"You've got it!" he cried, slapping his thigh.
"That's not all. If old Brass Bowels—" Noticing that the contractor was looking their way, he finished in a whisper, the significance of which caused the chief's grizzled brows to rise till lost in the roots of his hair.
"You'll break camp—?" he questioned.
"To-morrow. Build a spur into the mills, then start prairie grading at the American line and run north. Ought to make a junction about the time the sink is filled."
And this he did. The few miles of spur-track being quickly built, a yellow tide of sawdust was soon flowing out to the Devil's Muskeg, where Bender's wood gang directed its flow. At first there was great argument about this new material, some holding that one might as well try to build a road-bed with feathers. But it proved itself. Tamping hard as clay, it had greater resilience, and soon the twisted track rose like a mained serpent from the slimy clutch of the devil. Yes, miles of flat-cars, boarded up till they loomed big as houses, moved between mill and slough through that summer, and no one dreamed of their slow procession having other significance up to the moment that Helen heard newsboys crying a special in the hot streets—
"Monopoly refuses new line a crossing. Section gangs tear up Carter's diamond."
XXVI
WINNIPEG
By that time Helen had shaken down to a life that was new as strange—though not without travail; shaking is always uncomfortable.
Coming in to the city, a natural nervousness—that indefinite apprehension which assails the stoutest under the frown of new adventures—had been accentuated by heart-sickness from her late experiences, and was justified by some to come. She viewed its distant spires very much as an outlaw might contemplate far-off hostile towers. Entering from the west, as she did, one sees taller buildings poke, one by one, from under the flat horizon. For the city sits by the Red River—smoothest, most treacherous of streams—in the midst of vast alluvial plains, its back to the "Ragged Lands," facing the setting sun. North, south, east, and west of it they stretch, these great flat plains. Vividly emerald in spring-time, June shoots their velvet with chameleon florescences that glow and blaze with the seasons, fix in universal gold, then fade to purest white. Dark, dirty, the city stands out on the soft snow-curtain like a sable blot on an ermine mantle. Withal it is a clean city, for if the black muck of its unpaved streets cakes laboring wagons and Red River carts to the hubs after spring thaws, the dirt is all underfoot. No manufactures foul the winds that sweep in from boreal seas with the garnered essences of an empire of flowers.