rie Land,
Where everyone joins heart and hand,"

they sang, and the sociability of the party teemed to swell with the
volume of the song. A bond of human interest, human
interdependence--perhaps, even, some phase of human suffering, was
already linking them together with links of steel that should
withstand every shock of the coming years, and bind together the
foundations of a mighty land.

In the cold grey of a March morning, when the sun had not yet
dispelled the mists of night, and the fringing woods back from the
Red River loomed white and spectral through the frost, they
re-entered the Empire, and in a few minutes were detraining at
Emerson, the boundary town and gateway to the prairies which for a
thousand miles stretched into the mysteries of the unknown.

CHAPTER II

INTO THE WILDERNESS

Emerson was the gateway of the great invasion. Situated just on the
Canadian side of the International Boundary, the "farthest west" of
rail communication, on the threshold of the prairie country, it
seemed the strategical point for the great city which must arise with
the settlement and development of the fertile kingdom of territory
lying between the Lake of the Woods and the Rocky Mountains, and
between the Forty-ninth Parallel and the unknown northern limit of
agriculture. Sixty miles northward, at the junction of the Red and
Assiniboine Rivers, Winnipeg was throwing street-tendrils out from
her main traffic trunk which marked the route the Indian carts had
followed for years as they bore their buffalo hides and pemmican to
the Hudson's Bay Company's post at Fort Garry. Winnipeg was to be on
the main line of the Canadian Pacific Railway--at least, so the
promoters of its town-lot activity affirmed; but Selkirk, still
farther north, was already flourishing in the assurance that the
railway would cross the river at that point. But the Canadian Pacific
Railway as yet existed upon paper; its advance guard were pouring
nitro-glycerine into the rocks of the wild Lake Superior fastnesses,
and a little band of resolute men were risking financial disaster an
indomitable effort to drive through a project which had dismayed even
the Government of Canada. Some there were who said the Canadian
Pacific would never be built, many there were who said that if built
it always be a charge upon the country--that in the very nature of
things it could never become self-supporting.

So while Winnipeg and Selkirk indulged thei