"Yes, sir, boy--she's a-goin' to blow up some harricane before dark. This reminds me of yon day, four years ago--yous'll all remember the time--when Elleck Hamilton an' me started out for home on the bob-sleighs, pickled up to the eyebrows. Elleck, he was worse than me when we started; but Elleck's as strong as a horse, and when she started to blow, he slung off the effects of the licker like tossin' off a hat. But the stuff had got a kind of a holt on me; I got cold and started for to go to sleep. However, Elleck he seen me home safe. My face was froze a little, that's all--but Elleck, he'd had to get out of his bob-sleigh so many times to look after my team, that he'd froze both legs, one as fur as the ankle and the other clare up to the knee. Had to have her taken off. Never was any good after that, Elleck. He was worth about ten thousand dollars when that happened; and to-day he's buyin' grain for an elevator company, at seventy-five dollars a month. But I've done pretty well myself, an' old Elleck knows this--that whenever his pride'll let him quit work, he can come over to my place, and set down by the stove, and put his bad leg up on a chair an' keep her there, for life, even if he lives to be a hundred and fifty." Exclamation and anecdote rattled on; fog of tobacco-smoke and stench of snow melting on fur filled the air; free grammar and the broad "a" had unchecked currency in this organ-box of a western railway-hamlet hotel: but Sir William Ware, standing by the iron-rodded window with philosophic hands in his coat-pockets, had only one distinguishable impression--that he was being educated, that this west was giving him something denied by the university. This was Western Canada--blunt, gruff, western Canada. Not too forward in making one's acquaintance; not too stiff and "standoffish". Not caring sixpence--so long as you yourself were "all right"--who your father was, nor how much money you were worth. Western Canada, where nobody who works--or, if he can't or won't work, can tell a good yarn--is allowed to starve. Western Canada, which never "picks" a fight, but--well, just try to "run on" her! A raucous "hey!" brought Sir William about. Glancing out through the window, in the direction of the hall, he saw John Nixon signalling to him from the seat of a bob-sleigh. Hurrying on scarf and coat, Ware hastened out, creaked across the sidewalk and smilingly awaited instructions as to boarding this western vehicle of the long trail. It had a high, green-painted double box. The front and rear seats were two boards laid across the box and draped with gunny-sacks. The front seat was occupied by John Nixon and Jim Burns, the hired man who had brought the equipage in to meet the train. On the hind seat Lovina Nixon perched, nothing of her visible except one stoical pioneer-woman eye which looked out unwinkingly at Ware through a crack between folds of gray shawl.