Exclamation and anecdote rattled on; fog of tobacco-smoke and stench of snow melting on fur filled the air; free grammar and the broad "a" had unchecked currency in this organ-box of a western railway-hamlet hotel: but Sir William Ware, standing by the iron-rodded window with philosophic hands in his coat-pockets, had only one distinguishable impression—that he was being educated, that this west was giving him something denied by the university.
This was Western Canada—blunt, gruff, western Canada. Not too forward in making one's acquaintance; not too stiff and "standoffish". Not caring sixpence—so long as you yourself were "all right"—who your father was, nor how much money you were worth. Western Canada, where nobody who works—or, if he can't or won't work, can tell a good yarn—is allowed to starve. Western Canada, which never "picks" a fight, but—well, just try to "run on" her!
A raucous "hey!" brought Sir William about. Glancing out through the window, in the direction of the hall, he saw John Nixon signalling to him from the seat of a bob-sleigh. Hurrying on scarf and coat, Ware hastened out, creaked across the sidewalk and smilingly awaited instructions as to boarding this western vehicle of the long trail. It had a high, green-painted double box. The front and rear seats were two boards laid across the box and draped with gunny-sacks. The front seat was occupied by John Nixon and Jim Burns, the hired man who had brought the equipage in to meet the train. On the hind seat Lovina Nixon perched, nothing of her visible except one stoical pioneer-woman eye which looked out unwinkingly at Ware through a crack between folds of gray shawl.
"Climb in alongside the Missis, Bill," directed John Nixon, who had made no special preparation for extreme weather conditions, other than to pull his corduroy cap down over his ears, "We'll need to get a-goin', if we're intendin' to strike home before we get blew off the trail. All set?"
"All set, old chap," Sir William responded, as he tucked his end of the goatskin robe around his knees and, in response to Lovina's mumbled recommendation, felt with his toes for the extra brick which Nixon had heated for him on the top of the livery stable stove; "it's a jolly good thing Daisy decided to do as Mother wanted and stay in town for a week. Perhaps we shall have a better day, to bring her out."
"Oh, the gal wouldn't mind this," Nixon rejoined, casually, after he had "clucked" the horses into a trot down the drifted street; "no, sir, Bill; she'd have got you off that seat, a-runnin' behind in the sleigh-track, as soon as your toes would start for to feel nippy. It would take a mighty high wind to chase Daise into the house in the winter-time, except when dinner is ready. Her and the dog is about even, when it comes to standin' the cold. Ain't that so mother?"
"Oh, yes, it's so," Lovina's voice, muffled but still recognizable in its sharpness, said through the swathes of shawl, "except when I ust to want her to fetch in an armful o' wood or a pail of water. Then you couldn't budge her from behint the stove."
"Aw, go on," Nixon, happy to be on the way home to the "stock" again, swung his whip jovially but harmlessly over the backs of the horses. "Wait till you see the happy reunion between her and Rove, Bill, when she gets here next week. It'll prove what I say about them bein' chums. Rove, he would have no use for a girl that stayed in the house: you couldn't coax him any closer to in-doors than the chip-pile, not if it was sixty below zero."
The two bay sleigh-ponies—a light team had been chosen, as they could stand quick travel over difficult roads better than the heavy-fetlocked, big-haunched, working horses—trotted along sure-footed on the hard ridge of the trail. The last house on Toddburn's one short street was soon passed. Turning out at a wide angle from the railroad, at a point where Ware saw one of the country's tall red elevators, with staccato explosion of gasoline engine, pouring wheat into a freight-car, the prairie road set off alone across the white country.
The snowfall had been unseasonably heavy this autumn; and Sir William, looking over the side of the sleigh-box at a point where some passing horse had accidentally inched out into the soft snow and put down a leg, saw a hole nearly fifty inches deep. Plainly, if the bob-sleigh should slip off the packed hard ridge of the road, it meant a wholesale "spill", a floundering of horses, a chilling to the marrow of all concerned, and much delay. If it happened after dark, with the blizzard—the effect of which Ware had often watched from the study window of his city home—at its height, it would be a bit awkward.