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.