"Shove on all the clothes you can get on to you, Eng--Bill," counselled John Nixon, sucking his teeth shrilly as he donned a lupine-looking wombat coat and reached for his mittens, "and after that put on an extry sweater, as they say. She's a-going to blow." The place was the Toddburn hotel, where Sir William and John Nixon, left there by the warm and friendly train at 11 a.m., had now, an hour and a half later, come out of the dining-room with a good meal "under their belts". "You don't need to hurry, gettin' your duds on, Bill," John Nixon said, as he went out, "the Missis will be pokin' around the store down there for an hour yet, and Jim's buyin' himself a new suit, to have for when Daise gets here. I've told him she's married now, but it don't seem to sink in.... You better stay here and keep warm till we fetch the team round to the door." Sir William stayed--not to keep warm, but to look about him, like a boy at a circus. Somehow, the effect of the cold dry tingling air that resided in the streets of this prairie hamlet seemed to percolate in from outside, in spite of storm window and door, striking upon the nostrils bracingly and making one "feel good" in spite of the blue fog of tobacco-smoke and the odor of wet leather and fur. The effects of Ware's accident, now a week old, had pretty well passed, and the hereditary health of the Wares glowed in his face again and sparkled in his eyes. He stood with his back toward the window, his hands tucked into the side-pockets of his Norfolk coat, his attitude the Englishman's inimitable easy and negligent one which imparts to the stiffest suit the comfortable effect of flannels, and glanced down the short perspective of the Toddburn hotel sitting room and bar, which were in a kind of suite, with a swinging-door between. The roof of this place was very low, and the walls were very near one, and after the spacious places in which Ware had lived his life, it was a bit like standing in a piano-box. If the situation of this hotel had been a narrow byway in a city, it would have been a slum, a locality of death, a room of hollow coughings and faces dreary with debility and gloom. But here, on the wide prairie it was in effect a sanitarium, if one might judge by the figures that breezed about, the harsh but deep-lunged voices that came out of the midst of steam-clouds made when the outside door opened, the faces glowing and tanned by gale and snow-shine. One only needed to listen a moment to the hearty laughing and the sentences detached at random from the blend of cheery, companionable greeting and rallying, to know that the minds of these western men were as healthy as their bodies. "No, sir--I'd never go back on him. Bob an' me was neighbors a-homesteadin'. It ain't his fault if he had to give up farmin' and get a job in Jim McMillan's livery stable. His health give out--that's all."