nice lads I could do so with absolute propriety.

And they turn the lamp low and shade it with paper while I am asking my prayer. And I pray, "Spirits of the Mountains and Rivers, be not angry with me for talking in the hills. Gods of the North, strong Gods who watch over little children and us older ones, let me sleep in quietness this night, and at last bring me home in safety where all the lights be white ones."

And I press my lips to the palm of my heart-hand to say "Amen," and to let the gods know I love them. To let them know I love them!

CHAPTER V

THE END OF STEEL.

I love the hills and the hills love me
As mates love one another.—MACCATHMHAOIL.

It is over a year since, in the last chapter, I was turned back from the End of Steel because of a wash-out on construction, and now I am come back, but this time, through the kindness of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, on a through service, electric-lighted, fast-scheduled, no-fare excursion. And on this occasion, I am not the only woman on the train but merely one among a hundred, for this, you must know, is the triennial excursion of the women journalists and authors of Canada. The men present may be counted on one hand. The engineers who travelled with me last time have gone on further to new outposts.

"What are they doing?" you ask. I'll tell you.

"They are busy building railways on
The map's deserted spot,
Or staking out an empire in
The land that God forgot."

Doers of deeds are these men and the world has salted them with curious and stern experiences. To my way of thinking, Dinny Hogan, boss contractor, with his blue eyes that are the blue of steel, is a bigger man than the First Lord of the Admiralty and his work is of more permanent value to the Empire. It was only the other day that Dinny made an arch of "coyotes"—that is to say, of round holes—in one of the mountains, and into them he packed fifty carloads of gunpowder. The reader may find it difficult to follow this idea, but no doubt he could if he saw where Dinny removed the mountain in one shot. This would seem to be a kind of big game shooting which has all others vanquished into nothingness. This is a wonderful trail through the mountains—the pass called the Yellowhead—a level ribbon of land along which the steels are laid for most of the way. But in some places, a road has been blasted out just to show how the mountains can be beaten. These lords of earth and sky, when called upon, must bow their unwilling necks to the yoke of steel. And no proper-spirited person can stand in this pass without feeling the challenge of the hills and without an immutable desire to conquer them. This I take it is the spirit of the buccaneer.

The highest mountain in these Rockies is Robson, called Yu-hai-has-kun by the Indians, meaning thereby a high, winding road. The Alpine Club of Canada intend, one of these times, to erect a châlet at Mount Robson so that they may attempt to scale it often. Three men succeeded in making the ascent this very summer. They were roped together for thirty hours, and when they had come down again, their faces were seen to be cut and greatly marred. These men spoke fine and glorious things concerning the hilltop, and of how they looked down upon five hundred other peaks, but, in strait and narrow minds like ours, these climbs may be accounted only as strange follies. I have talked to Clausen Otto about these things, for he has been a guide hereabout these ten years or more, and is a notable man of affairs. He said I was only a terribly lame dog in front of a terribly high stile, and then, fearing that his comment was truthful rather than polite, Otto proceeded to salve my feelings by explaining how the desire to climb glaciers was an ill-regulated one, and that what the Bible said about sucking honey out of a rock was "plumb foolishness."

Once, he was climbing with a hunter of goats when a bear came swiftly over the glacier-clad peak of the mountain. They were greatly puzzled to know why the bear had climbed so high, and why it dashed across the summit. Surely there was something remarkable on the other side of the peak. After climbing several hours they made the ascent and looked over. "What do you think we saw?" asked Otto.

"Give it up," said I.

"I wish we had too," said Otto; "there was nothing on the far side but another glacier."

Perhaps, the literary critics will help me decide if Otto meant this for the parable of the climber or whether he was only singularly adept in the art of suggestion.

You do not see Mount Robson till you have passed by. Our train stops to let us look aright, but cloud curtains obscure the turrets of this great temple of stone. Like a sorrowful Caryatid it stands erect under the burden of the sky. But, after awhile, the veil is rent asunder and a tingling flood of light spills itself on the snow in blurs of garnet and blue and gold which scintillate and blend like the colours of a shell: Of a surety, the North has the alchemy that transmutes base metals into gold.

What else may one see at Robson in this dream of summer Canada? Come near till I whisper! You may see white horses—and roan—and chariots of fire, but not every one can. This is one of the mountain's secrets.

And if you listen you may hear what the hills talk about, but you must listen. One mountain who is not so solemn as you might imagine wishes to deny that he is of the earth, earthy.

"Bosh!" he said, and "Stuff! Any one who hasn't moss on his eyes can see I am of the rocks, rocky!"

"Mark me and be astonished!" boasts a stupendous fellow near by whose face is furrowed by snow-slides. "I am a western mountain. Beat me if you can!"

"I used to be a fish plantation," remarks a chalky-looking individual. "It was in the cretaceous period and I lay underneath the sea."

"Lobster plantation?" queries the western one.

"No, you froward ignoramus," replies the fossiliferous fellow, "I consist of Inoceramus problematicus, Faseiolaria buccinoides, and other aristocratic mollusks of the which you have never even heard."

... Overhead, an aweless eagle, rising wing above wing says to his sweetheart, "It is my opinion God made these mountains for no other reason than that you and I might build our nest in them....."

There is, in this region, a body of water called Maligne Lake, and Jules DuBois, a trapper, whose son is married to 'Toinette, the niece of the second cousin of Pierre, whose mother-in-law was the third wife of Black Moccasin, the chieftain, once told me that this lake is dreaded by the Indians because there are no fish in it. This is why it is called "maligne." It frets Jules at the heart to go near it, for he has heard how the fish have been frightened away by a dead man who lives there. This man can see without eyes and his face is like a fungus with white teeth. When he laughs there is a noise in his throat like the crackle of tamarack twigs, freshly lighted.

Because of the glaciers on these hills and the warmth of the summer in the valleys, this atmosphere seems like that of an eternal spring. Just to breathe it is a delight. Here the air strokes you into quietness till you forget the tearing hurry of life; the fretting uneasiness that rasps, and the hurt that comes of the fight. This is a sating of one's desire for the spiritual. And should you wish for a token you may stay awhile and drink of the water that cascades over the rocks. This is living water. This is the good wine of the hills. You may drink it in remembrance.

I am very sorry I must die some day and miss these wilding joys and the odour of the trees and flowers, but it is my comfortable hope that when I return to Claeg, the Round One, who is called the earth, I shall be evolved into a pine-tree and grow happily in this mountain pass. Then will other people come to, even as I come to these trees, and say, "Good morning, my friend! I have been lonely for you."

The pines are our fellow-creatures and more closely related to us than anything that has roots in the earth. They speak to our inmost being. A group of pines will restore sanity to the disdistracted and sorrowful mind, for they are cordial trees, and in quietness and confidence is their strength. The pines are never tremulous or trivial, neither do they fade or die. Other trees are green for awhile, but these all the while.

... Pippa, the little maid who sang for the world's hurt, came out of the woods, as likewise the Nazarene who died for it.

Upland growths are the pines as befitteth the gods of the arboreal world. They are northern trees, "the chief things of the ancient mountains, the precious things of the lasting hills." Their history is writ far back in the black strata of the carboniferous age, and that they will be the last trees to disappear off the earth, who can gainsay? As for me I shall not be persuaded otherwise though a man rise from the dead to tell me.

And now we have come to Jasper, where we have two hours to rest off and talk to the men of a construction camp who have struck work for the day in order to see the train come in. Of course, it does not take all their day for this, but there were the preliminary toilet preparations to make and the walk in and out. Such newly shaven chins; such freshly brushed clothes; such irreproachable boots! Who could have expected it!

Like the ascetics who of old-time went into the wilderness and found themselves dreaming of scarlet lips and white arms, so these fine fellows are ever fancying a comely woman gliding across their trail; a distressed damsel who needs to be fed and carried for long, long distances and sheltered in a low-built house of logs that is well-warmed and well-provisioned, with no other bachelor nearer than a hundred miles.

The bachelors will doubtless deny this sweet dalliance with a vehement fervour, but it has the matter of fact virtue of being true, and is no whimsey of mine. A year ago it was, in a prize competition, I was called upon to read over a hundred short stories, or more properly speaking, human nature studies. An amazingly large proportion of these came from northern camps, and in nearly every case the afore-mentioned situation was the theme. The variation from this concerned a young Englishman of education who is notified that he has inherited wealth at home but prefers to stay with his woodland wife—a beautiful Indian girl—rather than return to the granitic conventions of the old world, and to the busy idleness that goes by the name of society.

And why deny that their hearts are a-brim with dreams, for these are beautiful reveries and worthy the most chivalrous of knights. Since it was given me to look into the recesses of their minds I have liked them better than ever and am many times heartily glad. Any woman who is a gentleman would.

And here Opportunity has spilled a whole trainload of women before them—old and young, wise and otherwise. It would be tempting the patience of Providence if they didn't meet the train, these bachelors who would gladly lose a rib.

"Such a waste of excellent material," says a poetess who looks over the bachelors with an appraising eye. "How big they are! Someway or other, they make me think of steel girders."

"Ragingly handsome, I call them," says a petite miss who edits a page on a big eastern daily. "Do you think it possible, Lady Jane, that they—could—have—holes—in—their—socks?"

"Not only possible, My Dear, but highly probable," I reply.

"What odds?" asks Cy Warman, the poet. "It is recorded that President Taft was noticed to have a hole in his sock when he took off his boots in a Tokyo tea-room."

"I am persuaded," remarks an historian who has been listening, "that it is the duty of the Prime Minister of Canada to import wives for the bachelors who live on the frontiers. He has most excellent precedent in the case of Talon, the Intendant, who in 1670, because of the disparity of the sexes in this country, imported one hundred and sixty-five young women. Moreover, Talon specified that in sending out these girls from France, the King should see that they had good looks and were strong and healthy."

"My fellow-women!" interrupts a society reporter, who is an incarnation of frankness, "lend me your ears; I won't need your money. I intend coming here to live. No longer will I remain a martyr to good form. I am weary to death of musicales and other entertainments of an objectionable character. I intend to quit the 'best circles,' the 'local coteries,' and the 'haut noblesse in favour of a man with a bungalow at Jasper, and for these delectable mountains with the glories thereof. Now, what do you say to that?"

"Taken," replies a distinctly masculine voice in the rear—a voice that might come from a steel girder—whereupon the rest of us discreetly retire to allow for the arrangement of preliminaries. Love is born through effrontery more often than we think.

When we have achieved the sights of Jasper we entrain for Tete Jaune Cache, a beautiful moping place on the Fraser River. All the way along we pass through the fastnesses of the hills, places of glamour and mystery, and perhaps of fear. Here our eyes are pleasured with an illusive perspective or an uncertain silhouette; a fantastic rock-form cut out by the cruel chisels of the ice; a precipitous gorge up which the adventurous trees have stormed in darkened files; a welt of green where the moss has healed the hurt of the avalanche; a snow-born river with its white-toothed angry waters, a splash of ice called a glacier—a steady, long-living splash obedient only to the sun.

The artists with us talk of values, vistas, truth of space, chiaroscuro, mellowness of effect, and transparence of air. Perhaps they are right, but it seems to me that when Nature stretched her stone canvas in the Rockies she did not trouble with the trivialities of pleasing prettiness or technical nicety. She brushed in her colours with a boldness of mass and outline, with an energy and expression that stagger. There is no ambiguity about them. She used primary colours and never hesitated. Royal purple, the orange light of fire, and the sickening red in which Tintoretto has painted the wounds of his martyrs, she here emphasized by the "cold virgin snow" on the peaks.

For uncounted centuries, silence has brooded over the beauty of these imperturbable hills and over their unpathed, desolate places which only the eyes of the gods have seen. It is well with me this day that I journey through them, for here, as in Eden, the terrestrial and celestial may be one. It is well, too, that in passing I may shut my eyes and mentally sing the song of the land as it came hot from the heart of a poet in his home at the foot of these hills—

"Oh, could ye see, and could ye see
The great gold skies so clear,
The rivers that race the pine shade dark,
The mountainous snows that take no mark,
Sunlit and high on the Rockies stark
So far they seem as near.

But could ye know, and forever know
The word of the young Northwest;
A word she breathes to the true and bold,
A word misknown to the false and cold,
A word that never was broken or sold,
But the one who knows is best."

At Tete Jaune Cache, they are preparing to "strike camp" and move on to Mile 149. This has been the supply station for all the outposts, which means more than you may think, for the Railway Company furnishes an amazingly generous and varied bill-of-fare to its employees.

Don't ask me what you can get here, for I won't tell lest the urban epicures whose jaded palates need tickling should start out in a body for this lodge at Tete Jaune.

And the leading man in the kitchen has the most substantial merit and can roast a sirloin of beef or bake a cake of prodigious bigness for the men's supper just as he can cunningly and designedly contrive a pimento bisque, an omelette espanol, or shrimps à la créole for the boss and his company. I'll not tell another word about the fare, but, believe me it is "with such cookery a monkey might eat his own father."

Te' Jaune, as it is familiarly called in the North, is situated on the Fraser River. Because of the snow melting on the mountains, the Fraser is swollen as if the waters surged from underneath. While we wait, swart, husky-looking men are putting off to Fort George in primitive craft built of squared logs. These boats are called scows. They are carried along by the current which is from six to eight miles an hour, and are guided by means of a paddle with a vast yellow blade.

As the men pass on and wave their hands to us, a fret falls on me to go with them along this river-road to its very end, and if you are of my kin you would want it too. We would live sturdily; we would be sopped in sunshine, and God would give us joy.

At Te' Jaune there are many tongues spoken, for the workmen hail from all over the universe. Of late, we have heard much about these foreigners and of "those nations which we, so full-mouthed, call barbarous." Certain Canadians are enwrathed and utterly discomfited because of them. It is their desire to tidy up the country by sending the "alien offscourings" to where they belong. They tell us that our manners will become corrupted and our institutions imperilled by them.

This fear of strangers is not peculiar to our country and age. Strangers have, in all lands, been looked upon as enemies to the commonwealth, and consequently to be avoided or extinguished. According to Flavius Josephus, when Moses came to die he said, "Oh you Israelites and fellow-soldiers.... I would advise you to preserve these laws to leave none of your enemies alive when you have conquered them, but to look upon it as for your advantage to destroy them all, lest if you permit them to live, you taste of their manners and thereby corrupt your own proper institutions. I do farther exhort you to overthrow their altars and their groves and whatsoever temples they have among them, and burn all such, their nation and their very memory with fire; for by this means alone the safety of your own happy constitution can be secured to you."

The Jewish constitution was not worth the price asked; neither is ours. This should be far from the spirit of Canada—"the manless land that is crying out for the landless man." Canada is the child of the nations and our husky provinces have need of these husky peoples. Not only must we open wide our doors and bid them a good welcome, but having entered, it must be our endeavour to weld them into a seemly and coherent whole.

This is a task which is half accomplished e'er it is begun, for the Russian, the Italian, the Scandinavian and all our immigrants are eager to be like the Canadians, to speak our language, to wear our clothes, and to think, talk and walk like us. Their differentiation is a burden to them and they desire to drop it as quickly as possible.

These Coming Canadians from Europe are of a fine advantage to this country where thousands of miles of roads and railways are to be built, in that they perform the more onerous tasks of digging and drainage which the Canadian, British, and American turns from as menial and unworthy. It would be a wide mistake for us to turn back from our sea-ports these unlearned and common peoples who seek entrance—as foolish as the farmer who would fear a large yield of wheat lest he could not thresh it, or a banker who dreaded an inrush of gold lest he could not count it.

It was Michael Gowda, a Ruthenian living at Edmonton, who expressed for his people their feelings of loyalty towards the land of their adoption in a poem entitled "O Free and Fresh-home Canada"—

"And are you not, O Canada, our own?
Nay, we are still but holders of thy soil,—
We have not earned by sacrifice and groan
The right to boast the country where we toil.

But, Canada, our hearts are thine till death,
Our children shall be free to call thee theirs,
Their own dear land where, gladly drawing breath,
Their parents found safe homes, and left strong heirs.

Of homes, and native freedom, and the heart
To live and strive and die, if need be,
In standing manfully by honour's part
To guard the country that has made us free."

CHAPTER VI

BITTER WATERS

I

They could not drink of the waters of Marah, for they were bitter.—The Pentateuch.

"Tweet, my little plover! Thy lips are like unto the bleeding strawberry."

Wasi, the father, smiled indulgently on this child-play, cooing chatter, and sweet-flavoured words of his girl-wife as she fondled their wonder-eyed baby.

And in truth, it was a round dimpled baby—a cunning, cuddling papoose that looked for all the world like a live bronze. Wasi did well to smile.

The older Braves had sneered at Wasi, "the Yellow Pine," for had he not, they asked, breathed the breath of his squaw till his heart was even as faint and soft as a squaw's heart. But Wasi of the swart face heeded not their gibes for he loved Ermi with the flaming love known only to men of hot heart and greedy senses.

"Lazy one, to sleep till sun is high," merrily chided Ermi. "Little Ninon has been awake since the dawn raised the meadow-larks."

Wasi rose hastily, for he would take the trail early to the sun-dance, and it was four suns' journey to the North.

Once, Ermi had gone when she was ten spring-tides old, but the cruelties of the scene with its shrill jubilations, had bitten themselves into her memory. Her brother had been one of the candidates for the coveted title of "Brave," and she had seen the wooden skewers thrust through the muscles of his chest by which he was suspended to a tree and from which he only freed himself by tearing away the flesh. Since then, she had been to the mission school at St. Albert, and the nuns had taught her that the body was holy, "a temple," they called it, and that the sun-dance was sinful exceedingly.

Father Lament at the cathedral had christened her Agatha, for she had come to them in February on the day of the virgin-martyr of Sicily. But Wasi was a Pagan, and called her Ermi.

Ermi busied herself laying out Wasi's beaded moccasins, his bow of cherry-wood with its leathern thong, and his arrows of Albertan willows, that were winged with eagle feathers and tipped with iron.

All the while she sang a quaint song about love.

"Why singest thou thus!" asked Wasi. "'Tis the foolish song of the hunters from the south-land."

But Ermi laughed as she sang—

"'Twas odour fled
As soon as shed,
'Twas morning's winged dream;
'Twas a light that ne'er can shine again
On life's dull stream."

Then, as Wasi held his pony, Ermi kissed her brave and rested her slight little body against him with love speaking in every line of its limp abandon.

II

Outside, the smouldering sun sank earthward in a drapery of blood-red. In the tepee, the fierce dryness of the hot winds breathed on the baby that lay dying by the open door.

The Indian women feared the measles more than any other plague, and so Ermi had been alone all the days, save only for the medicine-man who had come to her thrice. He would drive out the evil spirits who had caused the sickness, but Ermi only shook her head and held little Ninon the closer. Once, she had seen him sear the flesh of Cheneka with a burning piece of touchwood, and he had sucked the blood from the breast of Kon. Besides, Ermi was a Christian and worshipped always at the shrine of the great white virgin.

The hours passed, horrible hours, and still in her loneliness and parching anxiety she cried for the life of her baby, cried the prayers of impotence to omnipotence. Already the baby-face was old and tired, but the mother crooned and rocked her all through the night till, at dawn, the wearied eyelids drooped over the darkened eyes for the last time. The dove had found no rest for the sole of her foot.

Ermi knew where there lay a great stone in the coulee off by the river bank. She would carry her baby thence and bury it under the stone, safe from the grovelling of wolves.

Then she washed the tiny form and combed the tangles from the soft hair, looping it back from the face with a band of scarlet. "After all," she mused, "life has no beauty so wonderful as death."

And because it was the tribal belief that if a corpse were carried through a door, the next person following would shortly die, Ermi put Ninon through the window, for Wasi would come home soon and the dread fate might fall on him.

Gathering the little clod of flesh in her arms and pressing it closely, the dry-eyed mother set out on her journey across the wide-lying plains. On and on she walked, trudge, trudge, trudge, under a brazen sky that looked down pitiless and tearless.

"Oh! If Wasi were here," she thought. "He would carry the spade and I would hold little Ninon only. If Wasi were here!"

The ground reflected heat to her weary soul and body, and the weight of the world seemed to crush her frail being.

"Oh, Mother of God! Sweet Mother of God!" she moaned. "How the sun burns, and I am very tired."

But the women of the Braves are in pain and weariness often, so Ermi staggered on till she reached the coulee, with its boulder that had been carried hither by the river when it overflowed its banks at the last springtide.

Laying her burden in the shadow of the rock, Ermi hollowed out an earthen cradle for the baby. She lined it with green, too, just as they had done at school when any one died, and then passionately kissing Ninon, she wrapped a bit of blanket about her, for the living would have the dead sleep soft and warm.

Ermi tried to think a prayer, but she had forgotten them all since the nights when Ninon was sick. She could not think of even one. She only noticed that the white butterflies swam lazily to and fro like floating blossoms, and that the sunflowers were wondrously beautiful as they punctuated the rank, shaggy grass with gold. Lissome lilies swayed gently in the hot breeze and made blotches on the earth like spilled wine.

At midday, the lilt of a lark stabbed the air, and the sound roused Ermi, for she rose sharply to her feet and sang with hoarse voice and stiff lips—

"'Twas odour fled
As soon as shed;
'Twas morning's winged dream;
'Twas a light that ne'er can shine again
On life's dull stream."

The startled gophers darted into their cover and waited. When they looked again, the mother had packed the little form in clay, had rolled to the stone and lay face down wards on the earth. It was early dawn when she rose from her vigil.

III