grinned broadly as he watched
Wisbech jolt across the clearing.

"I guess that man's not going to make the settlement on that horse. He
rides 'most like a bag of flour," he remarked, with evident enjoyment
of the stranger's poor horsemanship.

CHAPTER XIII

ON THE TRESTLE

It was with difficulty that Wisbech reached the railroad track upon
which Laura Waynefleet had told him Nasmyth was occupied. From the
winding waggon-road, he was forced to scramble down several hundred
feet through tangled undergrowth, and over great fallen logs. Then he
had to walk along the ties, which were spaced most inconveniently
apart, neither far enough for a long stride nor close enough for a
short one. It is, in fact, unless one is accustomed to it, a
particularly wearying thing to walk any distance along a Western
railroad track; since local ticket rates are usually high on the
Pacific slope, and roads of any other kind are not always available,
the smaller ranchers and other impecunious travellers frequently tramp
miles upon the ties.

Wisbech, however, had not very far to go, and, though it entailed an
occasional stumble, he endeavoured to look about him. He was
progressing along the side of the wonderful Fraser gorge, which is the
great channel clearly provided by Nature for the commerce of the
mountain province, and he was impressed by the spectacle upon which he
gazed. In front of him rose great rocky ramparts, with here and there
a snow-tipped peak cutting coldly white against the glaring blue.
Beneath these the climbing pines rolled down in battalions to the
brink of a vast hollow, in the black depths of which the river roared
far below. Wisps of gauzy mist clung to the hillside, and out of them
the track came winding down, a sinuous gleaming riband that links the
nations with a band of steel. There were, as he knew, fleet steamers
ready at either end of it, in Vancouver Inlet, and at Montreal, two
thousand four hundred odd miles away, for this was the all-British
route round half the world from London to Yokohama and Hong-Kong.

That fact had its effect on Wisbech as he plodded painfully along the
ties. He had Democratic notions, but he was an Imperialist, too, which
was, perhaps, after all, not surprising, for he knew something of
England's great dependencies. There are a good many men with similar
views in the Dominion, and they have certainly lived up to them. Men
undoubtedly work for money in Western Canada, bu