To-morrow! Yes, to-morrow the mother and father would have forgotten Ivan in the engrossing claims of return to their spiritual work. They would have forgotten the merry life gazing up at them out of the infant’s happy eyes. They would have forgotten the wonderful caress of his soft, white arms. But she, Luana, would remember.
The Reverend Arthur Steele looked up from the book on the table in front of him. His dark eyes scanned the broken mountain scene through which the train was passing. There was still a white skin of snow on the hilltops. But it was a moist, dank, dripping world, in spite of the brilliant spring sunshine pouring down out of a cloudless sky.
He was a tall, ascetic creature, who lived for his missionary work at Lake Mataba. He was desperately in earnest, and impatient of everything that interfered with his spiritual labors. His long vacation had been forced upon him. It had not occurred to him as a holiday. His mission needed money. And he had used his vacation for the purposes of raising it.
“We’re about at the divide,” he said to his wife beside him.
Helen Steele did not even look up from her book.
“I’m glad,” she said without interest. “It won’t take long to run down the gradient to the river.”
“No. And home to-morrow morning. We’re only about eight hours late.” The missionary laughed. “I should call it something like a record at this time of year. We’re in luck.”
He turned and glanced down the queer, little old-fashioned restaurant car in which the evening meal had just been served. There were only about ten other passengers, most of whom were well known to him. They included, in a remote corner, an Indian huddled in his parti-colored blanket, and two commercial men who were making the journey in the vain hope of selling farming machinery in a territory given up to fur-trading.
The missionary’s comment was not without justification. There was no time in the year when the hardy human freight which found itself compelled to use the Sisselu Northern Railroad but did so in a spirit of complete resignation. The road was the offshoot of a great line which bridged the Canadian Dominion from ocean to ocean. Its three hundred miles of ill-laid track, from Fort Sura in the south, to the shores of Lake Mataba, was one of those grudging concessions to a prosperous fur-trading industry.