Wondering, for a moment, if he had not done a foolish thing in resigning, Evan scratched his head, but the friction set his imagination aglow again—and he bade the office good-bye.
He met Henty in Buffalo the following night.
"What are you going by way of the States for?" he asked.
"So that the Canadian banks won't get you again," said Henty.
After sending his mother a silk scarf and Lou a pair of stockings and a box of candy, as a partial atonement for the wrong he was doing them in not visiting home, Evan bought a pair of corduroy breeches and heavy boots, subscribed for a farm magazine, and set out, with big A. P., for the far-away fields. They say those fields always look green; sometimes, perhaps, they are green.
Just as that "Overland Limited" sped along must this story speed. The boys fell asleep in New York State and awakened many miles from its border. And here in this story, as in a Pullman, only more obliviously, must the reader sleep—to awaken at a distance.
In a certain part of the Nicola Valley stood a cottage known as the "Bachelors' Bungalow." It, was alone except for the companionship of stables and out-houses. It was evidently not built in a land where lumber was scarce, for wide, heavy verandahs almost surrounded it.
From any of these verandahs one could get a splendid view of the mountains; to the south a green vista of valley stretched away.
A young man sat in the open, not listening to the greybirds or the meadowlarks sing of spring, and not revelling in the beauty before and around him, but working assiduously at a typewriter. On either side of his little table magazines and newspapers lay in heaps; there were Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary, Vancouver and other papers, and various Canadian magazines. Now and then he paused in his writing to pick up one of these periodicals and take note of a paragraph he had marked.
"I wonder if Alfy ever stops to read any of these articles?" murmured Evan, and laughed quietly. "Judging from the opinion he always had of my disability I doubt if he would attribute literary efforts to me."