Esther and Bert were sitting together on the hindmost seat, alternately sipping at the heaven in each other's eyes, and making joyous mating noises. The Traileys occupied the middle seat, and Sam, who manipulated the ribbons, the front one.
A surveyor who was in the camp gave them a bee line due north with his transit. "Fix your eyes on that gap in those hills," he said, "and keep as straight for it as you can. Then, when you think you've done ten miles, look about for a mound. The grass being burned off will make it easier for you to find one." This conversation took place atop of a ridge slightly north of camp. It all sounded simple enough.
"But 'ow shall we know when we've gone that far?" asked Sam.
The surveyor glanced at the team, and then at the men, and, after pondering a couple of seconds, replied: "I guess you will have gone far enough when you've been travelling four hours. You'll be within a mile or so of your land, anyway—unless, of course, you run into trouble." He was a short, merry, affable man, clear-eyed and burnt as dark as an Indian. So off they set.
For nearly four hours they drove through a country whose topography was about half open prairie, and half brush and slough. Their hopes sank a little. The district wasn't even pretty—the very first test most Barr Colonists invariably applied to their surroundings. A few early mosquitoes tormented them; big yellow, and small grey, brutes of a malignancy only equalled by their pronounced fondness for thick, rich, English blood.
The quality of the soil, or the nature of the subsoil, bothered their innocence not at all. What they desired above everything else was for their "bit of land" to be like a park; not like the Dukeries, nor like Chatsworth; but something infinitely more alluring, if only because of its freedom from artificiality.
Once Sam said jestingly: "Look! there's a rippin' plyce ter live," and he pointed at a patch of delicately-tinted aspens which were growing right out of a little gleaming "lake" upon which a pair of mallards sailed as stately as swans.
"Oh, how sweet!" cried Esther. Bert was just then squeezing her hand beneath the folds of her coat—a light-blue, satiny affair.
"Yes, isn't it?" echoed Bert, as he admired Esther's splendid profile.
"Ah-h," sighed Trailey, lovingly regarding a speck of egg-yolk which nestled between the fourth and fifth buttons of his somewhat wrinkled waistcoat—"it's over four hours since we started—it must be. Perhaps we'd better have our lunch and find the land afterwards; we could do it much better then."