The railroad seems like a huge centipede with rails for the body, ties for the limbs and smoke for the breath. The men who stand by her side are the waiters who feed her with coal and slake her thirst with water. Sometimes, when she is weary of the freightage these men lay upon her, she rises and crushes it to atoms. Men call this happening "a broken rail" or "an open switch," but we know better.
Or we may think of the railroad as a streak of light through desolate places telling the pioneer to be strong and of good courage with the hope of better days.
Or, again, it is a belt which binds the lustrous provinces of the East and West into the eager land of Canada. What odds that the belt, partaking of its environment, is rocky here or sandy there, so long as it be really a belt?
No one can truly say when this road will die. It may be—if one may hazard so saucy a suggestion—that the airships will kill her by taking her traffic in men and merchandise. And maybe the great-grandchildren of the "Coming Canadians" who arrived this year from Scandinavia or Austria, will plough long furrows on her right-of-way and haul off her bridge timbers for firewood. Guesswork all!
I might have gone on musing about this railway until now, and computing what its advent means to the North, the country which has hitherto been the land of the dog and the canoe, had not a commanding voice bade me come and "drape" myself with the crowd beside the first train in order to have my picture taken.
"I won't go! not a toe," said I, but I went, for no woman who is even fairly normal can successfully resist having her photograph taken. She always hopes it will turn out better than the last one, and I hoped so too.
CHAPTER X
ON THE ATHABASCA RIVER
I am but mad north-northwest: when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.—Hamlet.