"Dear me!" whines a person in the back seat, "and we are dreadfully out of tea."
At five o'clock, we stop at Eggie's for supper. Eggie broke land here fourteen years ago, and ever since has kept a stopping place for travellers. There is no need of his transporting eggs, butter, meat, grain, and vegetables to market, for the market comes to him. He makes hay when the sun shines, and also in the dark. As a result, he has accumulated sixty thousand dollars in money and gear. So far as I know, there is no eating-house with a record in any way comparable.
Eggie Jr. is a telegraph operator. His instrument is back of the cook stove over against a window. When he is away from home his young sister works the code. She picked it up while tending the stove. You can never tell what is up the sleeve of these pioneering women. I told her she was the sixth wise virgin. "The other five?" she queried with a glint of laughter in her eyes. There are other folk having supper at Eggie's. The man with the long slouchy stride is a land surveyor. They grow on every bush here.
That crisp-mannered youth with the honey-coloured hair is going down north to cap a gas well. In what better task can a youth engage than to conserve power, heat, and light for humanity? Dear young man!
Their driver quotes Cicero, and swears in Cree. He is a living example of what whisky can do for a Bachelor of Arts who entirely devotes himself to it.
By six o'clock we are again on the road, and passing through a rolling park-like country dotted with clumps of cottonwood, birch, poplar, and spruce. Sometimes, we pass lush meadow upon which graze full-fleshed cattle and comfortably rotund sheep. On one farm, a man is burning dead brushwood. There is no keener pleasure than, here and there, to thrust a core of fire into long grass or brushwood, and to watch the red tongues of flame as they greedily lap it up. As yet, no farmer has written about it, but this is only because farmers are afraid of literary critics. It is a pity the workers are so frequently inarticulate, thus leaving their joys and sorrows to be imperfectly sensed by onlookers. But, Hear, Oh Men! and rejoice with me for at this game I am not a mere onlooker, having once burnt over twenty-eight acres. In making these fires, there is a kind of madness that takes possession of you so that you pay no heed to the shrivelling of your shoes; to the scalding cinders on your hands; or the inky blackness of your face and clothes. Indeed, it would not be surprising to ultimately learn that the direful task assigned to Lucifer is not wholly without its compensations.
At long intervals, we pass fat little shacks that spread over the land instead of stretching up. At one of these, we stop to get cold water in the engine.
"Any news moving?" asks the bachelor who is overlord to the shack.
He does not wait for an answer, but proceeds to inform us that the prime knowledge a man needs for homesteading is the art of cooking in a frying pan.
His homestead is a ranch; not a rawnch. The difference, he explains, is that the former pays sometimes; the latter never.