CHAPTER VI
Saskatoon—A Temperance Lecture
When William Trailey issued from Bert's tent, he had but the haziest notion where his own lay. He was completely turned round. Also he was very sleepy, so much so that all the tents in the neighbourhood looked alike to him.
Even in the daytime he found it necessary to rely on the colour of his horses, more than anything else, to guide him home. He had purchased a pair of flea-bitten greys specially for that purpose; but soon the camp became filled with horses of a similar colour, tied to Bain wagons of a design exactly like his own.
Nor did the weird ghostliness of the night contribute much help to his extremely unreliable sense of direction. At last, however, after wandering about like a somnambulist for nearly half an hour, he saw at a distance a light-coloured team, so he promptly made towards it.
"Ah-h," he sighed contentedly, "here we are at last," and he commenced to hum one of his favourite tunes—"Throw Out the Life-Line."
Everything invariably came out all right in the end for William Trailey. Other people might try to drift along on the stream of life, but sooner or later they found themselves plunging over falls, or grounding on sand bars, or striking submerged snags. Not so he. Just when the stream began to race, preparatory to rushing over a weir, something always steered him into a peaceful backwater, where overhanging branches of trees sheltered him from the sun, and where he could—if it weren't mealtime—climb out on the grassy bank and enjoy a quiet snooze.
Nevertheless, when he stood beside his tent, a vague fancy seemed to warn him that one of his horses looked a bit different. But then horses were such puzzling creatures. How did he know that they mightn't change their colour and become cream-, or buckskin-, or even sorrel-tinted. Didn't politicians, and billboards, and dining-room walls, change their coats mysteriously sometimes? Certainly they did. Then why not horses?
Such subtle reasoning as this was one of Trailey's strong points. Had he been a soldier by profession, doubtless he would have argued that because the walls of Jericho fell down flat to the crash of Joshua's trumpets, such a feat could easily be repeated in a modern siege. It is conceivable he might have become a general in the subsequent Great War of attrition, had he been sufficiently lucky to be of military age about that time.
He now knew positively that it was his own tent he stood against, because there was the wash-bowl, and there was the chimney-pipe jutting out in the same place. How absurd of him to harbour silly doubts! He held his breath for a moment to listen to the far-off wail of a coyote. Indescribably sad, the dismal cry drifted across to him from out of the spectral night.
"Thank goodness I'm not out there alone," he mused.