e
gods, but for a vision that he carried ever in his heart of a face
sad and sweet and eloquent with trustful love.

"No, by Jove!" he said to himself between his shut teeth,
"I can't funk it. I'd be a cad if I did."

And with these visions and these resolvings they, boy and man,
swung off from the Edmonton trail black and well worn, and
into the half-beaten track that led to Wakota, the centre of
the Galician colony.

CHAPTER XII

THE MAKING OF A MAN

Wakota, consisting of the mud-house of a Galician homesteader who
owned a forge and did blacksmithing for the colony in a primitive
way, they left behind half an hour before nightfall, with ten miles
of bad going still before them. The trail wound through bluffs and
around sleughs, dived into coulees and across black creeks, and only
the most skilful handling could have piloted the bronchos through.

It was long after dark when they reached the ravine of the Night Hawk
Creek, through which they must pass before arriving at the Lake. Down
the sides of this ravine they zigzagged, dodging trees and boulders
till they came to the last sharp pitch, at the foot of which ran the
Creek. During this whole descent Kalman sat clinging to the back and
side of the seat, expecting every moment to have the buckboard turn
turtle over him, but when they reached the edge of the final pitch,
were it not for sheer shame, he would have begged permission to
scramble down on hands and knees rather than trust himself to the
swaying, pitching vehicle. A moment French held his bronchos steady,
poised on the brink of this rocky steep, and then reaching back, he
seized the hind wheel and, holding it fast, used it as a drag, while
the bronchos slid down on their haunches over the mass of gravel and
rolling stones till they reached the bed of the Creek in safety. A
splash through the water, a scramble up the other bank, a long climb,
and they were out again on the prairie. A mile of good trail and they
were at home, welcomed by the baying of two huge Russian wolf hounds.

Through the dim light Kalman could discover the outlines of what
seemed a long heap of logs, but what he afterwards discovered to
be a series of low log structures which did for house, stable and
sheds of various kinds.

"Down! Bismark. Down! Blucher. Hello there, Mac! Where in the world
are you?"

After some time Mackenzie appeared with a lantern, a short,
grizzled, thick-set man, rubbing his eyes and yawning