CHAPTER VIII
THE MANIAC
Winter is not, perhaps, the best time to introduce a boy to the Far West, fresh from all the cosy comforts of home—at least, if he is a boy of the 'cotton wool' kind. To a boy like Snap the keen air was worth a king's ransom; the forests of snow-laden pines through which the train passed were full of mystery and romance; his eyes ached at night from straining to catch a glimpse of some great beast of the forest amongst their tall stems, or at least a track on the pure snow.
The day upon which Frank and Towzer left him was too full of incident for him to find much time to sorrow after his old friends. The train was passing through a district in which great lakes—unfrozen as yet, except just at the edges—lay amongst scattered rocks and pine forests bent and twisted by the Arctic cold and fierce storms of former winters. Inside the cars all was warmth and comfort, although the gaiety of the travellers was sobered down by the presence amongst them of a poor fellow who had lost his wife and two children in a railway accident a week before this. He was now returning from the rough funeral which had been accorded to them at the station of Boisfort. A strong, gaunt man, his days had been spent as a Hudson Bay runner, and later on as a watcher upon the railway, or manager of Chinese labour. In spite of his harsh training, even his strong nature had succumbed temporarily to the blow from which he was now suffering. His lost family seemed ever before his strained, wild eyes, and the throbbing and rattle of the engine and its cars seemed to beat into his brain and madden him. From time to time he would spring to his feet, clap his hands wildly to his head, and peer out into the snow. Then, moaning, 'No, it's not them, it's not them,' he would sink down again into his seat, limp and lifeless. Snap had been watching the man, fearing he was going mad, until his friend Nares touched him and said, 'Don't keep your eyes on the poor chap like that, maybe it fidgets him.'
Ashamed of what he at once considered an unintentional rudeness on his part, Snap withdrew into another corner of the compartment, and had just wandered off into day-dreams, in which Fairbury and 'the little mother' took a prominent place, when he was recalled to himself by a scream and a shuddering exclamation of horror which seemed to pass all along the compartment. Looking up quickly, he had just time to see a wild figure, hatless and grey-haired, hurl itself from the footboard at the end of the cars into the snow, and to hear a wild cry, 'I am coming, chicks, I am coming.' In spite of air-brakes and patent communicators it was some minutes before the train could be brought up all standing, and the passengers who hurried out to see after the unfortunate suicide had a good many hundred yards to go before they reached the spot at which he threw himself from the train, and when they reached the spot an expression of wonder spread over every face. Although the embankment upon which he alighted was considerably below the level of the train, although the train was travelling at express speed for an American line, there was no dead man to pick up from the snow, no man even with fractured limbs or strained sinews, but just the mark of a falling body, and then the tracks of a running man leading straight away through the silent snows to the lake-edge.
Close to the point at which the man had sprung from the train was a labourer's shanty, just one of those rough wooden structures which the Irish out West set up alongside their labours on the line. Round this, when Snap and Nares came up, was gathered an excited little group of passengers and railway-men.
'Are you sure Madge isn't in the house?' someone asked of a little boy of seven, the Irishman's child.
'No, Madgy ain't in the house; I heerd her hollerin' just when the engine went by; hollerin' as if someone had hurted her badly,' the child added.
'Where's your father, little man?' asked Nares, pushing his way to the front.
'Down the line at the bridge, working; father won't be back till night, and mother's gone this hour or more to take him his dinner.'
Nares turned to the men round him, and, speaking in low, quick tones, said: