Kit said it was so and the other smiled.
“I was raised in England; the orphanage shipped me out and a whiles since they put a picture of my store in their little book. Two fellows loading a wagon at the steps and a big freight train on the track in front! Thomas Lightfoot, merchant. Another —— boy does well in Canada, printed at the top. I don’t grumble, but if the boys would pay their bills, I might do better. Well, the sun is pretty fierce and maybe you’ll take a drink.”
He went off and came back carrying two glasses of pale green liquor in which ice floated.
“Good luck!” he said. “I’m a lawful citizen; the stuff’s soft all right.”
“Thank you! You’re a first-class sort,” said Kit, and drained his glass, for the lemonade was cold and good.
“If the bridge bosses turn you down, you might go on to Jardine, where the boys are putting up a tank,” Lightfoot resumed, and looking about his shelves, gave Kit a small can of fruit. “Another on me! I reckon it will help your lunch.”
Kit thanked him and started for the bridge. The storekeeper’s kindness was encouraging, because he had begun to feel that Canada was a foreign country. He did not know if the Canadians were antagonistic, but they were not polite. Kit thought the baggage man’s ordering him to get out was typical, but in a sense perhaps it was logical. The fellow did not have his trunk and there was no use in talking. Kit smiled and looked in front.
The trail went up a gentle slope, and where the wheels had torn the sod the black soil reflected the light as if the stuff was greasy. The wheel-marks were not straight; they curved about clumps of brush and sloos where the grass was high. Near the top, a farmer turned the clods in the summer fallow and dust rolled like smoke about indistinct horses and sparkling steel.
By and by the soil got lighter and the grass was rather gray than green. The black stuff was the gumbo in which the wheat plant thrives, but it looked as if the fertile belt followed the river, and on the high ground the wheels plowed up sandy gravel. Although Kit had thought to see homesteads, and fields of wheat rolling in the wind, Manitoba was yet marked by spaces cultivation had not touched.
After a time he sat down in the grass by a sparkling pond. Behind the pond was a poplar bluff, and cool shadows trembled on the grass. Kit, pulling out the cheese and crackers, began his lunch. His violin was all he carried, he did not know when he would get his trunk, and his money was nearly gone. Then it was possible the bridge engineers would have no use for him. Perhaps he had some grounds to be anxious, but he was not.