insolently.

So the young farmer was compelled to sell his first wheat for what he
could get. He was prepared to pay three cents per bushel on the
spread, that being a reasonable charge; but although plenty of cars
were available at the time, the spread cost him ten cents, a direct
loss of seven cents per bushel. Besides this he was forced to see
between twenty-five and thirty bushels out of every thousand
appropriated for dockage, no matter how clean the wheat might be. That
was in 1902.

It was hard to forget that kind of treatment. And when, later on,
young Crerar accepted an offer of $75 per month to manage a Farmers'
Elevator at Russell he bore his own experience in mind and extended
every possible consideration to the farmers who came to him. The
elevator company, as a company, did not buy grain; but as
representative of Graves & Reilly, a Winnipeg firm, he bought odd lots
and for this service received an extra fifty dollars per month.

Financially, it was better than teaching school. He had made ten
dollars the first summer he taught school and to earn it he had walked
three miles and a half each morning after milking the cows at home,
arriving at the school soaking wet with dew from wading in the long
prairie grass. And even at that, the trustees had wanted a "cheaper"
teacher! A woman, they thought, might do it cheaper.

The young schoolmaster objected so earnestly, however, that the
argument was dropped. He needed this money to assist in a plan for
attending the Collegiate at Portage la Prairie. He taught the school
so well that after studying Latin at Manitoba College in 1899, the
trustees were glad to get him back the following year at a salary of
$35 per month.

But milking cows at home night and morning and teaching school in
between was not an exciting life at best for a young fellow ambitious
to go farming. So at last he acquired a quarter-section of Hudson Bay
Company land near Russell and took to "baching it" in a little frame
shack.

In the fall some lumber was required for buildings and it so happened
that along came an old chap with a proposition to put in a portable
sawmill on a timber limit up in the Riding Mountains nearby. The old
man meant business alright; he had the engine within ten miles of its
destination before he was overtaken and the whole machine seized for
debt. It looked as if the thousands of logs which the residents of the
district had taken out for the expec