"Mr. Tressider, eh?" Mrs. Trailey's tone was very corrosive, but she accepted the bandage. "Of course, I forgot! It's always Mr. Tressider, isn't it? Mr. Tressider this, and Mr. Tressider that; it's never your mother who does anything, is it?"
"Mamma, dear, don't be silly. I think you are simply wonderful, the way you put up with things, and do everything for us, especially as you've never been used to this sort of life." Esther turned to Bert, partly to have another look at him, and partly to gain his support. "Don't you think so, Mr. Tressider?"
The look in her eyes would have made Bert say anything. Martha Trailey was applying the finishing touches to her sleeping husband's extempore bed, patting here, and gently pulling there, in a wifely effort to achieve the uttermost of comfort for him. When she heard Bert say: "Indeed she is, Es—Miss Trailey; she's really splendid," she kept her face averted. After assuring herself that her husband was resting comfortably, and when she had thrown an eiderdown across his feet, for the great, cheerless tent was damp and cold, she left him.
As her mother whirled industriously towards the stove to begin preparations for supper, Esther noticed that her eyes were sparkling with something that might have been tears.
CHAPTER XII
Tragi-Comedy in an Alkali Flat
The Traileys, with Sam and Bert, stayed at the marquee camp a week. At the end of that time, the snow had disappeared; also Trailey's foot was doing nicely. Nevertheless, that gentleman arranged for Bert to do his driving for him. To this no one objected, not even Esther.
Trails were now made doubly treacherous by the water from the melted snow. Every few miles one or other of the wagons sunk to its axles. Sometimes they wriggled from the grasping clutch of the sticky morass by doubling-up; but much oftener by unloading. And because of the strangeness of the tasks they were constantly faced with, and the weirdness of the methods they employed for their accomplishment, at least one-half their truly prodigious efforts was so much time and labour wasted.
About one day's travel, roughly speaking, from Battleford, they ran into a screamingly comic incident, one of the kind which anyone except an old-timer, familiar with the peculiarities of the Barr Colonists, may possibly pooh-pooh at, or quite likely regard as pure myth. It is no trick to wrench credulity in these sceptical times. Indeed, it seems the more people know, the less they believe.
However, an alkali flat of immense length, and probably two or three hundred yards wide, was the pastoral setting chosen by an inscrutable Fate for the production of a pathetic little scene. To the right were the rounded hills marking the giant Saskatchewan's mile-wide meanderings towards Lake Winnipeg. On the left, the perfectly-level alkali plain strung itself out to the limit of vision. In front, more rounded and wooded hills; and, behind, a gently-rolling country disappearing into black perspective, with a ridge in the foreground upon which grew a long, straggling curtain of leafless poplars.