Camp-beds, ploughs, stoves, tents, the inevitable portmanteaus—all found tottering repose somewhere or other about the piled-up loads. Infernal multi-toothed drag harrows hobnobbed with tender stove-pipes. Dismantled disks nestled familiarly against beautiful English blankets. Bags of flour and sugar committed hari-kari on projecting nails, or on jagged hooping iron, stoically disembowelling themselves like disgraced Japanese officials.
The Trailey party met many colonists trickling back to the base at Saskatoon, en route for England. Woe-begone faces—mostly unwashed and unshaved; disillusioned eyes; grubby hands, and clothes showing signs of having repeatedly been slept in, were the distinguishing marks of these panic-struck Sunday-afternoon colonizers.
There is something sad about pioneering. So many broken hearts and shattered hopes go into it. The rewards are so slim, and the drudgery is so sure. Westminster Abbey treasures the bodies of none of the Empire's scouts. They are out on the veldt and the prairie, at the bottom of the oceans and the inland seas, and buried deep in the heart of virgin forests. The applause of the gallery was never theirs; neither were their names honoured by being written in big newspaper headlines beneath those of murderers, prize fighters, and divorced movie stars. Apparently there is much more notoriety to be got out of robbing a bank than there is out of taming a patch of prairie; which is as it should be, perhaps, considering the difference in the risk.
When meeting parties of advancing colonists, the faint-hearts naturally offered voluble excuses for running away. They complained bitterly of the awful loneliness, and of the terrible obstacles with which Barr's Point to Point was so plentifully studded; they objected to the obvious scarcity of theatres and music halls, and to the untrodden wildness of the prairie. The very immensity, and its emptiness, frightened them.
Whenever he could, Sam made a point of asking the stragglers why they were going back. It amused him. People always interested him more than objects did. One flat-faced man, with wide-spread ears, looked back along the trail lugubriously, when Sam stopped to speak to him, and said "there warn't enough —— 'ouses up there for 'im."
"Wot!" exclaimed Sam, feigning ignorance—"not enough blinkin' 'ouses!"
"No," replied the flat-faced man; "there's nowt up there but sludge, an' watter, an' steep 'ills like 'ouse-roofs to break yer —— neck goin' down."
"Yes, mister," added a voice, which belonged to a big, fat woman, who popped her face out of the back end of the schooner-top; "an' there ain't no schools up there, neither. That man Barr's a proper scoundril—inticing decent people away from their 'omes. Our Horice here"—Horice was hiding his genius somewhere inside the covered wagon—"wants to be a archytect; he's got a stificate from his schoolmaster intitling him to try for a scholarship. How's he goin' to get to be a archytect up there? That's what I'd like to know, mister."
Sam tried to assume a worried expression, in sympathy with such profound concern, but he found it difficult. The woman's appearance was too comical. She had three large curling-pins in her hair, one just above each ear, and the other in the centre above her forehead. As her cheekbones were very wide, and her brow somewhat narrow, her face looked for all the world like a cross between a problem in geometry, and a boy's kite turned upside down.
The party's transport animals were both of them red-and-white oxen. While the woman had been addressing Sam, the tired brutes had flopped down exhausted in the trail. Their mouths were open and flecked with foam, and their flanks palpitated rapidly like a dog's.