Quite early—a week or more perhaps—the trek began to sort out the invertebrates. These came straggling back to Saskatoon with mossy chins and bedraggled looks, reciting fearful yarns about how they had been forced to leave pieces of their backbones in sloughs; the sheen of their lovely equipment in bottomless muskegs; shreds of nerve hanging on the almost perpendicular walls of yawning ravines; and, inferentially, their rapidly dwindling courage in the rapacious ooze of sticky alkali flats.
At that time, the West possessed (except nearer to Winnipeg) only the main line of the Canadian Pacific, the Calgary-Strathcona, and the Regina-Prince Albert branches, in the way of railways. The Canadian Northern transcontinental had been surveyed the previous summer, and the spot in the wilderness for which the colonists were bound was where this survey bisected the 110th meridian of longitude—almost exactly midway between the Battle and North Saskatchewan rivers.
The North-West Territories had not yet given birth to the charming twins, Alberta and Saskatchewan; but the cradle was bought, any amount of clothes were ready, and numerous attendants, in the shape of future government officials, waited round to be first with their congratulations.
Whatever induced Barr to venture so far, when there was any quantity of available land nearer, is not quite clear. Probably he was the law of survival's right-hand man; or he may have fancied himself as a second Moses. There is nothing to prove that the majority of the colonists would have refused to follow him into the Arctic Circle. All they desired was "a bit of land "—the land, the piece officially apportioned to the Colony, and to them.
During the time Trailey's belated draft was delaying them at Saskatoon, Sam and Bert amused themselves in various ways. The former decked himself out in a black, satiny shirt, an article of male apparel then greatly in vogue. These soot-hued garments were not supposed to show the dirt. Some of them didn't. The idea was a brilliant one, and the inventor of such a grand, labour-saving device Was doubtless well rewarded. A store-clerk in Saskatoon tried to sell Sam half a dozen of them.
"Look at this one I'm wearing myself," he said enthusiastically, pointing to his own shirt-collar, and then turning his coat-sleeve back so that Sam might see the wrist-band. "How long d'you think I've had this on?"
Sam was curious at first, then interested. He surveyed the store-clerk's collar, and cuff, then looked up in his face. The fellow was tall, with cadaverous features, and rather an oily skin.
"Dunno," said Sam, "but I should say abaht six months, p'raps."
The clerk laughed. He evidently enjoyed a joke.
"No," he said, "not that long; but I've had it on seven weeks. Ain't it a corker?"