sheet of
wonderful pale green, against which the tall elevators stood out black
and sharp. The head-lamp of a freight locomotive flooded track and
station with a dazzling electric glare, the rails that ran straight and
level across the waste gleaming far back in the silvery radiance. This
helped Prescott to overcome his repugnance to his task, as he remembered
another summer night when he had attempted to hurry his team across the
track before a ballast train came up. Startled by the blaze of the
head-lamp and the scream of the whistle, one of the horses plunged and
kicked; a wheel of the wagon, sinking in the loose ballast, skidded
against a tie; and Prescott stood between the rails, struggling to
extricate the beasts, while the great locomotive rushed down on them.
There was a vein of stubborn tenacity in him and it looked as if he and
the horses would perish together when Jernyngham came running to the
rescue. How they escaped neither of them could afterward remember, but a
moment later they stood beside the track while the train went banging by,
covering them with dust and fragments of gravel. Prescott admitted that
he owed Jernyngham something for that.

Nevertheless there was no doubt that the part he had undertaken to play
would be difficult. He could see its humorous side, but he had not been a
prodigal; indeed he was by temperament and habit steady-going and
industrious. The son of a small business man in Montreal, he had after an
excellent education abandoned city life and gone west, where he had
prospered by frugality and hard work. He was by no means rich, but he was
content and inclined to be optimistic about the future.

When he reached the station, he found that the usual crowd of loungers
had gathered to watch the train come in. Lighting his pipe, he walked up
and down the low platform, wondering uneasily how he would get through
the next few days. Jernyngham, he felt, had placed him in a singularly
embarrassing position.

CHAPTER II

MURIEL SEES THE WEST

The sunlight was fading off the prairie when a party of three sat in a
first-class car as the local train went jolting westward. Henry Colston
leaned back in his seat with a Winnipeg paper on his knee; and his
appearance stamped him as a well-bred Englishman traveling for pleasure.
He was thirty-four; his dress, though dusty, was fastidiously neat; his
expression was pleasant, but there was an air of formality about him. One
would not ha