At Lanigan, the next station, a crowd of the same cheery temper also raised a clamour for the Prince. As a rule he never disappointed them, and would leave whatever he was doing to go on to the observation platform at the first hint of cheers. But at Lanigan there were difficulties. The crowd cheered. Some one looked out of the car, made a gesture of negation, and went back. The crowd cheered a good deal more. There was a pause; more cheering. Then a discreet member of the Staff came out and said the Prince was awfully sorry, but—but, well, he was in his bath!
"That's all the better," called a cheerful girl from the heart of the crowd. "We don't mind."
The member of the Staff vanished in a new gust of cheering, probably to hide his blushes. Need I say the Prince did not appear?
At Colonsay there was a stop of five minutes only, but the people of the town made the most of it. They had a pretty Britannia to the fore, and all the school-children grouped about her and singing when the train steamed in. And when it stopped, a delightful and tiny miss came forward and gave the Prince a bunch of sweet peas.
These incidents were a few only of a characteristic day's run. Every day the same sort of thing happened, so that though the Prince had a more strenuous time in the bigger cities, his "free times" were actually made up of series of smaller functions in the smaller ones.
II
Saskatoon, the distributing city for the middle of Saskatchewan, was to give the Prince a memorable day. It was here that he obtained his first insight into the life and excitements of the cowboy. Saskatoon, in addition to the usual reception functions, showed him a "Stampede," which is a cowboy sports meeting.
The Prince arrived in the town at noon, and drove through the streets to the Park and University grounds for the reception ceremonies. It is a keen, bright place, seeming, indeed, of sparkling newness in the wonderful clarified sunlight of the prairie.
It is new. Saskatoon is only now beginning its own history. It is still sorting itself out from the plain which its elevators, business blocks and delightful residential districts are yet occupied in thrusting back. It is a characteristic town on the uplift. It snubs and encroaches upon the illimitable fields with its fine American architecture, and its stone university buildings. It has new suburbs full of houses of symmetrical Western comeliness in a tract wearing the air of Buffalo Bill.
It grows so fast that you can almost see it doing it. It has grown so fast that it has outstripped the guide-book makers. They talk of it in two lines as a village of a few hundred inhabitants, but put not your trust in guide-books when coming to Canada, for the village you come out to see turns out, like Saskatoon, to be a bustling city full of "pep," as they say, and possessing 20,000 inhabitants.