“That’s all right,” the good doctor assured him, but he turned his face away a little. “I helped you into the world, and I guess it’s my privilege to help you through it.”
[CHAPTER XII—LOVE—OR LAW?]
| “They say there is wealth in the doing, That royal and rich are the gains, But ’tisn’t the wealth I am wooing, So much as the life of the plains; For here in the latter day morning, Where Time to Eternity clings, Midwife to a breed in the borning, I behold the Beginning of things!” The Empire Builders. |
Thirty hours later, in a forward seat of a colonist car, sat a young man with his face in bandages. A strong odour of disinfectants pervaded that section of the car, and other passengers avoided it as much as possible, but a doctor’s certificate that the trouble was not of a dangerous nature satisfied conductors and trainmen. For thirty hours the young man had fasted, and the interminable journey across the broad vest of the prairie country wore on in dull monotony. Villages, towns and cities had flashed by, and now they were in the great unsettled ranching country, where one may travel many townships without seeing sign of human life. Here and there, at great intervals, the eye caught a glimpse of numberless herds grazing on the rolling uplands; and at intervals greater still a horseman loomed high against the distant horizon. The two slender threads of steel seemed the only connecting link with modern civilization, and as they strung far into the endless West the very minds of the passengers underwent an evolution, a broadening, a disassociation with Established Things, and assumed an attitude of receptiveness toward That Which Shall Be. Here, at last, was the new West, the manless land, its bosom bared for a thousand miles to the hungry embrace of landless man.
Through his little window Burton watched it, and with the eye of faith and optimism saw all this boundless country checkered into farms; towns and cities rising where now were flag-stations and water-tanks, telephones and telegraphs where now were fences and buffalo runs; electric railways groaning with wheat across the now trailless prairie. Here was a chance to be in at the beginning; to lay new foundations of business, government, and society, unchecked by tradition, unhampered by convention, undaunted by the arrogance of precedent. How well those foundations must be laid; a variation of a thousandth of a principle, projected through a thousand years, might swing the centre of gravity of society beyond its base! And who were the men to lay this foundation? To whom had Fate entrusted such responsibility? He glanced about the car, foul from its long journey, saturated in tobacco smoke, reeking with alcoholic fumes and the nameless odours of unwashed humanity. Across the aisle sat a mother from Central Europe, crowded in the seat with her three children, clad in shawls and blankets, sweltering in the July heat. Once he caught their eye; they looked at him through the eye of the hunted thing, the croucher, the oppressed; the eye where hate serves for passion, where strength means tyranny, where love has only an animal significance. Was it from this that the ideal State should rise; from this sad flotsam of the seas of oppression and vice? And yet as he looked he saw in that same eye another element, deeper, perhaps, and less pronounced, as though only rising into being. It was the element of wonder; and whoso wonders is not without hope. And there was ambition! This little frightened family had dared to cross an ocean and half of two continents—for what? Surely only to share in a possibility impossible at home. Likely enough the husband was already a homesteader in the new land; he would meet them at one of these little flag-stations with his ox-team and wagon, and they would trek away, fifty, sixty, a hundred miles into the wilderness to rear their home, to lay the foundations of their future, to bring up a family of free-born Canadians. The whole car was filled with such foreigners; rough and vicious-looking many of them; sad-eyed and wondering a few, with here and there a son of that jocund hilarity which knows no restraint and whose current runs fullest where is most to dry it up.
And yet, who should set bounds to their future? What “mute, inglorious Miltons,” what “village Hampdens” might be here, waiting only the saving grace of environment to bring them surging into the fulness of a life unknown, undreamt, and yet the lure of whose prophetic vision had fired their dark eyes in the far fields of their unhappy ancestry! How far from the civilisation of the past, how far even from the civilisation of the present, had they thrown themselves in this wild projection into the unknown and the unlimited!
The train stood, waiting, on a side-track. With his head out of the window Burton saw a black cloud of smoke far to the westward; steadily it grew until the muzzle of a locomotive could be distinguished, and in a few minutes the eastbound express roared past them in its down hill run to evening dress and music and conventions made for the fascination of disregarding them! But even as it swept by from the open windows of the dining car came the scent of fresh-cut roses and carnations, and a moment later the “newsy” hurried through the car with a bundle of morning papers. Burton stopped him and bought a copy, somewhat to the vendor’s surprise, and settled down to read, verbatim, the speech of the Prime Minister of England delivered in London the evening before!
As the train approached the young man’s destination he quietly slipped into the washroom and removed his bandages. With soap which the doctor had supplied him he erased the salve and grease, and after a good wash, with his hair combed and his collar and tie adjusted, he felt more like a civilized being than at any time since he had left the consultation room of Dr. Millar. As the crowd swept out at the station he mingled, unnoticed, among them.
He rushed first into a lunch-room, and after satisfying his long hunger he had scarce set foot on the station platform until a friendly hand grasped him by the arm and led him to one side.
“Come this way, Jack,” said a young man, little older than himself, but with that alert, active manner which is as distinctive of the country as the chinook. “Let’s get out of this bunch before they get wised up. Lucky I saw you in time. Jimmy Reid, a chum of mine that came in here homesteadin’ last year, has just got word tuh go home tuh I-o-way, where his father’s most all in, an’ he says to me last night—no longer ago than last night—he says, ‘Frank, slip down tuh the station to-morrow an’ if yuh see a likely lookin’ fellow ’at ’ud appreciate a bit of a start in this country put him next tuh my homestead. I got tuh let her go,’ he says, ‘Dad’s all in an’ I’ll have tuh coop up under Old Glory for awhile, anyway. Put some decent fellow next it,’ says he. Talk about luck——”