He bent over and rubbed his head against the animal's face. Then he sprang up.
"Come on, you lazy old cuss, you," he exclaimed quickly. "Don't you know there's a long bit o' trail ahead yet? Come on!"
In a moment he was mounted again and on his way. About twenty miles of trail lay ahead of before he should come to the end of his journey. Although the afternoon was rapidly wearing away and the westering sun already turning red above the valley there was no special cause for hurry. King loved the trail in the long northern evenings when the scent of spruce and tamarac came down from the hills and mingled with the delicate perfume of the prairie roses that came up from the valley. He loved the changing colors deepening in the twilight. He loved to hear the night voices awakening one after another. Often he had taken the trail late in the evening in midsummer to escape the heat of the day and to watch the arc of daylight growing smaller as it shifted its way round to the north in the early night until it hung like the edge of a huge grey disc just showing above the northern-most point of the horizon. He had often watched the disc move eastward and grow again with the hours until it spread out into the glorious dawn of another day, and in his own way he loved it all—for it made him feel that he was a part of the great scheme of things. For a while then he felt sure of himself—and that was a good feeling for King Howden.
Only a few miles more and he would be out on the right-of-way where stood old Keith McBain's construction camp. It made a convenient place for a pause half-way in the trip, and the camp incidentally boasted the best cook on the line—a fact that might have had some bearing upon King's decision to make camp about supper time.
A short three miles farther on, the trail took a little dip to the left down the slope of a wooded ridge and emerged upon the open right-of-way. It was within half an hour of general quitting time and the teamsters had already begun to leave the grade, their sweating horses hurrying quickly away in the dust, with trace-chains clinking and harness rattling. The rest of the gang were still at work clearing the ground of stumps and logs, and roughly levelling the piles of earth that had been thrown up by the "slushers" during the afternoon.
King had stood upon right-of-ways before, but the prospect fascinated him as much to-day as it had done the first day he had ever looked along the narrowing perspective of an open avenue canyoned between two rows of trees, and in the centre a long straight line of grey-brown earth heaped up into a grade. He slipped down from the saddle and walked leisurely along the trail that skirted the side of the right-of-way, his eyes upon the men who went about their work quietly and with no more enthusiasm than one might expect from human beings whose thanks to a benevolent Providence found daily expression in the formula, "another day, another dollar."
King found a bit of innocent diversion in the efforts of four grunting and expostulating workmen who had lifted a log from the ground and were stumbling clumsily with it towards the right-of-way. The log was not so large that four men could not have handled it easily. King smiled as he watched them, and thought to himself that two men could have picked it up and taken it away without great effort. Suddenly a veritable torrent of profanity broke upon his ears, and the foreman who had been standing near rushed up, threw his arms about the log and scattering all four of them, carried it off alone and threw it upon a pile of stumps and roots that stood a few feet back from the trail. King found himself all at once wondering what he himself could have done with a log of the same size.
He came to himself suddenly again at the sound of the foreman's voice and looked round just in time to see Sal leap to one side and run towards him to escape a stick that came hurtling along the ground near the dog's feet. King stepped out quickly to protect the dog. As he did so he saw the foreman standing a few yards away, his face twisted into a grin. For a moment the two men eyed each other. Then King spoke.
"Quit that," he said in a voice that trembled with rising passion.
The foreman's only reply was a few muttered words of profanity that King did not hear, or hearing did not consider worthy of any account. His concern was for the mongrel collie that had narrowly escaped injury, and was now fawning and whining about his legs.