And the railway was coming now. From Atlantic to Pacific, one poem with an heroic theme was in the making—the epic of the Transcontinental.
To the East, in this epic, belong the giants of vision, the planners, the intellectuals. The West saw only the men of action, the giants who did the bidding of the fathers of the dream, the surveyors, plate-layers, navvies, engineers. These men of action were organized like an army. Like an army, they had their officers, their N.C.O.s, their rank and file, their hangers-on and camp-followers. The men who supervised—the construction-bosses, skilled engineers, managers of one thing or another—were the officers; the foremen and master-mechanics were the N.C.O.s; the lesser labourers—mostly called Dagoes—who laid the road-bed, dug ditches, carried sleepers, rails and fish-plates—were the rank and file; while the camp-followers and hangers-on—gamblers, whiskey-smugglers, robbers, cut-throats and lost women—were scum clean through.
Though organized like an army—these people—they were actually a crowd. An army is distinguished from a crowd by its discipline. And they had very little discipline. It was necessary, for the good of the great work, that their unruly elements be kept in hand. As far as such men could be, they were kept in hand. And, through their labours—this fact will help them at the Day of Judgment—the great work marched steadily towards completion. Slowly but surely, the thin thread of steel pushed its way through the trackless wastes of rock and burnt-out timber north of the Great Lakes; thrust itself across mile after mile of sunlit plain; climbed step by step over the foothills and into the mountains; clambered along sheer precipices, sprang over dizzy gorges, bored through vast walls of granite; and, tracing always the pathway of the pioneers, pushed forward month by month in the wake of the setting sun.
The crowd was kept in hand—partly by the iron rule of its chiefs but mainly through the unceasing vigilance of the Mounted Police, who soothed their discontent, caught their robbers, suppressed their gamblers, baffled their whiskey-smugglers and forestalled their murderers.
The 'end of track,' by this time, had reached Regina; and Hector was the senior N.C.O. of the Mounted Police on that division.
When Sergeant-Major Whittaker, six months before, had left the Force to take up land in the North, his departure had left a great gap in J Division; but nobody had been surprised when Hector was called upon to fill it.
"He's one of our best N.C.O.s," was the general comment. "Besides, he has the luck of the devil, anyway!"
So Hector was now Sergeant-Major, at twenty-eight, and it was more than probable that before he was thirty he would easily realize his dream of a commission. There was no cloud on his horizon. He was very happy.
For some time after Welland's escape Hector had feared for his prospects. A criminal involved in innumerable crimes had slipped through his fingers; he thought the Big Chiefs would consider this inexcusable. Hector's fall, which to some minds might have exonerated him, seemed to him to add to the disgrace. The result of sheer carelessness—so he considered it—that fall should never have happened to a Mounted Policeman; and he was certain the Big Chiefs would hold the same opinion. But when the Commissioner and Inspector Denton heard the details of his condition when, ragged, gory, white-faced and held up only by his indomitable will, he returned from Welland's, and realized just what he had done, they acted as they thought best. Hector, after all, had unmasked the man—one of the most dangerous in the country—and at least driven him out by his own unaided effort. It was good riddance of bad rubbish; and Welland's escape did him no harm.
That was two years ago now and Hector had almost forgotten the whole affair. Even Welland's dramatic little note, with its vindictive threat, 'I'll get even, if it takes me twenty years' he had contemptuously banished from his mind. And today he was Sergeant-Major of J Division, maintaining the law along one hundred miles of the line of construction.