"That was touching?" he said. "To die in your teens in this country!--just as the curtain is up and the play begins--hard! Hullo, Anderson!"
The great man extended a cordial hand, chaffed Philip a little, gave Lady Merton some hurried but very precise directions as to what she was to see--and whom--at Vancouver and Pretoria. "You must see So-and-so and So-and-so--great friends of mine. D----'ll tell you all about the lumbering. Get somebody to show you the Chinese quarter. And there's a splendid old fellow--a C.P.R. man--did some of the prospecting for the railway up North, toward the Yellowhead. Never heard such tales; I could have sat up all night." He hastily scribbled a name on a card and gave it to Elizabeth. "Good-bye--good-bye!"
He hastened off, but they saw him standing a few moments longer on the platform, the centre of a group of provincial politicians, farmers, railway superintendents, and others--his hat on the back of his head, his pleasant laugh ringing every now and then above the clatter of talk. Then came departure, and at the last moment he jumped into his carriage, talking and talked to, almost till it had left the platform.
Anderson hailed a farming acquaintance.
"Well? What has the Governor-General been doing?"
"Speaking at a Farmers' Conference. Awful shindy yesterday!--between the farmers and the millers. Row about the elevators. The farmers want the Dominion to own 'em--vow they're cheated and bullied, and all the rest of it. Row about the railway, too. Shortage of cars; you know the old story. A regular wasp's nest, the whole thing! Well, the Governor-General came this morning, and everything's blown over! Can't remember what he said, but we're all sure somebody's going to do something. Hope you know how he does it!--I don't."
Anderson laughed as he sat down beside Elizabeth, and the train began to move.
"We seem to send you the right men!" she said, smiling--with a little English conceit that became her.
The train left the station. As it did so, an old man in the first emigrant car, who, during the wait at Regina, had appeared to be asleep in a corner, with a battered slouch hat drawn down over his eyes and face, stealthily moved to the window, and looked back upon the now empty platform.
Some hours later Anderson was still sitting beside Elizabeth. They were in Southern Alberta. The June day had darkened. And for the first time Elizabeth felt the chill and loneliness of the prairies, where as yet she had only felt their exhilaration. A fierce wind was sweeping over the boundless land, with showers in its train. The signs of habitation became scantier, the farms fewer. Bunches of horses and herds of cattle widely scattered over the endless grassy plains--the brown lines of the ploughed fire-guards running beside the railway--the bents of winter grass, white in the storm-light, bleaching the rolling surface of the ground, till the darkness of some cloud-shadow absorbed them; these things breathed--of a sudden--wildness and desolation. It seemed as though man could no longer cope with the mere vastness of the earth--an earth without rivers or trees, too visibly naked and measureless.