Harris and his young bride found much to occupy their attention. Their minds were big with plans, nebulous and indefinite but charged with potentiality, which they should put into effect when they had selected their prairie home. To the young girl, naturally of romantic temperament, the journey of life upon which they had so recently embarked together took on something of the glamour of knightly adventure. Through the roseate lens of early womanhood the vague, undefined difficulties that loomed before her were veiled in a mist of glory, as she felt that no sacrifice could really hurt, no privation could cut too deep, while she was fulfilling her destiny as wife and comrade to the bravest and best of men. The vast plains, heart-breaking in their utter emptiness, could only be full to her—full of life, and love, and colour; full of a happiness too great to be contained. She watched the gaunt trees rising naked from the white forest, and her mind flitted on a thousand miles in advance, while on the cold window-sill her fingers tapped time to the click of the car wheels underneath.
Harris, too, was busy with his thoughts. He measured the obstacles ahead with the greater precision of the masculine mind. To him, love was not a magician's wand to dissolve his difficulties in thin air, but a mighty power which should enable him to uproot them from his path. No matter what stood in the way—what loneliness, what hardship, what disappointment and even disillusionment—he should fight his way out to ultimate victory for the sake of the dear girl at his side. As she watched the wintry landscape dreamily through the window he shot quick glances at her fine face; the white brow, the long lashes tempering the light of her deep magnetic eyes; the perfect nose, through whose thin walls was diffused the faintest pink against a setting of ivory; lips, closed and tender as in the sleep of a little child; chin, strong, but not too strong; and a neck full and beautiful, the whole forming a picture of purity, gentleness, and confidence which set his being aglow with the joy of immeasurable possession. As he thought of her love, her faith, her confidence, he swore in his own big heart that neither harm nor want nor sorrow should come upon her; that through every adversity of life he would be her protector, her champion, her defence. And so in the charm and mirage of their young dream they rode dauntlessly, joyously, into the unknown.
With Ned Beacon, the trusty hired man, in charge of the carload of effects, under the direction of Tom Morrison, Harris was relieved of many duties and responsibilities that would have broken in somewhat rudely on his dream. Traffic was congested with the immigrant movement; cars were side-tracked at nameless places for indefinite periods, but stock had to be fed and cared for; bonds had to be provided, and all the conditions of departmental red tape complied with when the effects entered the United States, for in 1882 the All-Canadian railway was a young giant fighting for life with the mighty rocks of the North Shore route, and railway traffic with the New West was, perforce, billed over American roads. These details and a score of others called for patience, for tact, and a judicious distribution of dollar bills. Harris made a mental note of his obligation to Tom Morrison in the matter. He was shrewd enough to surmise that this was the farmer's very practical wedding gift, but he took debit for it nevertheless.
And so the journey wore on. As day succeeded day to the monotonous rumble of the car wheels the immigrants became better acquainted, and friendships took root that in after years were to brave every storm of adversity and bloom forth in the splendid community of spirit and sacrifice which particularly distinguished the pioneers. But the strain of travel drew heavily upon physical endurance; meals eaten stale from lunch-baskets, or hastily snatched at wayside stations; the cramp of days spent in the crowded seats; lack of exercise and lack of sleep; these laid their heavy finger on the strongest and heartiest. But one night the word went round that daylight would see them back on Canadian soil, and the lagging spirit of the travellers was revived. Someone struck up an impromptu song, parodied from a well-known hymn; men, and children joined in the chorus as they caught the words, and rolled it forth with a vigour that vibrated every timber of the car.
"O, Prairie Land, sweet Prairie Land,
Where everyone joins heart and hand,"
they sang, and the sociability of the party teemed to swell with the volume of the song. A bond of human interest, human interdependence—perhaps, even, some phase of human suffering, was already linking them together with links of steel that should withstand every shock of the coming years, and bind together the foundations of a mighty land.
In the cold grey of a March morning, when the sun had not yet dispelled the mists of night, and the fringing woods back from the Red River loomed white and spectral through the frost, they re-entered the Empire, and in a few minutes were detraining at Emerson, the boundary town and gateway to the prairies which for a thousand miles stretched into the mysteries of the unknown.
CHAPTER II
INTO THE WILDERNESS
Emerson was the gateway of the great invasion. Situated just on the Canadian side of the International Boundary, the "farthest west" of rail communication, on the threshold of the prairie country, it seemed the strategical point for the great city which must arise with the settlement and development of the fertile kingdom of territory lying between the Lake of the Woods and the Rocky Mountains, and between the Forty-ninth Parallel and the unknown northern limit of agriculture. Sixty miles northward, at the junction of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers, Winnipeg was throwing street-tendrils out from her main traffic trunk which marked the route the Indian carts had followed for years as they bore their buffalo hides and pemmican to the Hudson's Bay Company's post at Fort Garry. Winnipeg was to be on the main line of the Canadian Pacific Railway—at least, so the promoters of its town-lot activity affirmed; but Selkirk, still farther north, was already flourishing in the assurance that the railway would cross the river at that point. But the Canadian Pacific Railway as yet existed upon paper; its advance guard were pouring nitro-glycerine into the rocks of the wild Lake Superior fastnesses, and a little band of resolute men were risking financial disaster an indomitable effort to drive through a project which had dismayed even the Government of Canada. Some there were who said the Canadian Pacific would never be built, many there were who said that if built it always be a charge upon the country—that in the very nature of things it could never become self-supporting.