ngham had read enough to learn that pistol and bandolier had
long gone out of fashion in Western Canada, where, indeed, they had
rarely formed a necessary portion of the plainsman's attire, but she
had expected a little vivid colour and dash of romance. The
stock-riders she saw at the station were, however, for the most part
dress in faded jean, and many of them appeared to speak excellent
English, while the wheat-growers rode soberly in dusty and dilapidated
wagons. Still the romance was there, though in place of the
swashbuckling cavalier she found only quiet, slowly-spoken men, with
patience most plainly stamped upon their sun-darkened faces. Their
hands were hard with the grip of the bridle and plough-stilt in place
of the rifle, and the struggle they waged was a slow and grim one
against frost and drought and adverse seasons.

There was, however, a transformation when she awoke one morning and
found the Rockies had been left behind, and they were roaring down
through the passes of British Columbia. This was a new, and apparently
unfinished, world, a land of tremendous mountains, leagues of forests,
such as her imagination had never pictured, and untrodden heights of
never-melting snow. Glacier, blue lake, river droning through shadowy
canons, rushed by, and the glamour of it crept into the heart of the
girl, until as they swept down into the valley with a river two
thousand feet below, she felt she was at last in touch with something
strange and new.

Presently the hoot of the whistle came ringing up the pass, wheels
screamed discordantly, and the pines below flitted towards them a
trifle more slowly. Then, as they swung rocking round the face of a
crag and a cluster of wooden buildings rose to view, Deringham came out
upon the platform. He was a tall, slightly-built man, with a pallid
face and keen but slightly shifty eyes, and bore the unmistakable stamp
of the Englishman.

"That must be our alighting-place, and I am not sure how we are to get
on," he said. "It is, I understand, a long way to Somasco, and when we
get there I really do not know whether we shall find any accommodation
suitable for you. It might have been better if you had gone on to our
friends, the Fords, at Vancouver."

Alice Deringham laughed a little. "I don't think you need worry. Mr.
Alton will, no doubt, take us in," she said. "A little primitive
barbarity would not be unpleasant as a novelty."

A trace of something very li