Bert had never really forgotten the Leatherstocking tales of Fenimore Cooper; nor yet Mayne Reid's Scalp Hunters; nor all the other Wild West stories among which he had contrived ingeniously to sandwich his legal studies. Some irresistible force within himself urged him towards the great open spaces. The romance of the endless prairies beckoned to him seductively with its adventurous imaginings. And, besides, he couldn't help himself. He was in the grip of heredity. Several of his progenitors had been wanderers. One of them had been hanged--so his father frequently boasted--by the Spaniards as a heretic, at Santa Cruz, because he refused to kiss a cross made from blood-stained Inca gold. When his father heard of the move, he argued against it--a trifle weakly though. He himself had many times nursed secret longings for a career filled with yardarms, pieces of eight, tomahawks and shark-infested lagoons. Bert was obdurate. With horrible recklessness, he sacrificed his chances of the Woolsack, greatly to his father's rather insipidly-expressed disappointment. However, when the time for the sailing of Barr's pioneering crusaders drew near, the old gentleman paid his passage, financed him to the tune of five hundred pounds, and also provided him with an exceedingly generous kit. Samuel Adolphus Potts' life history had been much less complicated. That little man's wits had been tempered in the environment of a fairly prosperous cab driver's home; rough-ground in a huge jam factory, among the sophisticated emery wheels of crowds of both sexes; finally burnished and sharpened as an extra barman in a not-very-high-class but well-patronized London public house. Sam's capital consisted of twenty-odd pounds, clear of travelling expenses--plus an invincible common-sense. CHAPTER III _Saskatoon--Acquiring Transport_ In the evening of April 17, 1903, at precisely twenty minutes before seven o'clock, the third of the C.P.R. special passenger trains carrying Barr Colonists steamed gingerly across the old wooden bridge spanning the South Saskatchewan River and clattered into Saskatoon. The weather was gorgeous. The middle of April had only just slid by, yet the sun shone dazzlingly out of an azure sky. Far-distant objects etched themselves in the magic air with marvellous visibility. Not one single thing in Nature marred the colonists' arrival. From a tumbled heap of unguarded bell tents, each of which was tucked, pegs and all, into a bag, the settlers helped themselves freely. Long before several hundred of these conical canvas shelters were coaxed--with many imprecations, and much laughter--to stand erect, the sun had disappeared below the edge of the world, leaving behind it a glorious topaz-flaked sky, which slowly turned to purple before melting into mysterious night.