This rather subtle compliment pleased the Manchester man so much, that he called to his wife to ask where he might find a small crust of bannock with which to banquet the surviving pig, Daisy. "And you fetch that white stone from over there, Annie," he ordered his little girl, "an' we'll put it on Fanny's grave."
Annie broke out in fresh paroxysms of woe, but she obeyed. Then the future market gardener, spitting into the palm of one of his hands in the most approved fashion of English navvies working by the hour, started industriously to inter the porcine corpse. With fitting respect, Sam, Bert and Esther quietly left the stricken family to its obsequies.
Though the sun was rather more than half-way down from the zenith, the heat was almost overpowering. All round them colonists toiled and sweated; some digging in front of the buried wagon-wheels; some hooking two and three teams together in a long string, trying to overcome the immobility of a half-emptied load, only to see-saw their horses or oxen into impossible; knots; others laboriously transporting their stuff bit by bit on to hard ground, till their wagons were entirely unloaded.
The last-mentioned scheme was the one Sam and Bert decided to adopt. Systematically, they set about it, the ladies carrying the lighter articles, and the men the heavy goods. When the great gulf of the prairie night swallowed them up, with their heart-testing toil only partly done, they erected their tents and prepared a hasty supper over a cheery campfire; then, as the smouldering shadows wrestled more and more successfully with the fitful gleams from the dying embers, they retired to their roughly-improvised beds and almost instantly fell asleep.
CHAPTER XIII
Battleford
Three-quarters of the following day was spent in extricating the wagons from the voracious alkali. Even after they had finished their own wearisome toil, and were all loaded up once more ready to proceed, they found it impossible not to go to the assistance of other colonists who were less fortunately situated than themselves. How could a lone man, no matter how willing, and possibly with no help but that which a nerve-exhausted and travel-satiated wife could give, struggle with a ton or so of heavy baggage across a bottomless ooze? A still more unanswerable question presented itself. How could such helplessness be ignored? Weren't they all penetrating deeper and deeper into the wilderness, where every vestige of help and encouragement must come from each other?
Unskilled, perhaps; innocent, maybe; foolish, possibly; but heroic without a shadow of a doubt, were these hundreds of men and women who plodded resolutely on to achieve a set purpose, with, in the territory where they were going, not even so much as a footprint in the grass as a suggestion of hope.
Almost continuously the stream of colonists and freighters dribbled along and into the morass. There was no other way round. The highly-deceptive surface of the long, narrow plain refused even to support an empty wagon. Not until weeks later, when the hot sun had baked the ground to the hardness of stone, were any colonists able to pass that spot without leaving some mark or other, either on the whitening soil with a spade, or on their own spirits with the experience.
Compelled at last to disregard their fellow-unfortunates' claims for succour, the Trailey party continued their journey. Another day's ups and downs brought them to a substantial steel bridge, spanning the Battle River. Crossing this, they climbed into historic Battleford.