Title:      The Flying Years (1942)
Author:     Frederick Niven
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      The Flying Years (1942)
Author:     Frederick Niven





CONTENTS

One--Eviction

Two--Red River

Three--To the Mountains

Four--Indian Woman

Five--Race

Six--Kildonan Bell

Seven--In the Haar

Eight--Ettrick Brothers

Nine--At Lasswade

Ten--Impulse

Eleven--Travellers' Tales

Twelve--Escape

Thirteen--"The Great Sickness"

Fourteen--Blue Jays

Fifteen--Progress

Sixteen--S.D.

Seventeen--Blackfoot Crossing

Eighteen--A Collet Ring

Nineteen--Prairie Schooner

Twenty--Fiona

Twenty-One--Voila les Boeufs!

Twenty-Two--Mr. Hodges Advises

Twenty-Three--Photograph

Twenty-Four--Birth

Twenty-Five--Changes

Twenty-Six--Descendants

Twenty-Seven--Business

Twenty-Eight--Two Sons

Twenty-Nine--Heather

Thirty--Buffalo Bill

Thirty-One--"A Married Man's Town"

Thirty Two--Sacrifice

Thirty-Three--Blue Gentians

Thirty-Four--Angus and Sam

Thirty-Five--Voice of the Prairie




DEDICATORY LETTER
                              
to
                              
A. RICHARDS



My dear Richards,

There is no need to remind you--far in terrestrial space though
the Columbia Valley may be from Magdalene College--of September,
1933.  "A magic gets hold of some days and they remain with you
forever . . ."  So I read--a reference to certain days in that
September--in one of those welcome letters that Dorothy and you
collaborate upon.

The sage-brush, as you will remember, was in full yellow bloom on
the slopes of the foothills and the peaks you were going to climb
were austere in distance.  The saddle-horses and the pack-horses
that were to carry you to your base camp had gone out on their way
to the road's end, and in Wilmer, all sunlight and the ricochetting
of a clicking grasshopper or two, you waited for the car in which
you were to follow them.  There, after talk of this and that, you
asked me:  "And what are you doing just now?"  So I outlined to you
The Flying Years of which not a word was written then.  I will not
excessively say that you upheld me from falling and strengthened my
feeble knees.  I was not so hopeless as all that either of being
able to tell something of them or of finding ears, somewhere, to
hear; but I did have, at the back of my mind, a melancholy whisper
of "Who cares?"  Your interest, your enthusiasm, silenced it.  The
day came of "All set."  There was the car spinning away, and you
called through its dust that was enveloping me, for a parting word:
"Don't let the years fly too long."

I can't tell you how I appreciated that nor how memory of it has
heartened me in the writing of this book that I am dedicating to
you--in the hope that you will find it not too grievously lacking
in what, as I outlined it to you, you felt it should contain and
convey.

Yours,

Frederick Niven.




Apart from the historic characters in this novel no portrait is
intended of any person.




CHAPTER ONE

EVICTION


Memory, as the years slipped past, always served Angus Munro with
Loch Brendan through a web of yammering gulls, but his mother
remembered it through a mist of tears.

There had come to her no omen that the Munros were to leave there.
An omen would have hinted the Hand of God in it, however strangely,
whereas there seemed to be only the callousness and rapacity of
man.  Not that any supernatural warning was needed in face of the
bitter evidences, but her folk were prone to omens.  Her
grandmother, as she often told, when recounting the stories of the
land, had been waked one night in the '45 by her brother who was,
as they said, "out".  She had sat up in bed, staring at him in the
dusk of the kitchen.  The smouldering seed of the fire had blazed
to a sudden puff of air--and he it was, without doubt, in that
flicker of light.  He shook his head to her, forlorn-like, as in a
sign that something had miscarried, and then was gone.  "So you
see," Angus's mother would say, "my granny was fully prepared when
the news came that her brother was dead on Culloden Field."

As for herself, when the news came that Angus's brother, Robin, had
been drowned in the Sound, she was prepared.  She took it as his
father did not.  Daniel Munro seemed to lose his reason for awhile,
marching to and fro like a soldier on sentry-go, back and forth.
At each sudden advance he appeared to be going for help; then he
would halt, aware that there was no help, stand dazed a moment,
wheel, and stride off again--back and forth.  But Mrs. Munro spoke
slowly:

"That was the death candles burning over the Sound last night,"
said she.  "I should never have let him go this day.  I was
warned."

She was intimate with ghosts.  "Shadows", by the way, was the word
for them among another folk in another land to which they were all
going--the father grimly, the mother in tears, the lad with a sense
of adventuring.

They were no great readers in Brendan in those days, though in the
winter great story-tellers, while sleet scoured the window and
night gave a hollow moan in the chimney, with narratives of the old
days, myth and truth: of King Hakon; of the Norse woman with the
flame-coloured hair; of Cromwell's soldiers that bided in Inverness
after the wars and, surrounded there by the Gaelic speech, kept
pure amongst themselves their own tongue and passed on to their
bairns the fine language of their time, so that, in after years,
Sassenach philologists would comment on how beautiful was the
English the folk of Inverness spoke; of Prince Charles Stuart; of
Cluny in his "cage" on Ben Alder when it was supposed by most that
he was long since in France; of the smoking out of the Macdonalds
in the cave of Sciur; of the pixies and the kelpies.

Angus's father saw the change coming and was for the boy "conning
his book".  The English they had was thus book-English, their
natural speech being the Gaelic.  Even Mrs. Munro learnt to speak
it--and with the prettiest lilt.  But the point here is that
between his mother's old stories and the books that his father got
for him, and a bent he had for knowing what was happening on the
hills and the lochs and the sea--a sort of living with the weather--
the boy (sixteen then) had his own kind of private excitement and
happiness in life.  He had his own gossip, too.  He would sooner
hear of a whiskered seal flapping onto the Black Rocks with gruff
bark like an old man's cough, than any yatter of human follies and
failings.

The eviction at Brendan was quieter than some.  The Munros expected
it.  Daniel possessed a booklet--Information for Emigrants to
British North America.  PUBLISHED BY AUTHORITY (that on the title-
page gave them deep confidence in it), Price Sixpence--and he and
Angus assuredly conned it, reading all its information on New
Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward's Island, on Eastern (Lower)
Canada, on Western (Upper) Canada, and were a little troubled that
the Western Canada it touched upon was not the west to which they
were going.  They were going even beyond "Western (Upper) Canada."
They made themselves acquainted, hopefully, with the value out
there of the sovereign and the guinea, and discovered what an
American Eagle was worth, a Spanish minted doubloon, a Spanish
milled dollar, and what was a pistareen.  A great mixture of coins
there seemed to be in the Canadas, from the French five-franc piece
to the Mexican dollar.  They learnt that there were Emigrant Sheds
at the landing-place for those who could not "incur the expense of
lodging," in which they could sleep a night if necessary, and they
made computation of how much food they should cook in preparation
for their further journey into that west beyond the tabulated west
of the booklet.  It was cheering to note that the further one went
the higher were the wages paid for labour.

Folk ate well in the Canadas by all accounts, never there, as in
Scotland, on the edge of starvation.  A man could kill his deer
without by your leave of any, and there were crops other than of
poor oats and potatoes.  There was even a sugar tree!  Now, there
was a land for you!  Think on it!  Yes, there was a lot of talk of
"the Canadas" before they were, indeed, started on their way
thither.

Their neighbours, the Grants (Jessie Grant was the lass of Angus's
calf-love), were also leaving Brendan, but not for the Canadas.
There were but Jessie and her mother, the father having been
drowned in the boat accident that took Robin Munro.  They were
going to Glasgow to live with Mrs. Grant's sister, married to an ex-
soldier, Cameron by name, a big-hearted man who had set up as a
smith, was doing fine there, and had offered, himself, to look
after them.

The events of the Highlands and the isles of that period put a kind
of dolour into even the young, ageing them somewhat, gave them too
soon, a sense of distrust in Life.  Happiness and trouble were
blent in their eyes and the elders seemed always to be admonishing
them in this fashion:  "There's no one can go courting these days."
"There's no lad can plight troth with a lass these days."

Nevertheless, there they were--Jessie and Angus--in the silver-
green shade of a birch wood by Loch Brendan, betwixt Brendan and
the point, on the morning of the day of departure.  To each the
proximity of the other was a rare, blessed, mysterious and secret
anodyne for the public woe that they could not escape.

"If I make a way in the Canadas--" Angus began.

Jessie interrupted him.

"I'm sure of myself but I'm not sure of you," she said.

What, exactly, did she mean?  What was it in him, he wondered, that
she was not sure of?

"Would you wait for me?" he asked her.

"I'll not say yes," she answered, "because--" she left the rest in
air.

"Because of what.  Jessie?"  He repeated her name, urgently:
"Jessie, Jessie . . ."

She sighed his name for the only reply, held her face up to him.
As he bent kissing her she turned it away in some young distress,
then suddenly drew him close, responding to his caresses.  Next
moment she abruptly disengaged herself, shook her head, her cheeks
pallid.

"No promises!" she implored.  "I'm sure of myself but I'm not sure
of you.  There's mother calling."

She pressed a hand against his breast and ran from him as though
she were running also, in agitation, in deep distress, from
herself.  At the bend of the road she halted and looked round.
There they stood looking one to the other--for an eternity, it
seemed: then she turned and was gone from sight and he walked home
by the loch-side, the incoming Atlantic tide toying with the
seaweed fringe of Scotland along the rocks.

By the door stood a group of men, talking.  It was the old talk
(repetitive as that of the young lovers on their uncertainties),
talk upon the plight of the people in that grandly beautiful land
that the Munros were leaving.

"Yes, that is so.  Join the army!  Join the army!" one was saying
to Daniel.  "That's all for some of them."

"It's a poor consolation for a lad," he replied, "sticking his
bayonet into the belly of a Rooshian, to imagine that he is
fighting for his own and stabbing into his real enemies, the men
who have put him and his out of house and home.  The army!  It
might be ordered against the French next, instead of to help the
Turks against the Rooshians, for all we know as it was when I was a
lad.  And the French were good friends to the Scots in the '45."

The old talk, the old talk.  Another spoke.

"They say it's not to make room for the deer that we must go," he
said.  "They say that never was any thrust out to make room for
deer for them to shoot.  Quibbles!  Quibbles!  To make room for
sheep it is--and then the sheep make room for the deer.  They'll
bring up that lie if ever we get the Commission of Inquiry that
some talk of."

"Yes, and it's been going on since the '45," declared Munro.  "It
was different, though, when it was the Sassenach that came with
fire and sword.  When a man's foes shall be they of his own
household it is bitter!"

Angus sidled past them into the house.  Just then, from one of the
further cottages up near the bracken and the heather (that soon
would encroach everywhere there), came the preliminary sounds, the
intermittent drones, of a bagpipe.  Who could be thinking of piping
over the tying of the last symbolic knots on the ropes round tin
trunks and boxes?  There was Mrs. Munro plucking and plucking at
her under-lip, looking out of the window, perhaps at Ben Chatton or
perhaps at a lone magpie veering by with some significance for her
superstitious mind.

"They tell me there are places where they do not dare to do it,"
Angus heard his father say, "even with the rent far in arrears.
And why?  Because clear it is that there would be blood shed if
they tried.  They tell me that at some places they have answered
the threat of eviction by driving the deer into the sea.  Ah, well,
by the grace of God some have bowels of compassion.  There is a
Macleod, now, when the potatoes failed, who fed his people himself
to tide them over instead of turning them out.  There would be no
faith in any landlord left if it wasn't for one or two like him.
But they are not in the majority.  'It's my land to do with as I
please.'  That's the usual.  It's bitter!  First of all driven off
the good lands onto poor, and then we have it flung at us, 'Would
you not be better to go to a new country instead of trying to live
on land like that--and be grateful if you have your passage money
given you?'  Well!"  He came indoors.  "Give me a hand, Angus, with
this trunk."

They carried it out.  When they went in again, Mrs. Munro had ended
her reverie at the window and was drying her eyes.

"I remember a story my mother told me of a Highlander in Quebec,"
she said, speaking as out of a dwam.

Her husband stared at her in amazement, thinking she was about to
launch a tale of some omen, but it was not so.

"It was in the days when the colonists in America rebelled against
the arrogance of King George the Third," said she, "'75 or thereby.
A Cameron he was.  He had not joined the Royal Highland Emigrants'
Regiment there but when the rebelling colonists came to assault
Quebec he did do his part in the repulsing of the attack, whatever.
So he was offered pay after the fight for his services.  Says he,
this Cameron lad who had gone to the Canadas after the '45, says
he, 'I will help to defend the country from the invaders but I will
not take service under the House of Hanover.'  That was the spirit!
Now, what was I telling you this for?" she asked herself.  "Oh,
yes, I know--the spirit in that.  Yes, we are going, but we'll go
proud."

She raised her head and with a glare dared the tears to come again.

"Perhaps the clergy are right," she exclaimed suddenly, over
another thought.

"In what way?" asked Daniel.

"When they tell us it is the will of God that we go as a punishment
for sins, and that any who offer resistance are in danger of hell-
fire forever."

"The clergy," said Daniel, "have their livings from the landlords.
They know who butters their bread."

"That sounds like profanity!" she cried out.

"I'm not talking of the Almighty," said he.  "I am talking of the
clergy--an entirely different consideration.  They call me a
heretic, and if trying to educate yourself and your issue is
heresy, then heretic I am.  But I'm not talking profanity."

She looked at him, troubled.  His thoughts were sometimes beyond
her.

The blast of a siren sounded and Angus peered out of the doorway.
There was the boat on which they were to embark, splitting the dark
water as a plough's coulter the dark spring loam.  The high corries
answered with their echoes to her bellow, the gulls rose and
volleyed in air, their silver reflections flickering among the
loch's reflection of the hills.

Silently they looked their last on the shell of the home.
Afternoon having come, an interior dusk was already in corners.  It
was as if they were ghosts visiting the place where once they had
been part of the active life of earth.

"Scotland," said Munro, and again, "Scotland.  Just a few sad songs
and old ballads!  That's all.  I see it getting worse every year.
God knows what the end will be.  And yet--and yet--we'll take
Scotland with us: a kingdom of the mind."

He stooped at the rear window.  His wife stepped over and stood
beside him, and he put an arm round her.  By the way they bowed
Angus realized that they were looking toward the graveyard where
Robin lay, he who was drowned the day after Mrs. Munro saw what she
called the "death candles" out at sea.  Though he was but sixteen,
Angus had some sense in him and hurried out, left them, so that
when they turned they would not find him there indecently staring
like a gowk of no understanding.

The surge of waves broke out on the rocks, an orderly smashing
pulse of water from the steamer's wake.  She was out there, come to
rest, waiting for them.  It was then that Daniel Munro lost his
control after that grand thought of how they would take Scotland
with them, a kingdom of the mind.

"To hell with Scotland!" he broke out.

There was a silence then like the silence left when the wind passes
through a wood of pines.  It was as if Nature held breath, as if
the spinning of the world ceased a moment--a moment that belonged
to horror as over a sin against the Holy Ghost.

"You should not have said that," Mrs. Munro whimpered.

"No, I should not have said that," he whispered.  "I didn't mean
it, I didn't mean it."

And as for Peter came the crowing of the cock, there rose the sound
of the bagpipes through Brendan, in the slow measure of a coronach.



CHAPTER TWO

RED RIVER


The odours of the new land, before they had sighted it, came out to
meet them through a white mist over the sea, odours of robustiously
scented forests.  The steamer crawled on, calling and calling with
her siren till the vapour was dazzlingly infiltrated with sunlight
and then, by the sunlight, dissipated away--and there were rocky
promontories glittering a welcome.

Further than Lower Canada, further than Upper Canada they were
going because of friends in the country beyond, "freends", indeed--
which is to say, in the Scots sense, "relatives".  Had it not been
for these the Munros would have been much in the condition of some
of their fellow voyagers who had merely had their passage paid for
them.  Landing with scarcely a penny and bound chiefly for the
neighbourhood of Toronto (that used to be called York when Angus's
mother was a girl), most of them with no word of English, nothing
but the Gaelic, they were in anxious plight.  By the charity of
their compatriots in the land, given in such a way that the name
for it was changed to "hospitality", these went on to their
journey's end.

The Munros' "freends" in the Red River Settlement--the Frasers--had
sent them some financial assistance.  In return for that Daniel,
before taking up his own land, was to help Ian Fraser on his; and
Angus, no doubt, would be working out the while for wages--or such
was the suggested plan.

Of the Red River Settlement Mrs. Munro had some woeful stories.
She would narrate how the first Highlanders that went there had
been hardly used, ordered back by the Northwest Fur Company's
representatives, and might have been all homeless again had it not
been for a Macleod--a smith--who made shot out of some chains,
loaded it into an old cannon he found there, and defied those who
would turn them back, with a handful of men at his side.  Her
husband had to remind her that that was a while back, in her
grandmother's day, and that the Settlement had vastly changed since
then--that here was 1856 and not 1815.

They went by train (not by such wilderness waterways as those
people of two generations back had gone, from Hudson's Bay to Lake
Winnipeg), by train to Minnesota, sleeping on the train, eating on
the train, a basket of provisions with them for the journey.  A
young man walked through the coaches now and then with boxes of a
crisp sort of biscuit new to them called "crackers", and with
fruit.  Mrs. Munro, after one sampling of his peaches, would
resolutely turn her eyes away on hearing him chant his seductive
wares.  So juicy were these peaches that she had to spread her
handkerchief--her pocket-napkin--on her knees when eating them.
Never had she known such lusciousness.

"Pea-ches!  Or-an-ges!" came the young man's cry, and her head
would turn and she would stare hard out of the window.

"We have our basket of sufficient food," said she, "and if I
succumb to the temptation of these fruits, and this craving for
them, we will have to spend all ere we come to journey's end,
whatever!"

Leaving the train at St. Cloud they went on by stagecoach, a four-
horse coach, clip-clopping along in a rhythm that at times made the
lids droop, sleepy, over eyes that would fain see all the way, clip-
clopping and swaying through forests the heady odour of which
excited young Angus, and across clearings where stumps smouldered,
and by the side of lonely rushy lakes like dropped fragments of
blue sky.  Minnesota, the driver told Mrs. Munro, was a Sioux
Indian word meaning "sky-reflecting water."  Each night they
stopped at some rest-house by the wayside.  Some of the men at
these places Mrs. Munro thought the most fearsome she had ever
seen, grim of visage and with revolvers at their belts in big
holsters.  But if ever she and one of them came face to face in a
doorway it was always, "Pardon me, ma'am," and hats off.  And
"Ma'am" it was at the tables when they passed her the cruets.  They
did not wear their armaments when eating, always, she noticed,
before they came into the dining-room, as casually as they hung up
their hats, handing to the proprietors of the places their
ammunition belts with the pistols attached, as in some usage or
courtesy of the country.

As she whispered to him her comments on the ways of this region,
Daniel thought she was beginning to be eased of the sense of being
far from home which clearly had shadowed her hitherto.  But when
they came to Abercrombie on the Red River and she discovered that
there they had still further to go, aboard a boat, she came near to
breaking down.  Every roll of the train wheels, the drumming of the
stage coach horses' hoofs, the thrashing of the big stern-wheel on
the river boat, told her the same refrain--"A far cry to Loch
Brendan."

As for the Settlement: each of them on arrival promptly observed it
in a different way, and in that difference you have all three
measured and weighed.  Mrs. Munro saw the houses as alien, they
being built of logs.  Munro saw them as not altogether strange,
they being thatched; and Angus saw them as romantic, they being of
log with thatch.  The lack of a mountain-side on which to rest
their eyes was dreadful to Mrs. Munro, to Mr. Munro odd, to Angus
novel and exciting.

Their "freends", the Frasers, welcomed them warmly.  Ian Fraser,
the father, was working out at the time with a wheelwright for
wages, toward getting money instead of getting exchanges of goods
for his produce.  On the steamship International, which had brought
them there, he found a job for Angus as deck-hand.  Daniel,
according to their agreement, began to work on the farm.

A happy family--Fraser and his wife, Hector, the son, about eleven
then, Fiona, between five and six, and little Flora, age four,
named after her mother.  There was no impression of a cloud over
life there as at Loch Brendan, but a sense of freedom to the point
of wildness.  With the family increasing they had added to the
original house, and with a little contrivance there was room for
the Munros.

Several times during the days that followed his arrival there,
young Angus remembered how his father had spoken of a kingdom of
the mind--Scotland, a kingdom of the mind.  Surely it was so here,
with the Gaelic round them, the burr of the Scots voices, and often
the pipes playing about the place from one house to another.  Yet
looking back on those days later, there was no doubt in his mind at
all that as he recalled and was aided by that phrase--"a kingdom of
the mind"--his mother was haunted and vexed by her husband's cry of
"To hell with Scotland!"  Not a word of that had they from her, but
she had not forgotten it, and being of a superstitious turn it
gnawed in her, first like a recurrent and then as she did not rout
it, like a chronic sickness.  Indeed, she was not, as they used the
word there, a "well" woman.  It was all, for her, despite the
Gaelic and the pipes, far from home.

For Angus one of the great pleasures in the change from Loch
Brendan was in the food.  One never had to say here, "If that's my
dinner I've had it!"  They were not limited to potatoes and them,
perhaps, none too good because of a wet season.  Fine trout could
be fished, and all round about they could shoot the prairie
chickens, while venison was everybody's.  Hunters came in from the
Great Plains with buffalo meat, and Mrs. Fraser taught Mrs. Munro
both how to prepare it and to preserve it (as the French and Scots
half-breed hunters had learnt from the Indians, beating in with it
various berries) so that it would keep for months--for years, if
need be, they said.  When Ian was reading the Scriptures aloud one
night and came to the words "Shall hunger no more, neither thirst
any more", they meant to Angus the new land.  He was not going to
be one of those who make a god of the wame, but it was good to rise
from the table satisfied.

In some ways the people were wilder than at home, in others more
kind.  A man was much more his brother's keeper, if ever there was
occasion for brotherly help.  None asked servility but most
practised courtesy.  On Sunday there were church services--all in
their braw clothes.  You would see silks then, silk gowns, and
below them the feet that peeped in and out were in moccasins as
often as not, moccasins heavily beaded, that could be got in trade
with the Indians for a twist of tobacco.  Some folks in the Scots
settlement had the blinds down all Sunday, but neither the Frasers
nor the Munros believed in that.

"Keep the good light of God out on the Sabbath day?  Na, na," said
Mrs. Fraser.

There was not much money in the place, though wages were higher
than in the east.  Almost all was done in Trade--which is to say
exchange or barter.  It was towards getting money against the time
when they would be taking up their own land, and building on it and
living apart from the Frasers, that Angus had gone to work on the
river boat--the International.  A month or two later he was
offered, and accepted, other work--on what they called the "flat
boats"--with a Captain Buchanan, from Ayrshire.  It was not but an
honorary or whimsical title.  He had been a blue-water sailor and
captained ships round the Horn and there he was, far inland, caught
by some call of this great continent's interior.  In Minnesota
there was wood and with the Red River settlers there was a scarcity
of it, so there was a brisk trade in bringing timber from south of
the line.  The method of transport was to lash it together into a
sort of boat in which a load of freight would be carried.  On
arrival at the settlements the freight was delivered to the
consignees and then the boat taken apart and sold for building
material.  On the flat boats, with Buchanan, Angus worked till the
river froze.

In the winter there were dances even those who did not dance at
home in Scotland (such as some of Lowland birth, descendants of old
Covenanting families) dancing out there.  You would hear the
fiddles going and from the doorways the voices of those who called
the dances: "First lady and first gentleman--balance; first lady
and first gentleman--both hands; first couple down the line;" and
wildly went the fiddles.  "Second couple down the line;" and
merrily went the fiddles.  "All hands round"--gaily they danced by
Red River then.  Strathspeys and reels, the Highland schottische
and quadrilles they danced, wearing their tartans (that had been
prohibited in Scotland in the '45 but were still worn a hundred
years later), and glancing to the door sometimes you would see the
dark faces of Indians looking in, coveting the colours.  There was
a wild jig, the Red River Jig, a great favourite with the Métis--
French half-breeds.  And now and then some Indians would give their
own dances, and when the drums beat and their feet thudded out the
rhythms, the queerest thoughts and emotions would come to Angus.
He could hardly put a name on it.  It seemed he had heard these
lilts, and danced to them, too, in a time forgotten that the sound
of them set him struggling inwardly to remember--which was a
feeling, thought he, too ridiculous to tell to any.

All the winter Mrs. Munro had been none too well, which was a
regret to them all--for most people newly arrived found the air a
tonic, had a fresh joy in life.  She, on the contrary, seemed to
lose hold of it.  Daniel suspected that much of her trouble was
mental.  Surreptitiously she brooded, he believed.

"I think," said he to her one day, "you have never forgotten, Kate,
what I said when we were leaving--"

She interrupted him with a catch in her voice.

"What makes you think that?" she cried out.  "I have never said."

"It's just a thought I have," he replied.  Today he might have
called it telepathy.  "I believe you brood upon it."

"If the coronach had not begun right on the heels of your crying
out so--" she said, admitting he was right in his surmise, but
stopped there, left the rest in air.

They did not know Angus had entered, and he, hearing this, backed
out, left them, much as he had retreated from them that last day at
Brendan when he came on them side by side bowed to the window,
peering along the slopes.

In the spring, after the ice had broken and was tinkling and
crashing away down river, when the snow was off the plains and
flowers were showing, Mr. Munro thought a jaunt or two might help
his wife, put the colour in her lips again.  So they went, all
three, driving west to visit a further Scots settlement out on the
prairies.  The land was still wet from the thaw, the wheels drawing
up mud as they revolved, and it fell in gobbets with a clapping
sound, but there was nothing of the "snell" in the air.  A fine
fresh day it was to breathe.  "This," thought Daniel, "should do
her good."

Over a little rise (for rises there were, as they discovered on
travelling, waves in that sea of grass) they came suddenly to a
small lake of the kind called "slough".  It was not the usual ducks
that clucked there but some birds, gray-blue and white, that rose,
yammering.  Sea-gulls here--and so far inland!  Mrs. Munro put chin
on chest to hide sudden tears, but her shoulders shook with
sobbing.

"What is the matter?" her husband exclaimed, drawing rein.  "Are
you in pain, Kate?  What has taken you?"

"Nothing," she answered.

"But it must be something," he insisted.

She looked up at him, biting on her lips and trying to stem the
flow by pressing her eyelids closer.  That was one of the last
pictures Angus had of her--crying like a bairn.  Here was a sad
downfall for the woman who had talked of "going proudly", but a far
cry it was for her to home and the sea gulls weaving their silvery
reflections in the waters of Loch Brendan.  The life at Brendan had
been hard--but it was home, and there was an end of it!  She seemed
like a little girl in grievous trouble.

"The gulls took me by surprise," she said in a small voice.

No need to explain why the surprise of these birds caused her to
sob.  Her husband and son both knew the picture that would be in
her mind.  Daniel put an arm round her.

"If we made money enough we might take you back again," said he.
"It won't be Loch Brendan, but somewhere in Scotland--in the old
land."

"No, no," she said, "you should be angry with me, not kind to me.
I'm a child and should be whipped!"

That night Angus dreamt that all the blinds were down at the
windows and he was trying to raise them but they would not budge.
In this dream he went from one to another, from room to room, and
for all his trying not a blind could he raise.

The malady that carried her off would today be called pernicious
anaemia.  She had no appetite, and nothing that she forced herself
to eat gave her sustenance.  She was always tired, though she never
complained of it.

Angus, as soon as the river was open again, only a few days after
that drive, had gone back to the flat-boat work, and it was but on
the third or fourth trip that he knew, as they sculled into the
bank, that something was wrong.  It was a boy with a fishing-rod--
or a fishing-pole, as they used to say, a slender, sappy tree
branch with line and hook pendant--who broke the news to him, the
Fraser boy, Hector, tuft of hair sticking out of a hole in his hat.
He dropped the fishing-pole as the flat boat was sculled close to
the bank and stared with wide eyes, no smile in response to Angus's
wave.  Then he clapped hands to mouth, trumpet-fashion, and began
to shout:

"You're to come home at once!  You're--to--come--home--at--once!
I've been watching for you yesterday and today, too!"

"Something wrong," said Buchanan.

"Something wrong," said Angus.

"You're to come up at once," shouted Hector excitedly.

"What's the matter?" asked Angus as they pulled in and he made
passes with a boat hook at their jetty.

"It's your mother.  You're to come at once."

"You go," said Buchanan.

Angus leapt ashore and climbed the bank, Hector leaving his home-
made fishing-rod lying there and hurrying after him.  On the point
of asking the boy for more detail Angus let the inquiries go.
Hector seemed to be both youthfully elated over his task of herald
and youthfully perturbed.  The slapping of his bare feet and, anon,
his panting, died away as Angus hurried to the house.  At the door
was Mrs. Fraser, head lowered, shading her eyes from the low
blinding rays of the setting sun.  She stepped back as he drew
near.

"Go right in to her," said she, with no greeting save that.  "I've
had Hector waiting for you since yesterday lest you came early."

He did not ask why she was so anxious for his return.  Her face
told him.  His mother, thought he, must be dying.  The bedroom door
was ajar, and as he stepped in, his father, sitting by the bed,
looked up at him, his life's great agony in his eyes.  Standing at
the bed-foot was the doctor, a commiserate man, pity in his
bearing, distress.

Mrs. Munro was in the article of death.

"She will tak' nae nourishment," the Scots physician's voice came
huskily.  "If she could but have taken into her blood some
nourishment . . ."  His voice dropped, and in a tone of sad
complaint he ended, "but she will not assimilate."

She seemed to be in a coma and yet, thought Angus, there was a
recognition in her eyes through the new opacity that he could not
but observe with piercing concern.  It was as though the candle of
her life guttered, flared--and sank.  She drew a breath of content,
or of restfulness, then another, desperately.

"Can ye lift me?" she asked in the merest whisper.  "Can ye lift me
that I could see the hills?"

Munro looked at his son.  Angus looked at his father.  To see the
hills!  They bent over her to do as she asked.  As they raised her
she had again knowledge of where she was, lost, apparently, these
last moments.

"There are no hills," she murmured.  "I forgot I was here," and
tears came to her eyes.

It was then, as they laid her back, that her spirit, her shadow
passed, tears in her eyes that she could not see the hills of home.
Someone at a distance began an evening's practice on the pipes.
Perhaps she heard it and, slipping away toward unconsciousness
thought that she was back in Brendan and falling asleep there.

It had been their intention on arrival, after discussion of plans
with the Frasers, to take up their own land that spring, but the
death of Mrs. Munro caused that to be deferred.  Daniel had no
heart, as well they realized, to go on with that matter for some
time.  So, though Ian had not continued with the wheelwright,
Daniel continued to work on the Fraser farm.  There was enough for
them both to do.

But Munro was never to take up land there, no more than six feet of
it beside his wife.  Only three months after Kate had gone her
husband followed her.  Just a year to the day from the day of their
arrival he passed away after a stroke in the hot field where he was
working.

The bearers, at his funeral, made up for the abstemiousness with
which, in deference to her views, they had carried Kate kirkward.
There were but four of these bearers, two to a side, and with them
walked four others to relieve them from time to time.  Seldom was a
coffin taken in a cart and the Fraser home was some way from the
church.  There were oatcakes and whisky before the start, and when
they carried him out all were rosy.  Daniel was a big man, and
sooner than usual Ian Fraser, master of the ceremonies, seeing the
bearers were hunched to the handles, gave the cry:

"Relief!"

The two on each side who had been but keeping slow step took their
places, and the four who fell out had their dram before all moved
on again.  A few hundred yards on there was again the chant:

"Relief!"

The bearers fell out, and had their dram, as did the mourners,
halted behind, and on went the procession once more.

"Aye, he was a great man," one remarked.  "I believe he weighed twa
hunner wi' the breath o' life in him; and with the kist weighing--"

"Wheesht!"

It did not matter to Angus, though.  Even then there was that in
him which developed in the years till the time came when he could
hear what would have irked, angered, or hurt him as a lad and pay
no heed.

"Relief!"

"No, no, I'll have nae mair now till we get him bedded.  For the
credit of the corp I mauna stagger."

"Wheesht!"

There was a great turnout, of Highland and Lowland, and when they
met any French half-breeds upon the way these stood to one side
and, uncovering, crossed themselves.  Even some Indians,
encountered riding into the settlement, reined in and sat by the
road wrapped in their blankets, like men turned suddenly to painted
effigies, with heads all bowed.

"Relief!"

There were two pipers ahead, at the kirk gate, and as the
procession drew near they began to play.  Angus felt he might have
been spared that.  To him death needed no pageantry, no music.  He
feared then that he was about to make a fool of himself, but there
came into his mind, "We'll go proudly," and he took hold of himself
and saw his father to rest like a man, then came away to a
consciousness--temporarily muted, as a new wound is often
accompanied, at first, by a stunning of the nerves--of being alone
(father and mother taken from him within three months), which, many
friends though he had, was never rightly to leave him all his days.

The first to speak to him was Captain Buchanan, for whom he had
been working on the flat-boats.  Buchanan was very drunk and when
he was drunk he seemed to be aware of all the sadness of life.
Never did Angus see him taciturn in liquor, only plaintive and
fuddedly compassionate, never what they call "greeting fou".  He
came with a lurch alongside of Angus, who was walking home with Ian
Fraser, and said he, with a hiccup:

"The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.  We have all got to come
to it.  Blessed be the name of the Lord.  Aye.  But what I want to
say tae you is something practical."

He flapped a hand in air before his eyes.

"Some other time maybe, whatever," suggested Ian gently.

"You're richt!  This is not the moment," said Buchanan.  "I'll come
and see you the morn's morn.  I want to see you special."

With a hiccup he dropped behind again.  In silence Angus and Ian
walked on, a faint murmur, a faint whisper of voices and shuffle of
feet in the dusty road to rear.  Ever and again came also the
hiccup of Captain Buchanan, and when that sounded, Fraser would
glance at Angus and mutter, embarrassed, "Aye--aye," or "Indeet,
indeet.  Yess, yess," very sad for the lad's sake.



CHAPTER THREE

TO THE MOUNTAINS


Ian Fraser had fancied that Buchanan was so fuddled at the funeral
that his promise to call and see Angus would be entirely forgotten
by him, but there he was, next day, "speiring", as he would say,
for the lad.

Angus was "out by".  He was dimly at work on some tinkering, alone
in the tool shed, and there Buchanan found him, coming in at the
door very sober and sedate, looking as though he had suffered
personal loss, but managing, with gaze on the floor or in distance,
to come speedily to the business that brought him there.  He had
received an offer, he explained, sitting down on a keg of nails and
filling his pipe with deliberation, to go to the far end of these
plains that lay to west of them--"to the boat-building there," said
he.

Angus thought for a moment that his caller was not sober as he
seemed.  Boat-building away inland on those prairies!  Then he
remembered that through that West country rivers ran, and that they
were great enough and sufficiently free of rapids for long
distances for heavier craft to ply on them than the canoes of the
company--these buoyant canoes that were paddled and portaged from
Hudson's Bay and from Fort William (by Rainy Lake and Lake of the
Woods) to Fort Garry, and by Portage la Prairie away into the chain
of rivers toward remote Swan Lake and beyond.

Buchanan was to take a man or two with him, he explained, able at
the work; the pay, he added, was good.

"It would be a change for you," he declared, with a nod and a quick
glance.  "It would take your mind from--aye," he ended.  "What say
ye?"

Angus told him he appreciated his thought and his kindness.  At
that Buchanan rose, and staring out of the window remarked that he
would like fine if they could start on Thursday morning.

"Here's Tuesday," said he, wheeled, and walked to the door.

Angus followed him.  They stood there a moment or two.

"Yes, I'll be ready," said Angus.

"That's fine, then," replied Buchanan, and departed, leaving the
young man to his tinkering and his thoughts.

With his employer going away from Red River he--were he to remain--
would have to seek a new job, and there had always been a spell for
him in that curve of sky over the space to west, as if with a still
small voice it called him.  He would be sorry to leave the Frasers.
He had come to look upon them as close kindred rather than as the
"forty-second cousins" that they were.  The children had called his
father "uncle".  He liked the callant Hector.  He liked the baby
Flora, and very greatly he liked Fiona, who would come to him in
the evenings, book in hand, and say "Will you hearken me my
lessons?"  There was a Sunday when she had asked him to "hearken
her" a psalm.

"'Thus spake the sheriff'--" she began.

"The seraph," Angus had corrected.

"'Thus spake the sheriff'--"

"The seraph."

"Oh!  'Thus spake the seraph and forthwith appeared a shining
throne'--"

"A shining throng--throng."

"Oh!  'Thus spake the sheriff'--I mean seraph--'and forthwith
appeared a shining throng.'  Perhaps I had better know, if you
please, what a seraph is.  That might help."

Yes, he would miss the family life of the Frasers.

There was a ring that Mrs. Munro had worn on her third finger, in
the collet the hair of her husband's mother.  Daniel's father had
had it made, a fine piece of work by an Edinburgh goldsmith after
his wife's death--on its inner surface the initials of his and her
Christian names in monogram--and Daniel, inheriting it, had given
it to Kate as wedding ring.  When she died Mrs. Fraser had taken it
from her hand and kept it to give to Daniel later.  He, however had
not worn it, put it away; but alone in the world, Angus--finding it
among his father's few treasures--put it on his little finger.  He
had no near kin left, but the sight of that ring, the feel of it,
to turn it round sometimes on his finger in those days of
desolation, seemed to help, mitigated the sense of solitariness
somehow.  It gave him two generations of his folk for secret
company.

The party consisted of Mr. Buchanan, two half-breeds (of French and
Saulteaux blood), who were known only by their Christian names of
Pierre and Aloysius, Tom Renwick, a fellow-worker on the flat-boats
with them, Sam Lovat Douglas, and Angus.

Douglas--he who was later to become Sir Samuel Lovat-Douglas--had
just arrived at Fort Garry on his way to Fort Edmonton, with a
wallet of letters of introduction to factors and such throughout
the land (to William McTavish, the governor of Assiniboia for the
company, Mackay of Fort Ellice, Lillie of Fort Carlton, Chantelaine
of Fort Pitt, Hardisty of Fort Edmonton, Macaulay of Jasper House,
and Colin Fraser of St. Ann's), and hearing that Buchanan was
westward bound had made arrangements with him to go with them.
Douglas, in his early twenties Angus judged, was heavily built at
that time, with a powerful frame--and a geniality of manner somehow
suggesting rather the plausible than the candid.  Clearly he was in
the country on business bent, but to ask direct questions of a man
was not the usage in those days.  As a matter of fact Angus was not
curious.  If a man had no desire to disclose his affairs--then it
was nothing to do with him.  Yet it was to Angus that Douglas
revealed the object of his journey.  It was on the night they
stopped at the Touchwood Hills post--that shortly afterwards was
abandoned by the company and left to crumble in the weather and the
seasons.

"I'm verra glad," said Douglas in that friendly way of his, "to
have your company on this odyssey--and I hope you mak' weel at the
boat-building.  Some fools tell me that in a new land a man should
take the first job that turns up.  Well there may be something in
that; but I'm no' eager to take the first job lest I stay in it.
You see what I mean?  Man, I'm ambeetious!"

The others were over at the post for company and a chat there (to
the official in charge at the Touchwood Hills House, Douglas had no
letter), and they were alone at the night fire.  Its flames
illumined the heavy forehead, the heavy jowl, the dancing and
genial eyes of Sam Douglas.

"Do you know what I'm here for?" he asked.  "I'll tell you.  You
haven't tried to pump me to find out, so I'll tell you," and he
laughed.  "This country is going to open up--to develop.  What have
we seen so far?  Buffaloes by the hundred, and these two half-
breeds whooping Voila les boeufs!  Voila les boeufs!"

"An odd fellow," thought Angus.  "He seems to be acting."  (Not but
what he had already a liking for Sam.)  "Even his Scots burr he
seems to accentuate deliberately at times--as now, when we are
alone together, for example.  Something a trifle humbugging about
him, is there?  Something of insincerity in his ingratiating
manner?  And yet, isn't it easier to get along with one who would
fain be a good fellow than with one who is sulky and taciturn?"

Thus was Angus thinking as Douglas paused there by the fire beside
him on a buffalo robe, gazing into the flames.

"Aye, buffaloes," Sam went on after a pause.  "And antelope louping
over the prairie, and a few bit villages of the Crees in their
leather tents.  But consider how the buffalo are being killed off.
They are no' just for the sustenance of the Indians now.  The trade
that has sprung up in their robes as they call these pelts," and he
stroked the one on which he sat, "is going to exterminate them; and
the railroad builders down in the States are feeding the navvies on
buffalo meat.  Mark my words.  Man, man, my mind is of the kind
that is aye just a jump ahead--maybe 'twa jumps'.  There's going to
be cattle grazing on these buffalo pastures before long.  And there
are going to be fixed habitations--fixed habitations.  But what are
the folks going to burn to keep them warm in wintertime?  It's a
cold winter here.  Buffalo chips?  Na.  And there's not sufficient
wood in the river bottoms to last them long when they come in here
in great numbers, as come they will.  I'm looking for coal.  My
mind is of the kind that goes jumping ahead!  Aye, 'burning rocks'.
I heard of burning rocks from an Indian on the Missouri.  They have
coal there; and he told me there were burning rocks up here to
north also.  But it's no' safe to travel up through the Blackfoot
country, as ye ken, so I went back doon the Missouri and over to
the Red River and Fort Garry, and I'm going to see these burning
rocks in the north.  That's what I'm here for, sir.  I'm thinking
of the future.  I'm planning big."

It was young man's talk, perhaps, and as the years passed he might
be more minded to keep his own counsel; but many were the young men
in the land, then, engaged on affairs onerous and dangerous--
factors and explorers of the company hardly more than striplings.
All the difference between them and him was that they were in the
service of others, and he already was, as they say, playing a lone
hand.

Doubt in him suddenly intruded unhappily into Angus's liking for
him when, after a lull in talk during which they but sat smoking
there by the fire, the talk resumed came somehow to the subject of
the stipends paid by the Hudson's Bay to its factors and clerks.

"A small stipend," declared Douglas, as though he were an aged
promoter and experienced financier, "and the promise of a fair
pension is the idea.  You see, it makes a man work well to know his
old-age is provided for if he behaves himself--and, actually, he
may never live to have the pension.  If I was head of a big company
I'd run it on those lines.  It would be benevolent, you see, to
arrange for the pension--and, as I say, only a percentage would get
one.  That's to be considered."

"You would not, then, pay the pension to widows of your employees?"
asked Angus.

Sam Douglas rubbed a hand over his face.

"That would have to be thought over," he replied, and dismissed the
subject by rising to prepare his blankets for the night, the sound
of the fumbling steps and the voices of the others drawing near
them from the direction of the post.

Rumours of Blackfeet raiders in the region when they reached Fort
Carlton ordained a continuance together toward Edmonton, with the
intention of passing southward, thence, to the Mountain House; but
at Fort Pitt there was a dark-eyed young man, the half-breed son of
one of the factors, who was setting out across country for Rocky
Mountain House.  He was known to the Blackfeet.  (His mother was,
in fact, a Piegan woman--which is to say Blackfoot, the Blackfeet
being, as Angus had it explained to him, a tribe in three parts:
the Blackfeet proper, the Bloods, and the Piegans, all speaking a
common tongue.)  So there they said farewell to Douglas and the
half-breeds, striking out west, south of Beaver Lake, by the Dried
Meat Hills, Buffalo Lake, the Red Deer River's upper waters, and
Gull Lake--new names to Angus, with the life of the land in the
sound of them.

For some reason or another Douglas's parting remark remained
hauntingly in the young man's ears.

"I hope you mak' weel at the boat-building," said Sam.

"And I hope you find your coal that you are going to make a fortune
over--by and by," replied Angus.

"Oh, sooner than you think!" Douglas told him.

There seemed at the time and in the remembrance as he rode on to be
an ironic note in the words, "I hope you mak' weel at the boat-
building."  Did Douglas want, all friendly at parting, to spur
Angus on, to make him think further than the day's board and bed?
"Some folks tell me that in a new land a man should take the first
job that turns up, but I'm no' eager to take the first job lest I
stay in it."  That also Douglas had said.  He may have intended, at
parting, a jog to his new friend toward looking ahead, "planning
big".

It was a little way beyond Gull Lake, coming to an eminence, that
Angus had one of his experiences, these experiences that he told to
no one but that went (more than other ones apparently less airy,
less unsubstantial) to the making of what he was to become in the
drift of the years.  It was an experience of the spirit kin with
that which had privately befallen him over a year before when the
odours of the new land, before they had sighted it, came out to
meet them through a white vapour over the sea, into which the
steamer's siren bleated.  By the olfactory nerves had come that
one.  By the eyes came this, with the gift of a secret ecstasy.

Before him the Rocky Mountains were suddenly revealed beyond belts
of colour that were of woods, parklands, wedges of sky-reflecting
water, twist of river, fragment of distant lake.  Very much as it
was with him when listening to music was it with him then, gazing
on the scene before him.  Music would pick and choose through the
past years of his life, recover and toss to him this, that and the
other: the tone of a voice, the light on a pebble, a forgotten wail
of wind in a chimney from a winter storm of years back, the glance
of eyes (Jessie's, no doubt), the gleam through water of a herring
shoal--and leave it to him to make something of the medley.

He thought of his father's remark--"Scotland, a kingdom of the
mind."  Scotland was not his.  They would not have him there.
Well, he had Scotland still, the bark of seals on the Black Rocks,
the remembered smell of sun-scorched bracken, of peat-smoke beaten
down in the gales.  He thought of the vast Atlantic swaying like a
compass disc betwixt the rise and fall of Scotland's seaweed fringe
and the scent of pines, firs and cedars in the mists off
Newfoundland.  Of the curve of the Milky Way he thought, seen from
their prairie camps at night, a whirl of sparks from the Arctic
shores to the Caribbean.  Of the columns and whip-lashes of light,
up to the zenith and gone, of the Aurora Borealis, seen after hot
summer days of their journey (not only in winter as many believed),
he thought as he reined in his horse and sat motionless staring
from that butte beyond Gull Lake at the revelation of the Rocky
Mountains.

Something happened to him beyond his power to express; something
happened, wordless, like music.  As though the blue of the sky had
run and thickened roughly at the base, there lay the ranges, low in
contrast with the height of that space of blue but--he aware of how
far off they were--majestic in their serene extent.  They dropped
away to south, they dropped away to north, as into a quiet
eternity.  Here and there slashes of white showed among their
purple.  Here and there rocky gables twinkled like mirrors, and at
one place, far in, there was a dun seething, peaks turning to cloud
and clouds solidifying into peaks.  A lightning flash was drawn in
quick gold on that portion where peaks and clouds fused, and then
came a distant sound, the faintest rumble.

But he could not stay there all day, his spirit and the sighing of
the wind in the grass blending as sky and mountains blent in that
section of storm on the ranges.  Men and horses ahead were
dwindling to the size of ants, passing away in a steady jig-jog
with the rhythmic swing of long tails, the slight sway of the
riders' shoulders and of the balanced packs.  After that vision
they would soon be at journey's end.

It was, in fact, next morning, just one calendar month from the day
they started out from Red River that, cresting a knoll, they saw
beyond a twist of river the towers of Rocky Mountain House.



CHAPTER FOUR

Indian Woman


It was as the summer changed into autumn in the year '57 that Angus
came to Rocky Mountain House and already the place had its history,
though the signs of it were splintered in wood instead of being
chiselled in more ancient stone.  Here were no granite peel towers,
only those wooden watch bastions.  Here was no Roman Wall such as
crumbled through the centuries betwixt Clyde and Forth, no ruined
keep such as sat by the side of the Wee Cumbrae, gazing hollow at
its double on the mainland.  But in the logs of Rocky Mountain
House already, when young Munro came there, was a silver gray
veneer of the weather that silently told him dead men's hands had
hewn them and set them up.  The scene in which the fort sat--with
its history, recent in comparison with the history of his homeland--
spoke beyond record, it seemed, spoke from the beginnings of the
world, prehistoric days, the early ages.  There lay the eternal
mountains--higher than Grampians, if obvious comparisons were to be
made--and in the twilight the bay of a timber wolf came as it were
from a time before Bruce, before Hakon, of whom his mother had
known the legends.

Here had come one Pangman, and on an old pine close by had cut his
name and hewn the date: Peter Pangman, 1790.  Here, in the days
before the amalgamation of the Hudson's Bay Company (the Governor
and Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson's Bay)
and the Northwest Fur Company, Alexander Henry of the latter (known
as Alexander Henry the Younger, to distinguish him from his roving
uncle) had fuddled a party of Piegan Indians with whisky into which
he decanted laudanum, making them incapable of going on toward the
Rockies to intercept David Thompson, who was then on his way to
trade with their enemies through the passes.  And what would David
Thompson, Angus wondered, have thought of these methods, listening
to it all and hearing, anon, of that curious man of brain, heart,
and sinew who refused to serve liquor to the natives?

The factor of the house entertained them often with these old
stories as the evenings drew in, telling of how Thompson once,
importuned by his friends to take kegs of rum to trade away off in
the land of the Kootenays, stampeded the horses so that they dashed
under tree branches, smashing the barrels, then wrote a letter--
that would get back to his partners he knew not when, nor by what
hands--telling of the "accident" and, glad that he had found a way
not to debase the natives with fire-water, sat down to his lonely
evening fire in the glow of resinous pine-knots to read a chapter
from the pocket Bible he carried along with him.  There was a
legend of him having arrived at the Mountain House once from one of
his expeditions beyond the mountains, that had been in winter,
downcast greatly at the treatment accorded to the sledge-dogs--a
humane man.

"What was he like to look at?" Angus asked, and was given a
description of him--broad shoulders, deep-set eyes, high forehead
and across it his fair hair cut bang-fashion.

The ghost of David Thompson, the shadow of David Thompson, moved
for him always thereafter against the background of these silver-
gray logs.  There was also a peppering of history in them, gouged
holes that had been made by no woodpeckers' beaks but were
souvenirs of occasions when Cree and Blackfeet, unhappily arriving
simultaneously, fought round its walls.

At the fort they had fires of coal--which Douglas had gone seeking;
and there were men whose duty was to go to the outcrop a little way
back and pick it out, pack it to the House.  As for the "burning
rocks": Angus discovered that the Indians called them so not
because they at any place, so far, mined and burned coal
themselves, but because there were certain areas ignited no doubt
by bush fires, that smouldered away, glowing by night in deep
crevices and raising their pillar of smoke by day.  Had Sam Douglas
read more in the journals of the old explorers he would not have
needed an Indian's account of burning rocks to send him on his
quest.  That coal was in the land had been known and noted by
travellers long ago--Franklin, Peter Fiddler and Mackenzie among
them.  Seams had been smouldering to the knowledge of white folk
for a hundred years, and according to the legends before that, time
out of mind.

Less was Angus impressed by any feeling of lack of history in the
land than by the sense of the prehistoric there.

News of the outer world--near and far--they heard and discussed.
The territory of Kansas was still, it seemed, a troubled place to
live in with the settlers from the free and those from the anti-
slavery states at loggerheads, drawing their guns over their
differences.  There was trouble in Europe, as always.  There was
war between France and Sardinia, France and Austria.  There were
wranglings over the provinces of Nice and Savoy.  They heard of
that fracas and, anon, that it was over, then that another was
brewing in Sicily; and Victor Emmanuel and Garibaldi were discussed
on the banks of the Saskatchewan.  More distant, sometimes, seemed
to Angus the people of these discords and bloodshed than the folk
of Venus (if folk there were on that planet), setting in a clear
sky beyond the Rockies.

When the Blackfeet came north to trade there was ceremonial, the
factor going out to meet them with a gift of tobacco.  As sharing
salt to the Arab was whiffing from the same pipe to them.  The
chief would accept the gift, fill his sacred pipe, and the sub-
chiefs and the factor would smoke, with a dignified observance in
the pointing of the stem, even in the manner of handling it and in
the direction of its circuit--"with the sun"--"Much as we white
men," remarked the factor, "have a ritual in the birling of the
wine round the table."

In the earlier days--of the Northwest Fur Company, when rum was
much used in trade--there was great care exercised in letting the
Indians, of whatever tribe, into the Fort.  A few at a time they
passed into the trade-room and up in the galleries company
employees were secreted with primed rifles at hand.  When the rum
was in the tomahawk was often out.  The Indian had to be taught to
like the spirit, and when the extensive use of it was discontinued
he had a grievance--that he was not given it.  He would demand,
with murder in his eyes.  Dreadful and dowie doings there had been
in that place of lonely grandeur.  To avoid these clashes of tribes
at enmity the company's officers tried to keep the trade of the
Plains Cree to Forts Edmonton, Pitt and Carlton (the woods Crees
went chiefly to Carlton and à-la-Corne), of the Eastern Assiniboine
to Qu'Appelle, of the Saulteaux to Forts Ellice and Pelly.  Rocky
Mountain House, by the company's desire, was for the Blackfeet
confederacy and for the Sarcees (who seemed, by their speech, to be
a southern band of the Chippewyans--the Tinnhes--of the northern
lakes), and the Western Assiniboines, generally called the Stonys.
But Crees still came there at times, even as roving Sarcee and
Blackfeet would dare to go as far as the core of their northern
enemy's lands--Fort Edmonton.

Never, so far, either at Red River or at the Mountain House, had
Angus been homesick for Brendan, because of the melancholy of
crushing conditions of the life of his people there.  Yet a day
came on which, at the sound of a place-name, he had--if but for a
moment--a pang at his heart, a realization of being far from home,
and he understood how his mother would ache for Scotland despite
their misery there.  There arrived at the Fort a man with a marked
Highland accent who, on being asked whence he came, replied
"Dunvegan," which Angus took for Dunvegan in Skye, and had a vision
as of all the Hebrides with trailing mists, quiet glens, and sea
lochs huzzaing with a homing tide.

"Dunvegan," said he--homesick.

"Yess--north of Fort Edmonton, on the Peace River it iss."

"Oh, I thought you meant Dunvegan in the Isle of Skye."

"No, no, I've never been in Scotland.  I was born in Glengarry--
Upper Canada," he added quickly, with a laugh, noting a look of
puzzlement on Angus's face.

He was descended, no doubt, from others cast out of their homes as
his folk had been--and the brief homesickness passed.

In talk of those who had been before him in these parts he learnt
much of their marital affairs--their blanket marriages, their
prayer-book marriages, their registered unions: the varieties of
marriage observances and plain concubinage.  High-placed men, he
heard, in the service of all the trading companies--the old
Northwest Fur Company, the X.Y. Company, the Hudson's Bay Company,
had taken Indian women as wife or as concubine--and some, when
their time of living in the west was finished, left women and half-
breed weans behind, while others took theirs east with them.

Tom Renwick voiced plump and plain the view that if a man must have
a woman he might as well visit the Indian camps and find some
temporarily obliging and clean squaw without any legal proceedings
whatever.  There were older men present and Angus wondered how such
a suggestion struck them.  There was a marked silence--and it
occurred to him that perhaps they were considering that Tom's view
was a sound one, but that it would have been better for a junior
not to have expressed it.

"This young man's dogma," said the factor, wagging his head at
Renwick, "is apt to lead to trouble.  You be careful, Tom, of
acting upon that conception in some of these Indian villages."

"I wasn't thinking of it personally, sir," replied Renwick.

"Hum!" said the factor.

"I believe that with a white-man marriage," Buchanan remarked, "a
squaw has a tendency, as time slips along, to be dictatorial.
Marry one according to their own rites and it's no' so bad.  I'm
told.  She'll be aye a wee bit uncertain if the white man feels
wholly bound.  Give them a ceremony before a priest or a clergyman
and there is, I doot, that tendency.  A squaw with a marriage
certificate in her hand is apt to become heap big chieftainess."

"That applies," the factor pointed out, laughing, "to some white
women, too.  I doubt if it is typical."

"They are, of course, savages--les sauvages," said Buchanan.

"Daniel William Harmon said--" began the factor.

Daniel William Harmon: Angus had never so much as heard the name,
yet the factor spoke it as though almost to quote an authority.
Some, in Angus's position, might have damned Mr. Harmon and his
opinions at a venture, but instead of that he reminded himself that
little did he know of this west to which he had come; and desiring
to know more he was "all ears" and his gaze was eager on the
speaker's face.

"Daniel William Harmon said that hospitality to strangers he had
found to be among the Indian virtues, and that he had been treated
with more real politeness by them than is commonly shown to
strangers in the so-called civilized world."

"Well, Harmon certainly knew both," said one of the clerks.

The factor went on to talk of one and the other--giving them their
names, Harmon and Sir Alexander Mackenzie among them--who had
married Indian women, and these not eastern Indians long in touch
with white people, but Indians of the Great Plains; and that talk
sooner than he had any premonition (premonition, in fact, he had
none) was to be turned over and over in Angus's mind.

When the snow was beginning to creep down on the range of the
Rockies westward with that amazing straight line as though ruled
along the mountains where upper whiteness and lower green met,
Buchanan, Renwick and Angus went off to the hunting of white-tailed
deer in the wooded country.

Over gray and brown pebbles a stream came down through the forests.
The place belonged to antiquity.  The stands of deciduous trees
among the evergreen conifers were yellowing, autumn having come,
and Indian summer might hold all in exquisite trance for a month or
more.  As they rode down to that stream, their pack-horses laden
with the kill of deer, there was an odour of burning wood, red-
willow smoke.  There, in a natural meadow, a green gusset by a
curve of the hurrying water, was an Indian encampment, a cluster of
tepees, the leather ones of that epoch.

There had, by the signs, been a meal recently eaten in the open.
No smoke came from the tepees, but a fire crumbled into ash before
them, sending up, as is the way of red-willow well alight, more of
odour than of smoke into the air.  A mere sift of blue, a haze of
blue, ascended from that natural meadow in a thin long wisp, and
was caught by the draught of the stream's passage, drawn away
trembling above its flow, a pennant of blue twining above the
twinings of the creek so that its further course could be traced
some distance by that gauzy riband among the tree-tops.  Little did
Angus realize how even that, remembered in days to come, would
importune him till it was as though a voice called in his dreams,
"Come back."

He and his two companions rode down to the water's edge.  The
Indians had been hunting also and in the creek-bed were many hides
held down by stones.  Others, pegged to the ground, or stretched
upon upright wicker frames, the women were scraping clean.  By the
lodges sat the men, some idling after the hunt, one making arrows--
running the shafts back and forth, to assure them straight, through
a stone in the centre of which was a circular hole.  The horses of
the white men whinnied to the horses of the Indians.  The horses of
the Indians answered back, looking up from their grazing,
displaying white splashes on broad foreheads and Roman noses--these
descendants of Arab sires.

The Indians scarce looked up.  They might, by their manner, have
been unaware of indication that anyone was coming, going on with
the straightening of arrow shafts, the chipping of fat from hides.
The three men paused at the creekside, their pack-string loping
ahead and craning necks to drink, then the saddle horses craning
down, so that the riders sat forward, hands extended with the
reins.  They knew these people and, as the animals drank, when one
or another of the band glanced toward them they raised their hands
in the customary signs of greeting, either the palm held upward--
the sign of peace (a hand with no weapon in it)--or with the first
two fingers elevated and slightly oscillated, the sign for two
people, friends, together.

The pack horses, having drunk, waited with dripping muzzles for
direction, and were driven by Tom Renwick through the stream on to
the meadow and across it, past the camp to the further ford.
Buchanan reined in a moment to hail an elderly man, Chief Red
Shield.

"Hullo, Chief!" he called.  "You get deer?"

"You bet!" replied Red Shield, his face wrinkling in a smile.

Buchanan rode on, pointing a finger at two children that balanced
at the lodge door sucking their thumbs, staring at him, and--"Boo,
boo!" he chanted at them, an old squaw looking from the solemn
children to the jocund white man and rippling laughter.

That was the day when Angus first saw Minota.

In some impulse he glanced round and there, a little way up the
creek, was an Indian girl dressed in the manner of the time, which
was part native, part white, with fringed deerskin kirtle over deer-
skin leggings, and a print flower-patterned bodice from the
company's trade-rooms.  Her head was bound with a blue bandana,
thick plaits of hair hanging on either side.  Hand on hip, head
canted, she was watching him; and when their eyes met she did not
look away.

Angus smiled at her and after a moment, when it seemed she was not
going to respond, she did, then looked toward one of the elder
women at work upon a hide.  To her, then, Munro turned and was just
in time to realize she had seen and was pretending utter
engrossment in her task.

Quiet he was, following Renwick and Buchanan through the forest
that flounced these slopes, aware of the smell of balsam in the
dusky hush, seeing the tree shadows rippling over the backs of the
two in front, rippling over the horses' haunches, keenly alive to
scent and sound, the click of a hoof on a stone in the dust of the
forest floor.  The roar of the creek had fallen away.  Surely the
silence of that forest was older than the Roman Wall.  As he rode
he thought of Sir Alexander Mackenzie, of whom he had often heard
with his Indian woman, and of Harmon, whose name was new to him,
with his.

Next day when they were in camp the horses, tearing grass close by,
became restless, raising their heads, snorting.

"Somebody coming," said Buchanan.

There between the tree boles above them was a movement.  Laughter
came down, rippling laughter of Indian women, the deep brief laugh
of a man.  It was their friends again, Red Shield's band.  Pack
ponies tittuped past, laden with rolled hides.  Young men following
them, swaying loose in their saddles, gave response with a waggle
of two fingers to the salutes of the white men.  A squaw rode
slowly by on a deliberate piebald that had no doubt been as it were
the nursery horse of many children.  She smiled.  Looking after her
they saw a cradle hanging on her back, a small face there, eyes
staring out at the receding landscape.

Anon came Red Shield, a fine figure, sitting erect, foursquare.  He
not only was a chief--he looked a chief in his fringed buckskins,
and with his plaited hair (the "braids"), bound at the ends with
little brass rings.  He halted to talk to Buchanan, and as he did
so the horses of those behind behaved as usual when one stopped
ahead--immediately took the opportunity to turn aside and snatch at
the special herbage of their fancy.

There was the girl of Angus's admiration and considerations--
swinging out her rein-hand to ride past Buchanan and Red Shield.

"Your horse wants to stop and eat," Angus said.

"Yes," and she showed white teeth in a smile.

That was all.  He wondered if that was all she knew of white-man
speech, "yes" and "no".

"Your people seem to have got plenty deer for moccasins," he
remarked.

"Yes--and the skins are very good this year," she replied.

The clarity of her voice, the precision of her utterance, made him
glad he had not spoken to her with the usual sort of pidgin-
English.

"What is your name?" he asked.

"Minota," said she.  "My father is Chief Red Shield," and she
inclined her head toward him.

"Oh, your father is Chief Red Shield.  I have seen him once or
twice at the Mountain House."

He was suddenly aware of a young man manoeuvring a half-broken
horse past them.  It seemed to him that there was anger on the
rider's face.  He stepped aside to give more room, said "How-do,"
but the Indian was surly.

"He does not speak English," explained Minota.

"Where did you learn it?" Angus inquired.

"My father taughted me," she answered, and then in her eyes was
shadow of a doubt of her pronunciation.

To him it was well enough.  Red Shield, he had been told, was one
of the ablest chiefs of the Crees thereaway.

The old lady who had observed their exchange of smiles the day
before was upon them then.  Minota flicked the rein ends over her
horse's haunch and it moved on.

"How do you do?" said Angus to the old lady.

"How--do--you--do?" she responded, stately.

"I hope we will meet again," Angus said, turning to Minota.

"I expect so," she said.

The chief shook his lines and the cavalcade passed, leaving an
odour of new-tramped, new-crushed pine, fir and tamarack needles,
an odour of horse-flesh.

"A fine old fellow that," said Buchanan.

"And Angus is thinking 'a fine young lass'," said Tom Renwick,
sitting on his heels by the fire.  "Eh?"

"Yes.  Not bad," admitted Angus.

"I expect so": what, precisely, did she mean by that?  Had she seen
in his eyes what Tom Renwick had evidently seen?  Did she mean only
that wide though the land through which they roamed they would no
doubt forgather again?  He was surely in love to be probing for
deep implications in casual remarks.

They did meet again, at the Port, several times before the snow
fell, and on each meeting the deeper was Angus enamoured of his
copper-coloured maid with the dark, lustrous, candid and somehow
pathetic eyes.

A letter from Ian Fraser, received just the day before one of these
visits of the Indians, for some reason--he could not tell how or
why--had the effect of restraining him, though but temporarily.  He
was back, in memory, with that happy family, saw the plates in
their racks round the kitchen that was like an old Scots interior,
heard again Ian at his work singing in his fine natural voice the
old ballads; "hearkened" Fiona her lessons--and her psalm!--and was
doubtful if he should act as he was here moved to.  He had seen
enough of Minota to believe that all he had to do was to ask her,
and she would be his woman.  He turned about and about on his
finger the ring that had been his mother's, the hair of his
grandmother in its collet, and asked himself (asked, almost it
seemed, the ghosts of his people) if he was wise.

He did indeed believe that, by an Indian's view, by an Indian's
ways of courtship, he had gone far already.  He had seen the young
men at the preliminaries of their courting, which was but making
eyes at the girl of their choice till she either too often turned
her back with a finality of disdain or indifference and it was
realized as hopeless to proceed, or raised her eyelids in passing
and smiled, when the next step was to waylay her in the dusk and
cast a blanket round her.  There they would stand, these young
lovers, by the hour, no one paying any heed, not even the wild
striplings of the village.

Yes, in all the meetings he had had with Minota her eyes (after the
first talk) had "told" him with a lovely darkening or misting in
them, like the darkening of pools of water under a passing cloud.
She gave herself to him in that misting of her dark eyes.

The end of it all was that in the spring young Angus Munro (just
nineteen then) took his woman--it was never "my wife; my woman" it
was--to the factor, her father and mother with them, to have an
entry made of his union with Minota Red Shield in the company's
books.

He did not ask himself insistently why that was all, why he did not
go to the mission and have a white man's marriage.  He silenced the
inquiry by telling himself that some white men took their woman to
wife without even the formality of an entry in the books, no more
formality than the present of a gun or a few horses to the father.

What was the depth of his love?  What was the depth of hers?  Her
eyes had clouded when, her promise to be his woman given, he had
said that they had better have it written down at the Fort; but she
had not asked, instead, for a prayer-book ceremony.  Minota would
have gone with him even without that.  He offered neither gun nor
horses to old Red Shield.  She did not want that; her father, she
said, did not want that.  That savage, Chief Red Shield, and his
squaw looked upon it as an honour to have their daughter wed to a
white man.  Minota's mother was a sonsy woman, coming to the age
when those of her race have a tendency to broaden in a very
definite "middle-age spread," a sonsy woman with genial eyes and a
happy laugh.  She was a Stony (which is to say an Assiniboine of
the west, a Rocky Mountain Assiniboine) whom Red Shield had met
once at the House when both her tribe and his were camped close-by
there to trade.

No--no gun, no horse for the girl but, not as the purchase price,
merely as a gift--as the phrases went, "a prairie gift, a gift cut
off, a gift in itself," meaning not given in hope of any return or
exchange--he presented Chief Red Shield (on the sober advice of
Captain Buchanan) with a silk hat, a secondhand top hat, with a
second-hand ostrich feather round it, for the trade-room at Rocky
Mountain House had a queer miscellaneous stock of goods.



CHAPTER FIVE

Race


Within the palisades were two or three cabins from an earlier
period, uninhabited, and in one of these, new-caulked in chinks
between the logs, with a Franklin stove from the trade-room, Angus
took up house with Minota, making the third at that time in the
Fort with an Indian woman.  He had moved, as it were, another step
away from Loch Brendan.  This log cabin was not like those at Red
River, thatched, but had a roof of split cedar--"cedar shakes".

Speedily his Cree talk improved.  He discovered that there was not
only pidgin-English but pidgin-Cree, and that many white people who
imagined that they spoke Cree spoke only that.  Minota unfolded for
him the tenses of the verbs, and he learnt how pliant were the
sentence formations, how full the vocabulary, and that often with
one word could be conveyed what necessitated the use of half a
dozen English to express.  He came to respect les sauvages more and
more.

As she taught him her language his mind often went back to Sabbath
evenings in Scotland, Sabbath evenings at Red River, and the voice
of his father (or of Fraser) would be with him again, reading in
the Scriptures.  For to the same simple, elemental, eternal things
did the Crees go for imagery as the Hebrews.  "The winter is past,
the rain is over and gone, the flowers appear on the earth, the
time of the singing birds is come and the voice of the turtle is
heard in the land," might have been one of Minota's songs.  "Like
as a hen gathering her chickens under her wings" was pure Cree, it
struck him.  When she taught him the sign language even more did he
recall the voice of his father rolling out the Hebraic metaphor in
the candlelight at Brendan.  If one would signify in the sign
language "I am happy," so Minota showed him, one made the signs for
"day" and "my heart", meaning: "The day is in my heart." There
seemed to be no giving of orders in the talk of the hands.  There
was no "Do that," no "Do not do that."  Instead there was "I think
it good for you to do that," or "I think it not good to do that."

The names of the months, the moons, she told him, beginning with
the moon before winter; the moon when the leaves fall: the moon
when deer rut; the moon when deer shed their horns; the moon that
is hard to bear; the moon when the buffalo cow's foetus is large;
the moon of sore eyes (because of the sunlit snow then); the moon
when the geese lay eggs; the moon of growing grass; the moon when
strawberries ripen; the moon when the buffalo bulls are fat; the
moon when the buffalo cows are in season; the moon of red plums.
She showed him games, gambling games with little pegs, peeled
wands: and one that was simply cup-and-ball Indian fashion.

Well though she could speak English she could read neither print
nor script, nor did she know the Cree syllabics devised at Norway
House by the Methodist missionary there, James Evans, for her
people.  Pictograph she could have translated, with the symbolic
colourings among the figures represented, but not these symbols.
The Woods Crees speedily learnt them but the Plains Crees, roving
about in bands, buffalo hunters chiefly, had not the same need to
leave missives behind as those who split up into small parties and
families for their hunting and trapping in the Land of Little
Sticks.  The day was to come when Angus would regret that he had
not taught her to write.

Like most white men he had looked upon "savages" as signifying
something ceaselessly vindictive and treacherous.  Red River had
corrected that.  Like most white men he had looked upon the
religion of his people as the only true faith--and discarded that
view while living with Minota.  Very tenderly he came to think of
her as she lost her shyness before him and revealed what lived
behind these dark, deer-like eyes, behind that soft-moving and
graceful exterior.  She reminded him at times, by reason of her
innocence, her naïveté, of his mother, and occasionally, with her
heresies, of his father.  She could not understand, for example,
simple though it is to the civilized mind, how the company that
sold firearms to the Crees was the same that sold firearms to the
Blackfeet, Blackfeet and Cree being hereditary enemies.  The
shareholders in armament firms that gaily, in our days, manufacture
lethal weapons for any who will buy she could not have understood.

There were moments when, in place of feeling that he had
condescended, or descended, in this alliance, he felt that he was
in the presence of something far superior.  She was credulous,
pathetically so, he thought often, but that credulity, he realized,
was from her honesty and truthfulness.  She told him of the
Blackrobe that came to the Piegans southward with what was called
the seventh day ceremonials.

"And one day," said she, "a Piegan went out to hunt, and the
Blackrobe saw him going and called to him that it was the Rest Day.
The Indian laughed at him and--" her eyes were solemn as she
continued, "he was killed that day by a grizzly bear.  So the
Blackrobe stood up before all the people and told them that God had
sent the bear to punish that man, and the next time he rang his
bell and called that it was the Day of Rest he had a great
gathering in his lodge for the ceremonial.  Do you think," she
ended, "that God would send a grizzly to kill the man for not
resting on His Day?"

Angus shook his head slowly, saying nothing.

"After that Blackrobe left them he went through the Flathead
country and there he baptized a great many, all under the water in
a river.  And after he had baptized them they went on a war party
against the Crows and got many horses, without any being killed.
The Blackfeet heard of it and waited for him to come back and got
him to baptize a lot of them, and then they went out horse-stealing
into the Gros Ventre country, and it was the most successful raid
they had had for many snows."

She looked into his eyes.

"You think there is nothing in it?" she asked, trying to read his
thoughts.

He was in a quandary similar to that of parents who have had formal
religious upbringing and wonder, grown to years of questioning,
whether they should bring their children up to a belief in all the
old stories or not.  She pressed the point.

"You think there is nothing in it?" she repeated.

"I do not know," he said.

It was clear to her he would not say any more than that.  Of her
own people's medicine men she had been rendered somewhat skeptical.
They demanded much when they came to shake their rattles, beat
their drums, blow their whistles and sing over sick people.  She
thought that many men and women could do more for illness with
herbs and certain roots made into plaisters.  Not but what she
herself knew of a medicine-man who did a wonderful thing.  He cut
with a flint a crack in the side of an ailing woman, sucked some of
the bad blood there, spat it forth, and lo, he had sucked a little
frog from her inside.

"Did she recover?" Angus asked.

"Yes, she recovered at once, and her man gave the medicine-man ten
ponies, for he was very fond of her."

She told him the medicine-men were paid chiefly with ponies and
buffalo robes.  But when anyone was dead their powers ended.  The
good Father Lacombe at Fort Edmonton had power even after men died.
That beautiful black horse he rode he had received from a widow for
getting the soul of her dead husband out of purgatory.

"All round us is mystery," said Minota.

Angus nodded slowly, listening.

"Yes," he replied.

"We have the same belief," she said.

There came to Rocky Mountain House news of the Sepoy Mutiny.  What
was it all about? they wondered.  The first emotion was, no doubt,
that whatever its cause, enemies of Britain, and rebels, must take
their punishment.  But soon there was sympathy at the Fort with the
mutineers when they heard more.  Living among a people prone to
superstitions and respecting these if for no other reason than that
the amenities might continue and Trade go well, the general view
was that British arrogance had made a mess among the Sepoys.
Angus, after hearing the talk, explained to Minota thus:  Much as
in the way that the Crees will eat dog, a dish that is abhorrent to
the Blackfeet, it was "bad medicine" to some of the people away off
there to touch pig and to others the cow was sacred.  A new sort of
rifle was issued to these people, the cartridges of which needed to
be greased, and they had found out that the grease used was that of
pig and cow.  They objected, and their objection was unheeded--
hence the Indian Mutiny.

"Could they not have let beaver fat, or some other fat, be used?"
asked Minota.  "That would have put the matter well."

"They would never think of that," replied Angus, deep in him a
hatred of tyranny, of the arrogant.

He would talk to her of his early home on Loch Brendan, of how his
people had been driven first from fruitful soil to barren soil by
the salt-water edge, and then harried even from that.  Her eyes had
fear in them.

"There are some of my people," said she, "who think that the day
will come when we will be treated that way by yours, but I cannot
think so.  I think there are many more good than bad white people,
enough good to keep the bad from doing that to us.  I think if they
tried to my people would die fighting.  Did your people fight?"

"Not where I was.  Our medicine-men said we were to go and that if
we offered resistance we would sizzle in hell."

"You do not believe in hell fire?"

"I--do--not!" he replied.

The year slipped past.  There came the moon when the deer shed
their horns, December, and preparations were made for Christmas Day
(Big Sunday) with Oregon grape branches in place of holly.  The
doings of Big Sunday somewhat puzzled the innocence and directness
of Angus's woman.  According to an old usage of his Highland home
he set a lit candle in the window on Christmas eve, and hearing the
significance of that--a light for the dead to see--Minota took it
much more seriously than he.  All night she was hushed, thinking
of, as she called them, "the shadows" seeing that signal--his
father, his mother, his brother who had been drowned in the big
water.  Angus had difficulty in explaining to her that he was not
sure if the shadows would really see.  She thought they would--and
they left it at that.

At the Fort the Nativity was celebrated in the usual way.  "Braw
claes" were worn as they had been worn on high-days and days of
celebration all across that land, from the Great Lakes and from
Hudson's Bay to the Pacific, from the beginnings of the fur trade.
A prospector from the mountains (there were many such in the land,
much gold having been found the year before far west in the Cariboo
Country, by white men who had wandered all that way from
California) drank so much rum that he died of alcoholic poisoning
next day.  Minota was troubled over that.

"Did they get drunk," she asked, "at the last feast before He was
nailed up on the cross?"

"I should hardly think so."

"My father once got drunk and spewed in the lodge and was very much
ashamed.  I think Jesus Christ would not like His friends to get
drunk and be sick on their last feast together.  It was a cruel way
to kill Him," she added.  "That is a sad story."

The new year came and the new year slipped along.  The moon of the
sore eyes was none too bad because of a warm wind (the Chinook)
which wiped the snow away.  The moon when the geese lay eggs came,
geese and ducks honking over, driving their wedges into the north:
and Minota sang:


     "The ice has broken in the rivers,
     The geese and the ducks fly over,
     All day--and even at night."


But with the spring she grew restless.  Her people were moving out
of their winter camps, setting up sweat lodges by the river sides
and taking baths both wet and dry, as she explained--that is to
say, steaming themselves in the low brush cages (the sweat lodges),
with hot stones thrust in to them, and then either cooling outside
wrapped in blankets (a dry bath) or plunging into the river
afterwards (a wet bath).

The desire to move was agony to Minota.  One morning she asked
Angus if he would object if she went on a visit to her people who
were going from the woods to the plains soon.

"Why, no," said he.

She was troubled lest he should think she loved them more than she
loved him, but after more parley and mutual assurances of devotion,
and assurance of understanding from him, she took off her white
woman's clothes, attired herself in the deerskin kirtle and
leggings, wrapped herself in a blanket, and prepared to go.  On the
point of departure almost she remained.  Her people, said she,
would come into the Fort some day, and she could see them then.  So
it was his part to beg her to go and tell her he knew how she felt.
As he spoke she looked long in his eyes, loving and troubled.

After she had gone, Tom Renwick must needs chaff him about his
woman.

"Well, your woman has gone back to the blanket!" he said.

Angus felt he had either to take that remark as friendly jest, or
to fell him.  He wished that Tom's smile had been pleasanter as he
spoke, to make the acceptance of his speech as a joke more easy.

"That's it," he answered, "that's it," and lightly laughed as one
does when humouring another with whom for this or that reason he
has to associate and would bide with amicably, though at heart he
would fain see far.

Minota came back within a month, after many sweat-baths, smelling
of sweet-grass which she carried in a little sack hanging from a
thin raw-hide string round her neck.

In the moon when the strawberries ripen there was a suggestion by
Buchanan that they might soon have finished all their work there
and have to go to Fort Edmonton; and then arrived at Rocky Mountain
House--Sam Douglas.  He had been far beyond Edmonton into the
mountains by the Howse Pass and Tête Jaune Cache Pass.  He had made
thorough survey of the foothill country between the ranges and
Edmonton, wintering (for his first year) with Macaulay at Jasper
House and (for his second) with Colin Fraser at St. Ann's.  He was
well content.  There was coal "almost anywhere," said he.  He was
going back to "the Old Country" to "interest capital," and had come
to Rocky Mountain House because he had been told there might be
those there who could convoy him to Fort Brenton on the Missouri
River.

No!  Impossible!  Attempts had been made to open a transport route
that way--and failed.  The Blackfeet to the south contested the
passage of all.  Even in mid-summer when they would be out on the
plains none could risk that traverse.  Angus could see, at that,
that Douglas was perturbed.  He evidently had no desire to cross
the thousand miles to Fort Garry alone.  The Crees were friendly,
but there was always the risk of coming on some Blackfoot raiding
party in their country.  He smoothed a hand over his head,
meditating.  Angus laughed, surmising Douglas's cogitations.

"Yes," said he, "you have a fine, fair scalp-lock trophy there to
deck the lodge of a Blackfoot on the South Saskatchewan!"

"That's just the trouble," said Sam, "that and the loneliness.  I
am not a man that can live alone.  I've been alone enough of late,
since last we parted.  I was alone in the mountains till I heard
voices there.  Oh, man, man, I have heard the water-kelpies--and no
use to assure me it was but a boulder rumbling down in the spate,
or the freshets, as some of them say here, or the rise and fall of
a wind that made the creeks cry loud and then hush.  No, I canna
thole the loneliness."

"When the voices of the dead are heard," explained Minota, "those
who have been to the Catholic Mission make this sign," and she
showed him.  "The Methodist ones just pray without a sign.  We pray
and make the sign of 'I pity you' to them, like this--or like this,
'I bless you.'"

The grace of her motions held Douglas's eye with admiration, and
then--

"Aye," said he.  "Well, I think I would make all the signs."

She agreed to that suggestion.

"The more signs the better," said she.

"Would you," began Sam, turning again to Angus, "think of
accompanying me across the plains?  In fact, I was wondering if you
would come all the way with me, seeing the boat-building is nearly
finished.  Since seeing the coal fires here I have been thinking
that evidence of a person living here would be of great help.  They
might look upon me as a mere promoter, ye ken, but if I had one of
the men of the land wi' me--"

There came to Angus what, in Minota's absence with her people that
spring, had often come to him.  He saw, he heard, he smelt the old
land.  Often, while she had been away, he had looked at the Rockies
to west and seen a peak there like Ben Chattan that stands over the
head of Loch Brendan.  The forests along the slopes he had, by half
shutting his eyes, turned into heather and moors.  At Douglas's
suggestion he saw, in memory, the seaweed fringe of Scotland
undulating to the tides that pound in from the Atlantic, in his
reverie saw the silver reflection of the weaving gulls in the dark
waters of the loch.  The wood smoke and coal smoke odours of the
Mountain House were changed to the smell of smouldering peat.

"I would pay all expenses," said Douglas.  "We could even arrange
something in the manner of a stipend.  You have conned your book"--
(it was his father's phrase too,)--"and you could be of great
service secretarially, too, I have nae doot."  He always broadened
his speech when he was engaged upon a special pleading.

Angus turned to his woman.

"Minota," said he.  "It is as you felt in the spring when you had
to go and see your people."

"I know it," she replied.

"If I went, what would you do till I came back?" he asked her.

She did not answer at once and Sam, with a manner as of stealth,
clearing his throat, stepped to the door, looked out, the girl's
dark eyes gazing after him--reproachfully, it seemed.

"I could arrange for you to have everything here you would want
while I was away," said Angus.

She shook her head.

"No.  It would be easier with my people.  Here--" she hesitated.

Douglas went strolling out, his hands clasped behind his back.

"Some of the white men while you were away," she began, then
hesitated again.  "I could wear a protection string," she said,
"though with my people I think my conduct would be enough; no one
would ever learn that I wore one.  With the white men--some of them--
especially on Big Sunday, or at the new year, well, they would not
then respect even a protection string.  No, I would go to my people
until," she looked at him with doubt in her eyes, he thought, "you
come back."

Angus wondered if among her people would be some, like Tom Renwick,
who would jest at her that her white man would never return.  That
look of doubt on her face hurt him.  He had an inspiration how to
wipe it away.  On the impulse he withdrew the collet-ring of his
forebears and, taking her hand in his, put it on her third finger.
He had compromised between a Blackrobe ceremony and the less
ritualistic Indian ceremony of marriage--which was none at all,
unless the delivery of a string of horses at the father's door be
called ceremony.  He had only had the union entered in the
Company's books.  If she had desired more, now did he abruptly
atone.

She was surely his by the light in her eyes then.  Had he never
before realized how deep was her devotion--her fealty--he knew it
at that moment.

"I will wait for you." she said, "till you come back from the
country of your people.  I will wait for you--with my people."



CHAPTER SIX

Kildonan Bell


So there he was, a mere satellite for the time being, it seemed, of
Sam Douglas, that young man of far-seeing plans, aware of little
but the misery of farewells and that it was too late to change his
mind.

The horses (it had pleased Sam to hear, while Angus was busy on the
packing, that they could be sold at Red River with profit) stepped
out briskly.  Soon, as the ocean encompasses a ship, land dropping
astern, the rolling country received them and that Backbone of the
World, the Rockies, was dwindling down the sky to west.  Their
route was to be southeast, toward the great plain across which,
picking up the loom of the Eagle Hills like a guiding pharos, they
would pass on by the elbow of Battle River to the old Fort Garry-
Fort Edmonton cart-trail.

Like Lot's wife was Angus that first day out, constantly slewing in
the saddle, hand on his horse's haunch, to watch the sinking of the
mountains.  These undulating belts, the colour of smoke, along the
foothills he had ridden through.  He knew them for what they were.
Always in this land there was an impression, whether on flat
prairie, rolling foothills, or among the mountains, of immensity.
It was not due merely to the scope of the immediate view, for in
the forests were often narrow gulches in which one could only see,
between tree trunks, trees on the further slope set precipitately
and densely.  Nor was it the result of studying maps of the
continent.  The prairie wind whispered of space and space again
beyond where the blue crystal cupola rested lightly on the horizon;
and in the ranges there was the consciousness, in every dell where
a creek shouted under debris of fallen trees and moss hung in
tassels on the branches of living ones, that there were a million
such dells, scented so of cedar or of balsam, on and on, terrain of
the deer, the bear, the beaver.

Angus recalled, when they came to the headwaters of Red Deer River,
queer legends that Minota had to tell.  Away down there near where
Red Deer River flows into the South Saskatchewan, she had said,
there were strange stone animals of enormous size, huge lizards of
rock that were sometimes partially exposed after a gale that sifted
the sand from them, or a cut-bank crumbled.  Odd the inventions of
les sauvages, he had thought--and would remember those stories of
hers on a day to come, hearing of the discoveries of geologists
there.  At the time, memory of her talks about those queer
creatures merely added, to the sense of spaciousness, that of
mystery, as they rode on, drawing near to the swerve of land called
High Butte.

They had been advised at the Mountain House to swing to the north
of the butte, coasting round its base, but Angus sent the pack-
horse up athwart its southern slope, looking back as he followed
them to see the Rockies bobbing upward again.  Near the summit in
the thin whistle of the wind he halted for some moments.

Sam Douglas, no doubt, realized the cause of his companion's
meditative silence there.

"It's no place for a woman," Douglas suddenly declared.  It was a
statement beyond question by his tone.

Angus was about to reply.  "You mean a white woman?" but that would
have been foolish.  Obviously that was what was meant by Douglas,
who then plunged into a rambling dissertation on the life of the
forts where he had been, and of the settlements in their
neighbourhood.  There was no law, or if there were law there was no
one to enforce it.  Up at Edmonton murderers had been pointed out
to him, murderers free and unconcerned said he.  There was a Cree
there, for example, who had slain two Sarcees that had been
visiting his family.  They had fallen in love with his daughter--
"Or his sister, was it?" rumbled Sam.  "Anyhow, the fellow's name
was Tahakooch, and when these Sarcees prepared to leave he went out
on the trail with them, dropped behind, shot them both, and came
back to brag of it, swagger of it before whites as well as before
Indians."

Then there was a raid he had heard of in which a band of one tribe
of Indians had killed one entire band of another, men, women, and
children, except one or two young women whom they had carried off.
And the prospectors who were washing for gold dust on the
Saskatchewan headwaters, and even over by the Peace River, when
they came in--"Well, some of them," said he, and paused.  "I like a
dram whiles.  I can tak' a dram.  But drinking!  Hech, sirs!  I've
seen drinking now.  No, no place for a woman--" he paused again,
"yet," he added, "but twenty years to come--you mark my words."

"Uh-hu," said Angus, and turned his back on the scene for which he
had deflected the horses upward there.  With lowered heads the
string went dropping down the eastern slope of High Butte.

They passed on into that sea of grass in which for days on end, in
a phrase of the plainsmen, they were "out of sight of land," no
lone butte even raising far off a purple knob in the immensity.
Angus had a mental image: a great hand was dropped in water and
made a wide gesture in air, flicking down the drops of Fort Ellice,
Fort Pelly, Touchwood Hills Post, Fort Carlton, Fort Pitt, Fort
Edmonton, with three sprayed residual drops at the end, of St.
Ann's, Jasper, and the Mountain House--in a sweep across a thousand
miles.

There were days when they saw--as far as eye could reach--humped
dots moving slowly by the hundred all in the one direction, and
they even rode through these herds of buffalo without creating a
stampede.  There were days when they travelled, with a flirt-flirt
and frou-frou of saddle leather, between western sky and eastern
sky and at night looked not only up but forth at the stars as do
sailors at sea.  Once or twice they came upon parties of the
buffalo-runners from Red River and Qu'Appelle, Scots and French
half-breeds.  Once or twice they came to camps of Cree Indians upon
their summer hunt, the tents all set up like white candle
extinguishers in the long wrinkle of some coulee, the horses
grazing round about--bays and buckskins (with or without the prized
black streak down the spine), blue horses (the kind called
smokies), pintos (skewbald and piebald), horses glossy black and
horses silver gray.  Or they met bands on trek, travelling villages
jogging along with trailing travois raising the dust.  These
encounters were the chief interest of the traverse for Angus.

For Sam Douglas the most interesting episode had to do not with any
met or overtaken on the way, but with a cloud.  No bigger than a
man's hand it seemed at first, sailing serene, how near or how far
hard to compute, ahead of them one blazing day.

"An odd cloud that," he remarked, "different from the others."

A long gaggle of geese served to show that it was far off for these
distant pin-points in none of their divagations disappeared into
that cloud.  What they were about it was difficult to conjecture.
They appeared to be but exercising their wings above that segment
of the world.  Now they showed as an immense arrow, moving
definitely to north, then suddenly they changed to a mere thread
wavering irresponsibly in the ether.  They were not travelling
anywhere, had either risen in alarm or but for the pleasure of
flight.  The thread undulated in another direction, was again arrow-
shaped; and always, beyond, was that cloud, the hue of which
differed from that of others adrift and, by reason of the
difference, seemed ominous.

It dipped to the prairie's edge and there it broke in a glittering
descent, a thousand flashing points of light.  They talked about it
in their camp that night; and in their camp next day they talked
again of it, having come to an area of the plain where the grass
was beaten into the earth.  Arrived at Fort Ellice, chatting of
their experiences with the factor, Mackay, and Chantelaine of Fort
Pitt (who was there for a night on his way back after a visit to
Fort Garry), Douglas spoke of that region of bruised and beaten
land.

"That was hail," said Mackay.

"There must have been a midsummer hail-cloud emptying itself
there," said Chantelaine.

Douglas turned to Angus.

"That was yon cloud!" said he solemnly.

He had many questions to ask regarding these hailstorms on blazing
August days.

"I have heard of the stones," said Chantelaine, "as big as marbles,
even as big as bantams' eggs."

"It would hurt to get a crack on the head with one!" observed
Douglas.  "Do they happen often?"

Not often, he was told, and both men were of opinion that only
certain districts were thus afflicted.

"Lots of people in the country for years have never seen one," said
Chantelaine.

"Well, that's good hearing," declared Sam.  "I suppose the
buffaloes' shaggy foreparts protect them if they don't know the
weather signs and clear away.  But their hindquarters are not so
well covered.  I should think ordinary cattle--"

"They don't last long," said Mackay.  "It is just a cloudburst of
hail and over."

"But look what one storm can do in the time!  Suppose hail came
down like that in a wheat-field--"

"There are no wheat-fields here," said Chantelaine.

The subject was in Sam's mind next day as they rode on by Snake
Creek toward Bird Tail Creek.

"Hail insurance," he suddenly boomed.

"What's that?" asked Angus.  "What are you talking about?"

"I was just thinking that some day all these plains will be what
they call 'smiling farms'!  Look at how the land has been manured
through ages by the buffalo.  Look at the grand, growing soil, man.
It's too good for cattle, I'm thinking, a grand country like this.
And when that day comes an insurance against damage to crops by
hail--the way they have marine insurance and life insurance--would
be a good thing.  No doubt lots of people would say they would take
the risk without paying insurance.  These men back there said the
midsummer storms are localized and don't happen often.  But a
fright or two, here and there, for one or another of the smiling
farmers, would make them listen to a man of a persuasive turn.
Aye, that's far ahead, however, but to be taken a brief of in the
notebook so to speak."

"You are jumping ahead again," remarked Angus.

"Yes, a jump or two--as always.  But those days are not so far off
as some might imagine.  I'm going to tell you something between
ourselves.  Last year there was a man--by the name of Hector--a
civil engineer--away back there in the mountains looking for a way
through for a railway.  And the winter before there was another
man, Palliser by name, who spent the whole winter (and he must have
his courage) with the Blackfeet Indians, so that they could become
friends and he could move about through their country at his ease--
and he was on the same job.  All last year he was at it, looking
for a route for a railway."

"We heard rumours to that effect at the Mountain House," Angus
began, "but--"

"But!  Oh, yes, there will be 'but' upon 'but' for awhile, I have
no doubt, but it's coming.  You and me, Angus, if we live, are
going to see changes in these parts."

Leaving Ellice, they went by the valley of the Assiniboine which
flows into the Red River at Fort Garry, and so anon came to that
small settlement to which, two years before, Daniel Munro, Kate and
Angus had driven in the spring, the mud dragged up by the wheels
and plip-plopping behind as the horses squelched on the way--passed
near the settlement (the hoofs of their horses leaving a pennant of
dust that day), coasted the slough where the unexpected gulls had
been too much for Mrs. Munro.  On the traverse they had, as was
easy enough, lost track of a day, neither of them sure as they rode
down the Assiniboine valley whether here was Saturday or Sunday.
When houses began to show ahead, rectangular scrabblings on the low
skyline, the sound of a kirk bell came to them on a light wind out
of the east.

"So it is the Sabbath Day," said Douglas.  "I wish I had taken a
bet on't!"

Together they rode to the Fort to discover when the International
was to go up the river.  Hearing that she was not expected down for
two days, Douglas remained there with the officer in charge (to
whom had been one of his letters of introduction), while Angus
started out upon the road for the Frasers'.

It was growing dark by Red River, scents and sounds stronger than
the visible, but along the road day lingered as though the dust
held it.  Lights were beginning to show in windows and stars in the
sky when he came to the old place.  He had the impression as of
having been dreaming, lying out under a tree somewhere, or in a
haystack--a strange dream of broad prairies, of boat-building by a
distant river, of the singing of an Indian girl in a cabin there--
as a voice came out to him, Ian in the porch tapping the beat with
a stick:


     "A vine from Egypt thou hast brought,
       Thy free love made it thine;
     And drov'st out nations, proud and haut,
       To plant this lovely vine.
     
     "Thou didst prepare for it a place,
       And root it deep and fast,
     Then it began to grow apace,
       And filled the land at last.
     
     "With her green shade that cover'd all,
       The hills were--"


The singing and the tapping ceased as Mr. Fraser rose to meet the
tall shadowy form that advanced.  A light from within shone on
Angus's face.

"Well, well, it's Angus Munro!  Come and see who's here!"

There they all were again, Mrs. Fraser unchanged in the pleasure of
the meeting gathering him to her and kissing him as though he were
a son.

"How you young folks do grow!" exclaimed Angus, but twenty himself.
"Fiona, Fiona!  If you go on like this they'll have to train you to
a bean-pole!  Let me see, how old are you now?"

"Nine."

"Not too old for me to kiss?"

She leapt to him in her lithe, quick way, kissed him, then linked
her hands over one of his shoulders while Flora embraced him and
hung, and swung, to the other side.

They passed indoors to the remembered twinkle of the homemade
candles shining on the plates in their racks.  At that Hector came
in.

"Here's Hector," said Mr. Fraser.  "He's the foreman now!  That's
what his mother calls him, whatever."

"Oh, yes, they are shooting up.  Let me see, it is just two years
since you've been gone."

"Just two years," replied Angus as they sat down--and marvelled at
how much had been in his life in that time, back here at this
little settlement that looked out on the curve of western sky and
the plains as the shore-side villages look out to sea.  He had been
to the end of it and was back again.

His eyes rested on Fiona, blindly it seemed, as the thought came to
him how far away was Rocky Mountain House.  Where, he wondered, was
Minota then, as the dusk which had deepened to night here at Red
River ran beyond Assiniboia, Saskatchewan--and on.

"You must have a lot to tell us of where you've been and what
brings you back," said Mrs. Fraser.

One thing, he considered, he could not tell.  There were unions of
white with red folk round them there to be sure.  Even the tallow
of the candles lighting this scene came to them from the half-breed
buffalo hunters.  And yet--he imagined himself talking about
Minota: a shadow would come in Mrs. Fraser's eyes and she would
turn to her husband while he, to hide his stare of regret or
unbelief, would look at the floor.  There would be a silence broken
only by Ian's unconscious whistling, or hissing between his teeth,
of some ballad or psalm tune, in a way he had when pondering
something sad, calamitous, beyond mending.

Next day Angus took an opportunity to slip away alone to the
kirkyard of Kildonan to see the stone that (as he had arranged
before going west) had been set up for his father and mother--a
melancholy occasion.  Standing there he felt again a deep
loneliness--and thought of Minota.  Voices had a way of haunting
him, and hers was with him then, singing one of her short
repetitive chants, about the grass sprouting, the geese and the
ducks flying over--all day and even at night.  There rose in him--
there rose in him--a wish that he had for wife one of his own race.
Little more than a month ago he had left her, loving her, yet here
came this thought surging up and angering him with its shabby
disloyalty.

"It seems he has something on his mind," Mrs. Fraser said to her
husband that night.

"He went out this afternoon to the kirk where his father and mother
lie," answered Ian.

"Oh, that's it, is it?" said she.



CHAPTER SEVEN

In the Haar


Had anyone told Angus Munro during that last winter at Rocky
Mountain House that in the next year he would be hearing the carts
rattle in the streets of Edinburgh, and seeing the room of a
Lothian Street lodging hazed with a penetrating night mist, he
would have known that the runes were being read awry!

First he had been in Glasgow, where Sam Douglas had interviewed
many wealthy bodies, bailies and merchants, toward financing his
confident coal-mining project, and at most of these meetings Angus
was present.

"We have been bitten already by that country," said one shrewd
Glaswegian, shaking his head, and began to talk of a transport
company that was to take emigrants into the Cariboo gold-fields--a
hollow fraud, he called it.  "I came near to having the ignominy of
being upon the board of that company," he went on, "but did not
like the look of it.  It had its map of the western continent, with
a line showing the route from Ottawa to Minnesota and the Selkirk
Settlements--Red River--and on across these prairies o' yours to
the Rocky Mountains, and through them to some river flowing west."

He opened a drawer and searched in it.

"I thought I had their map," he said, "but I must have destroyed it
in disgust.  Their stage-coaches, they proclaimed, ran from the Red
River to the mountains, and beyond that they had boats.  What was
the end of it?  Suits against the company by folks who had found
there was not a conveyance for them beyond Selkirk.  I've just
heard an extraordinary story about one party that they bamboozled
and that didn't come back to take them to law."  (Sam seemed to be
all attention).  "At their own expense they went on across the
plains, through the mountains, and there had their own boat--made
it, mark you--and they had to do what's called portaging: you'll
both ken what that is, acquaint with that speculative country.  At
one place between close banks they decided that two might venture
down with the boat lightened, instead of dragging it over land, and
the others portage.  Well, these got to the end of their carry and
there was the boat, smashed to bits.  One of the two men that had
dared to run down was clinging to a rock, and him they rescued.
The other was lost.  When they came to look through his things for
his relatives' address they found that he had his log-book entered
up in full, aye to the very end.  The last entry was, 'Arrived at
the cañon--and was drowned.'"

The bailie's contempt for the humbugging company was forgotten as
he talked by reason of his interest in that strange story.

Sam Douglas was but half listening, despite his rapt air.  Stage-
coaches!  Why not?  Why not stage-coaches across the great plains?
The Sam Douglas Transport Company; or The Great Northwest Express
Company: he tried over to himself various names as he sat there and
the bailie talked himself down a side-turning to the end.

"Ah, weel," said Douglas, "let us get back to the coal-developing
project.  There is nothing fraudulent in that."

"I'm not saying there is," the other retorted, "but there is plenty
of time before we invest in it."

"I'm no' so sure," said Sam.  "I think you'll be coming to me
sooner than you have the faintest thought, and wheedling me to get
you in on't.  However, however, I'm no' here to plead.  I'm here to
give you a chance to be in on a good thing.  We'll no' tak' up your
time, seeing how you feel."

There were many incidents of that sort, weeks slipping by, and no
one jumping at the chance that Sam brought them.  At the end of
three months Angus considered how many of Douglas's letters to
likely investors he had copied, and examination of the file he kept
was depressing.  Here was many a cast and never a bite.

They had been back close on half a year when Sam went on a visit to
some relatives (like Angus, he had no near kin), and Angus thought
to take passage on The Clansman while he was gone and revisit Loch
Brendan, but, instead, stayed in their lodgings writing to the
Frasers, to all his friends at Mountain House, and to Minota--her
letter addressed care of the factor, who would read it to her.

Sam came back from his rest with renewed eagerness and his notebook
full of names of "likely folk" in the capital.  But after another
few months in Edinburgh, where Douglas had no better luck, Angus
began to feel as though imposing upon his good friend's hopes.
Yet, not himself unhopeful, remembering the coal fires at the
Mountain House, his faith revived on hearing that several of those
whom Sam sought to interest in his plans had also heard that a
railway route was being sought for out there.  "Oh, yes, we admit
that!" they would say.

There is no place like Edinburgh for book-shops, and when left to
himself Angus spent much time in them, or turning over the volumes
in the "dips" at their doors, needing no recollection of his
father's advice to con his book.  He had learnt the love of
reading.  A whole year fled thus, with an astounding celerity,
Douglas and he back in Glasgow again with two offers of splendid
chances for those seeking sound investment.  One of these was for
immediate not a postulated early reaping: The Great Northwest
Express Company--to be going on with.

"These bodies have nae ambition beyond keeping their money in the
bank," said Sam at last.  "It's a wonder they trust it there and
don't keep it in an auld sock under the bed!  We'll try the
Sassenach.  I have some introductions."

So to London they went together, and there the result of all the
appointments and conferences seemed depressing to Angus but to Sam
were "eminently satisfactory".

"We have them interested," he said "We have them interested.  They
have not bitten at once--but they will bite, and with a snap, just
when something happens to convince them.  Oh, man, if these railway
engineers could only submit reports of a route we'd have them.
They are taking an unco while out there.  I believe they are
fishing when they should be surveying!"

The words were jocular but something in the tone made Angus think
that Sam was dissatisfied and so thinking he felt again that he was
living on another's dream.  He began not to like his position.

Here they were well into the second year of this hopeless
hopefulness.  They returned to Edinburgh and Sam, sprucing himself
even more than usual, went off for the day on private business.

All that week Angus could not get from his mind a wish that he
could hear from Minota, or from Captain Buchanan.  Feeling the lack
of news from her it occurred to him that he had been home a year
and a half and had not written to Jessie Grant.  After his mother
died he had written to her and had received a letter of condolence
couched in very friendly--old friendly--terms.  After his father's
death he had written again, thinking guiltily that it was only the
sad events that drove him to letter-writing.  Her reply to that did
not come for a long while, for it had to be sent on to the Mountain
House from Red River.  In it she told him of her mother's death,
writing from a new address.  Her uncle--Cameron, the blacksmith--
had moved from Glasgow to take over a better business at Lasswade,
near Edinburgh.  That had arrived after his union with Minota, and
answering it, sending his condolences, he had found himself (he had
to admit it) writing as one penning a duty.  He felt far from
Jessie and that not only in space.  "Your old friend" he had
inscribed himself.  He should go and see her, seek out the house at
Lasswade.

He wished Sam would come back.  He felt downcast.  He had a feeling
that something grievous was about to befall.  Nonsense!  It was the
haar (that fog off the North Sea) creeping up over the city,
creeping even into rooms, that depressed him.  And then Sam
returned.

"There's a letter for you," said he, heeling off a boot by the side
of their lodging fire.  "I was at the bank today."

On leaving Rocky Mountain House it had been arranged that letters
to Angus should be forwarded in care of Sam's bankers, and in his
letters to his friends he had asked that the old direction should
be used--never knowing where they might be.

He opened the envelope, and--"You will be heartbroken to hear, as I
am grieved to communicate to you--"

These were the first words his gaze alighted on.  His eyes puckered
to the sheet as he read, his face ashen gray, for that letter told
him that his Minota had, as she had intended, gone back to her
people the day he left, and that everyone of the band was dead of
the measles.


"It is, as you may know, a new malady to the race and they have no
resistance to it in their blood."


Sam, putting on his slippers, remained humped forward, staring at
his friend.  Something was wrong.  Angus sat back, then rose and
walked across the room as if for help, wheeled, marched back again,
stood stock still and re-read the letter.

"There is ill news," said Sam, more than perturbed.

Angus opened his mouth to speak and could not.  He was stricken
dumb temporarily because on each attempt to speak tears instead of
words were about to come.  He would not weep and could not speak.
He sat down again, just nodding his head to Sam.



CHAPTER EIGHT

Ettrick Brothers


Angus was twenty-two and had had the feeling, for long, of a sort
that many men do not experience till gray hairs come--a feeling of
having lived his life.  At times, in fact, it was as though he had
known more than one life: an early one by the shores of Loch
Brendan, then, to the wailing notes, the slow surge of a coronach,
an end of that; another on the Red River and an end to it with a
voice halting him on a blurred road, intermittently intoning,
"Relief": another in a west that had, remembered in Lothian Street,
the quality of dream lived between the freedom, the spaciousness of
an ocean of grass and the grandeur of the ranges, a life he had
ridden away from of his own accord, though doubtfully and with many
a backward look.

Again, recovered from the shock of the news of Minota's death
(though haunted by the thought that nowhere yonder by the
Saskatchewan she moved any longer), he began to think of his
position with Sam Douglas and to feel himself as--well, in an
excessive fashion he called himself "sponger", though had he called
himself so to Sam there would have been ructions.  Neither to the
Great Northwest Coal Company, nor to the Great Northwest Express
Company did any investors attach immediate importance.  There were
no more appointments with "nibblers".  There were, eventually, no
more letters to copy.  It seemed the end had come; and one day when
Sam went off again on private business, Angus trudged into the
country to think upon his position, for easier could he deliberate
under the sky than under a ceiling.

At Morningside the sight, suddenly, of the range of the Pentlands
recalled to his mind the westward view from the Mountain House,
immense though the difference.  He was sick for the upper waters of
Saskatchewan, the upper ripplings of Red Deer River.  He tramped
on, meditating, and when the pee-wees were calling by Fairmilehead
he came to a decision to begin--here, in E