Hour after hour, and day after day, the procession of wagons creaked slowly along. Tin pails drummed and chattered. Corners of cook stoves chewed away industriously at paint-veneered, near-oak wagon boxes. Stable lamps swung like pendulums from the hoops of the schooner-tops. Plough handles, and fork shafts, and silver-mounted walking-sticks provided temporary accommodation for anything that would consent to be hung, from a lady's bonnet to the back of a kitchen chair.
Women—and ladies—who never in their lives had ridden in anything slower or more prehistoric than a tram, sat perched high up on top-heavy loads built by grave-eyed men with a blissful disregard of such a thing as centre of gravity.
Children fidgeted and cried and slept in crevices between packing-cases. Older children alternately rode and chased about alongside the teams. Miles of heavenly puddles supplied them with unlimited paddling. Untoughened skins frayed and peeled and tanned. Boots became sodden, curled up round evening campfires, then in the morning refused to be worn.
Pure light-heartedness was the prevailing characteristic. It must be confessed, though, that quite often such an admirable spirit was simply the effect of ignorance. The pitiful greenness of everyone was so acutely evident to experienced spectators as to be provocative of the keenest mirth. In subsequent years, some laughed—and still laugh—over reminiscences of multitudes of tragi-comic incidents more heartily than the colonists themselves.
Very few of the men had ever handled a pair of lines. Nothing in the whole range of ignorance was more obvious than that—especially to the poor, dumb brutes with the bits in their mouths. It was a ghastly experience for them. Only a very small proportion of the drivers had the faintest conception of what constituted the proper handling and care of horses. The oxen had the advantage in that respect.
But there is a final way out of every insupportable difficulty—for dumb beasts, at any rate. They could always die. Scores of horses did eventually. If they survived the hardships of the trail and the abysmal ignorance of their masters, it was only at the expense of their constitutions, which shortly afterwards could stand no more, and at last succumbed. Even the prairie-hardened spirits of acclimatized bronchos drooped, finally, in many cases, departing for an equine heaven where perhaps green Englishmen are refused admission.
Many oxen perished. Those that did not grew terribly emaciated, and looked about them with despairing eyes, probably wondering what they had done to offend the grim reaper that he should refuse to waft their own tortured spirits into the land of everlasting cuds, where everything was green except wagons and men.
Imitation pioneers with faint hearts, wobbly wills and rubber spines, sat back in Saskatoon, listening by day to the hair-raising stories of retreating colonists; and at night dreaming of miles of asphalted, lamp-lighted thoroughfares lined with semi-detached villas of a deadening sameness, where one could always find one's own rented house by counting either from the top or the bottom of the street.
The weaker spirits, sprouting white-feathered wings streaked with yellow, promptly flew back to England ignominiously. Others spun their feeble pluck into nets of vacillation and timidity, in the toils of which they became inextricably tangled. Yet others, shortening their horizon, and taking a reef in their vision, cast shrewd eyes at what lay nearer their feet. These developed into citizens of Saskatoon and other places farther south.
The weather still kept magnificently fine. The frost came out of the ground with a rush, leaving in its wake a carpet of purple anemones. The sun shone forth with undiminished splendour, wringing indefinable suggestions of fertility and growth from the pleasant-smelling earth.