with shaking fingers. The
youth, who was a bartender from a small saloon in the neighbourhood of
the station, looked at him with contempt.

"Wonder when you was sober last? Think you'd better clean yourself a
bit, or they'll not let you on the train."

"Who told you I wanted to go on the train?" said the old man sharply.
"I'm staying at Winnipeg."

"Oh! you are, are you?" said the other mockingly. "We shouldn't cry our
eyes out if you _was_ sayin' good-bye. Ta-ta!" And with the dollars in
his hand, head downwards, he went off like the wind.

The old man waited till the lad was out of sight, then went back into
the station and bought an emigrant ticket to Calgary for the night
train. He emerged again, and walked up the main street of Winnipeg,
which on this bright afternoon was crowded with people and traffic. He
passed the door of a solicitor's office, where a small sum of money, the
proceeds of a legacy, had been paid him the day before, and he finally
made his way into the free library of Winnipeg, and took down a file of
the _Winnipeg Chronicle_.

He turned some pages laboriously, yet not vaguely. His eyes were dim and
his hands palsied, but he knew what he was looking for. He found it at
last, and sat pondering it--the paragraph which, when he had hit upon it
by chance in the same place twenty-four hours earlier, had changed the
whole current of his thoughts.

"Donaldminster, Sask., May 6th.--We are delighted to hear from this
prosperous and go-ahead town that, with regard to the vacant seat the
Liberals of the city have secured as a candidate Mr. George Anderson,
who achieved such an important success last year for the C.P.R. by his
settlement on their behalf of the dangerous strike which had arisen in
the Rocky Mountains section of the line, and which threatened not only
to affect all the construction camps in the district but to spread to
the railway workers proper and to the whole Winnipeg section. Mr.
Anderson seems to have a remarkable hold on the railway men, and he is
besides a speaker of great force. He is said to have addressed
twenty-three meetings, and to have scarcely eaten or slept for a
fortnight. He was shrewd and fair in negotiation, as well as eloquent in
speech. The result was an amicable settlement, satisfactory to all
parties. And the farmers of the West owe Mr. Anderson a good deal. So
does the C.P.R. For if the strike had broken out last October, just as
the movement of the fall crops