PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO
ALYSE

CONTENTS

CHAP.

  1. [The Park Lands]
  2. [A Deputation]
  3. [The Trail]
  4. [The Coyote Snaps]
  5. [Jenny]
  6. [The Shadow]
  7. [Mr. Flynn Steps into the Breach]
  8. [When April Smiled Again]
  9. [The Devil]
  10. [Friction]
  11. [The Frost]
  12. [The Break]
  13. [The Camp]
  14. [The Red Teamster]
  15. [Travail]
  16. [A House-party]
  17. [—And Its Finale]
  18. [The Persistence of the Established]
  19. [The Wages of Sin]
  20. [—Is Death]
  21. [Persecution]
  22. [Denunciation]
  23. [The Charivari]
  24. [Without the Pale]
  25. [The Sunken Grade]
  26. [Winnipeg]
  27. [The Nature of the Cinch]
  28. [The Strike]
  29. [The Bluff]
  30. [Fire]
  31. [Wherein the Fates Substitute a Change of Bill]
  32. [The Trail Again]

THE SETTLER

I

THE PARK LANDS

The clip of a cutting axe flushed a heron from the bosom of a reedy lake and sent him soaring in slow spirals until, at the zenith of his flight, he overlooked a vast champaign. Far to the south a yellow streak marked the scorched prairies of southern Manitoba; eastward and north a spruce forest draped the land in a mantle of gloom; while to the west the woods were thrown with a scattering hand over a vast expanse of rolling prairie. These were the Park Lands of the Fertile Belt—a beautiful country, rich, fat-soiled, rank with flowers and herbage, once the hunting-ground of Cree and Ojibway, but now passed to the sterner race whose lonely farmsteads were strewn over the face of the land. These presented a deadly likeness. Each had its log-house, its huge tent of firewood upreared against next winter's drift, and the same yellow strawstacks dotted their fenceless fields. One other thing, too, they had in common—though this did not lie to the eye of the heron—a universal mortgage, legacy of the recent boom, covered all.

At the flap of the great bird's wing a man stepped from the timber and stood watching him soar. He was a tall fellow, lean as a greyhound, flat-flanked, in color neither dark nor fair. His eyes were deep-set and looked out from a face that was burned to the color of a brick. His nose was straight and large, cheeks well hollowed; the face would have been stern but for the humor that lurked about the mouth. Taken together, the man was an excellent specimen of what he was—a young American of the settler type.