Trailey and Bert spent money lavishly. They stocked up with every imaginable thing, regardless of transportation problems. With an astonishing display of diplomacy in one so young, Bert presented Mrs. Trailey with a pair of weighty, handsome, vividly-scarlet Hudson's Bay blankets.
"Oh, you shouldn't, Mr. Tressider," the good lady remonstrated. "A pretty penny they've cost, I'll be bound. They'll come in useful, though, if we get any more snowstorms," and she fingered their soft, fleecy surface admiringly. "Oh, my goodness!" she exclaimed, as she lifted the blankets up, "what a weight they are! My husband will never stop sleeping when he gets these over him."
William Trailey happened to be dozing in a folding camp-chair just outside the tent, in which position he was soaking up sunshine like an equatorial lizard on a rock. Every now and then he emitted a subdued grunt of perfect content.
Esther was learning how to darn a woollen sweater, with her mother as an acrimonious tutor.
"Dad doesn't need anything to induce him to sleep," she laughed.
"Sleep! H'm!" snorted her mother. "Your father doesn't sleep; he goes into trances. Look at him—he's in one now. It's my opinion this isn't a country for lazy people. We're rushing into trouble," she continued reflectively, as she pursued her train of thought. She was busy peeling some potatoes which that morning she had attempted to refuse at the hands of a generous matron of the town. "I can feel it in my bones. Poverty, and worse, is staring us in the face all the time. Besides, I dropped my mirror this morning, and broke it; and that's a sure sign of trouble. One of your grandma's pictures fell off the wall the night your Uncle Tom was born. You remember him, Esther, don't you? He was the one who turned out to be a journalist, y'know, and tried to write poetry. I've heard your grandma say many a time it was a wonder she herself wasn't taken. The midwife..."
"In which event," interposed Esther quickly, "you wouldn't have been here to tell us about it, mamma."
Esther's face became suffused with blushes at the turn her mother's remarks were taking. Bert was quite composed. He thought she had never looked so adorable. "She's mine, or my name's not Tressider," he vowed to himself as he watched the flush slowly fade from his companion's lovely, rose-petal skin. "What a magnificent girl!" he mused, his mind wandering back among the romantic incidents of the trek, dwelling with leisurely joy upon the charming intimacies with which such a life abounds. But, like a lot more bliss, he merely longed for what he already possessed. It was merely a matter of revelation.
A trifle reluctantly, they finally set off from Battleford. The trail was sandy and good, well-worn by the vehicles of wandering Indians, who went frequently into the little town from their reservations close by. Here and there long wagons had drawn faint lines in the pale, yellow grass, tracing the path of a more or less aimless endeavour in some dusky Indian's untroubled mind. Beautifully natural tufts of poplar grew everywhere. A gigantic arch of sky rested its pale-green rims on the rounded buttresses of the Battle and Saskatchewan River hills to right and left. Far away in front, the prairie, stained a deep blue-black with distance, and futurity, stretched illimitably, waiting with implacable patience for the arrival of the unsuspecting Barr Colonists.
Soon a smoke, like a thin haze, enveloped everything, seeping into the crystal atmosphere apparently from nowhere at all. As the party travelled on hour after hour, it grew thicker and thicker. It flowed in over the prairie as imperceptibly as did the sentiment of affection over Esther and Bert. This latter emotional phenomenon was fast becoming so dense that at times the victims of it were perfectly unable to detect anything but the light shining from each other's eyes. Without an inkling of the nearness of any special declaration; scarcely aware that the vague, pleasant fondness they had conceived for one another was but the enchanting prelude to something more serious, and therefore more risky, the pair of lovers penetrated deeper and deeper into the spiritual haze of a mutual attachment.