“It doesn’t matter,” said Miss Kinnaird. “I feel tolerably sure it is Weston, and that is the name of the people who own the place. You don’t appear to understand that the fact has its significance.”
“How?” asked Ida.
“You haven’t been in England or you’d understand. The people who live in those old places are often very poor, but a certain number of them have something that the people who have only money would give a good deal to possess. As a matter of fact, though distinctly human in most respects, they are—different.”
Ida laughed.
“Oh,” she said, “I’ve naturally heard of that. It’s quite an old notion, and didn’t originate with you English people. Didn’t the Roman emperors claim to have the Imperial purple in their veins? Still, out here, when we speak of a man appreciatively we say his blood is—red.”
“And that’s the color of packer Weston’s.”
A faint gleam crept into Ida’s eyes as she remembered the white-faced man who had limped out of camp one morning almost too weary to drag himself along.
“Well,” she said, “I think you ought to know. When he went back up the range for you he left a trail of it behind him.”
Her companion had no opportunity for answering, for Major Kinnaird came back from the smoking end of the car just then, and when he spoke to Ida his daughter took up a book she had laid down.
In the meanwhile, a mountain locomotive and a train of flat cars came clanking into the station where Weston waited. Swinging himself onto one he took his place among the men who sat on the rails with which the car was loaded. Then, as the big locomotive slowly pulled them out, some of his new companions vituperated the station-agent for stopping them, and one came near braining him with a deftly-flung bottle when he retaliated. There were a good many more men perched on the other cars, and Weston concluded, from the burst of hoarse laughter that reached him through the roar of wheels, that all of them were not wholly sober. They had been recruited in Vancouver, and included a few runaway sailormen. One told him that they were going into the ranges to fill up a muskeg, and he expressed his opinion of the meanness of the company for not sending them up in a Colonist train, and offered to throw Weston off the car if he did not agree with him. He explained that he had already pitched off two of his companions.