Disappearing snowbanks fed willow-fringed sloughs to the brim. These tiny fictitious lakes sparkled in the sun like crystals. Brilliant-hued mallards preened themselves in their mirror-like surfaces. Lowly mud-hens sailed in and out among the grass and reeds, cheerfully challenging the broadsides from the colonists' guns long after their aristocratic relations had kicked the shimmering water into ripples and flown away.
Frogs, the only infallible harbingers of spring, rehearsed incessant and monotonous choruses. Deep-toned bassos kept them in time with rasping croaks. A shot from a gun, or a sudden shout, would turn off the music like a tap—one partly-trained voice occasionally lagging a little behind in a sort of self-conscious note.
It was through such scenes as these that the wagons of Trailey, and Sam and Bert, had been travelling for two whole days. Everything was progressing swimmingly, both literally and metaphorically speaking. In spite of detouring round sloughs, and making quick rushes at deep, boggy creeks, Trailey had succeeded in getting stuck a number of times. But always either Sam, or someone of experience, had come along and hauled his wagon on to dry land.
Then, towards the evening of the second day out from Saskatoon, Trailey, whose team was somewhat slower than Bert's, had again dropped behind. Suddenly the trail brought him up against a series of sloughs which appeared to run into each other and stretch to right and left as far as eye could see. Except for a few experimental wagon-tracks branching off here and there, the main trail led directly into the water.
So into it Trailey bravely steered his team, which, now being accustomed to the luxury of having its load pulled out for it, lunged along through the water for a matter of twenty or thirty yards with a very deceptive simulation of enthusiasm, and then abruptly stopped. After plunging about a bit in a highly hypocritical effort to move the wagon, the horses unanimously quit, and then calmly pretended to drink the stirred-up water which reached to their breasts.
"Gracious me!" cried, a well-known voice from the top of the loaded wagon. "But there, it's just what I expected. Didn't I tell you, William, when I saw that crow fly over the tent this morning, that either somebody was going to die or else we should all be drowned in a bog? But you're so stupid. You never heed me, who's been your faithful wife these twenty years and more. If I was like some women I know—and you know, too"—Martha Trailey grew hintingly mysterious—"no need to mention names. You know well enough. You needn't look like that—as if you didn't know what I meant. I can read you like a book. That Mrs. What's-her-name, for instance, who you used to——"
"Martha, my dear," expostulated Trailey from the front of the wagon, where he was supposed to be driving, "please keep quiet a minute. This is rather an awkward place."
"Keep quiet!" retorted Mrs. Trailey. "Keep quiet, did you say? Well, of all things! I wonder what next. Keep quiet—yes, I should think so. William Trailey; allow me to tell you that ever since you kissed that cat Priscilla Pilkins at the Bible Class Social Evening, thirteen years ago come Esther's birthday, I've been a quiet wife to a deceitful husband. Yes, and a faithful mother, too; but what thanks did I ever get for it? Tell me that, William Trailey. You can't, you know very well you can't. And now you are doing your level best to drown us all. Oh, dear me! never any sympathy from anybody. No comfort; no home to go to—no anything," and had not Martha Trailey been so busy assisting her husband to solve his present difficulty, she would certainly have shed a few tears.
The wagon was stuck to its hubs. Viewed esthetically, the slough was really a pretty, miniature lake, and precisely the kind of duck-pond every Barr Colonist was longing to find on his private estate. Queerly, though, the glamour of lakes was already beginning to wear a bit thin.
The other wagon, with Sam as pilot, was out of sight behind a clump of naked poplars on the farther shore. The little Londoner, as usual, had muddled safely through.