"So do I. Perhaps we can arrange to——" but just then, annoyingly, Esther excused herself, and ran off into the tent.
Bert joined Sam, who was busily engaged with William Trailey, teaching him how to steer a team by pulling an imaginary left rein to go to the left, and an imaginary right one to go to the right.
"We s'll make a rarncher of yer yet, guv'ner," said Sam, as the intricate problem slowly percolated into his pupil's intelligence.
Trailey didn't seem at all sure about it. At the close of the lesson, he said: "Thank you very much, Sam. I think I shall be able to manage it after a few years."
CHAPTER VIII
On to Battleford
Excitement and bustle prevailed throughout the camp. Every day ten, fifteen or twenty teams, nearly all hitched to garish covered wagons, started out along the Battleford trail. Plentifully sandwiched among them were Indian, half-breed and white freighters, their worn and dingy equipment contrasting vividly with the resplendent convoys of the Barr Colonists.
The Rev. Isaac M. Barr engaged scores of teams to transport surplus luggage, stores, hospital and general supplies to the far-distant Colony. This was his great Transportation Company going into action for the first time. Blithely it charged the sticky trail. By the time May Day arrived, every slough, and creek, and gumbo flat from Saskatoon westwards for two hundred miles, was decorated with one or more mired wagons. The piercing squeaks of ungreased wagon-wheels heralded through the prairie solitudes the passage of the pioneers.
Perhaps it was because Barr's Transportation Company only just escaped being stillborn that it was so weakly. Its wagons, though driven by professionals, were quite as expert in getting stuck as were those of the colonists.
Some families brought out pianos, and even whole suites of furniture with them, but the greater number had been content to pack their belongings into a few large-sized, hoop-ironed, wooden cases, heavy as lead. It was the more cumbersome of these pieces of luggage which broke the backs nearly, and the hearts, of the Transportation Company's drivers, when they were forced to unload and lug the massive boxes through waist-deep water.