ights, Harry would figure with the end of a pencil how much we
had already placed to our credit.

"We are doing well, Ralph," he said the last time it happened, with a
smile that lighted his sunny face. "There's enough now to pay off those
people in Brandon, and with luck we'll manage to settle with the worst of
the rest before the frost comes. It's almost a pity we didn't try the
railroad sooner, but"--and here he glanced at me with a twinkle in his
eye--"we came out to work our own land, and it's your intention to add
acre to acre until Fairmead's one of the biggest farms in the Territories,
isn't it?"

"Yes," I answered soberly. "God willing, if health and strength hold out,"
and in his own expressive way Harry shook hands with me. Harry's hand
harmonized with the rest of him, and hands as well as faces are
characteristic of their owners' temperament. It was small and shapely, one
might call it almost feminine, but its touch conveyed the subtle
impression of courage and nervous energy, while I wondered what the woman
who reared him would think if she saw those toughened and ingrained
fingers now. Neither were words needed, for Harry's actions had each their
meaning, and that grasp seemed to say that in this I was leader and
whatever happened he would loyally follow me. Then he added softly:

"Yes--with your reservation--we will do it."

Uninterrupted good fortune seldom lasts long, however, or at least it
seldom did with us, and presently the line ran into a big coulee which
wound through what we call hills on the prairie--that is to say, a ridge
of slightly higher levels swelling into billowy rises. In the Western
Dominion the rivers, instead of curving round the obstacles they
encounter, generally go through, though whether they find the gorges or
fret them out is beyond me. In the latter case, judging from what one sees
in British Columbia, they must have worked hard for countless centuries.
The hollow as usual was partly filled with birches and willows, which
hampered us, for they must be cut down and the roots grubbed up; and when
at last we had scooped a strip of road-bed out of the slanting side it
seemed as if disaster again meant to overtake us.

Autumn had melted into Indian summer, but it was still hot. With the
perspiration dripping from me one afternoon, I whirled and drove the keen
axe into a silver birch's side, seldom turning my eyes from the shower of
white chips, because looking up between the s