The reverend gentleman was standing on somebody's big black cabin-trunk. He looked worried. His clerical spruceness was fraying at the edges a bit. Pausing nervously to open a folded sheet of paper--a telegram from St. John appertaining to the trifling matter of five hundred tons of missing luggage--he took advantage of the break in his speech to moisten his lips with his tongue. They were dry, like ashes. Beating up against the pleasant breeze, fragments of a song being sung uproariously, struck his tired ears in variable gusts of sound, now faint, now loud. With perfectly diabolical clearness, the ribald voices wafted verse after verse across to the crowd. "Barr, Barr, wily old Barr, He'll do you as much as he can;" "Men!" shouted the dispirited leader in a desperate attempt to smother the song's ugly significance. "Be British----" With a crowd's usual cruelty, a few of the bravest cowards jeered and mocked. Meanwhile, relentlessly, like the toppling crest of a wave breaking on the beach, the verse went on-- "You bet he will collar, Your very last dollar, In the valley of the Sas-katch-e-wan." The crowd burst into loud laughter. Barr, with a mechanical sort of effort, tried bravely to compel his own strained features to smile, but he failed miserably. In a bell tent, about a hundred yards off, half a dozen throaty prodigies were seated comfortably on the ground with a nearly-emptied bottle of Saskatoon's choicest wassail nice and handy. In ironical tones, they ripped out the chorus of the song, totally unaware of the devastating effect it was having on Barr's meeting. "Farm, farm, do let us farm, We're sure that the most of us can; We'll plough and we'll sow, And we'll reap and we'll mow, In the valley of the Sas-katch-e-wan." "The Nautch Girl" was the particular musical comedy honoured with the supplying of the air in which this marvellously poetical masterpiece was rendered. The author of the "poem" had, between spasms of biliousness aboard the _Lake Manitoba_, composed eighteen stanzas of it, before crawling away to die. Like most early Barr Colony experiences, this particular incident at Saskatoon was pathetic, yet at the same time comic. With a dreary gesture of hopelessness, Barr stepped down from the trunk and hurried within his tent. Contemptuously, the crowd gradually dispersed. Half pityingly, Sam murmured--"Gawd!" He bore Barr no special malice. Indeed, if anything, he was very grateful to the reverend leader for being the means of his separating himself from his sordid environment in London. "I feel a bit sorry for the old boy," was Bert's only comment, as the pair headed towards the village. Stepping into Saskatoon's main street, a wide, unkempt, dirt-metalled thoroughfare, irregularly bordered on one side with unpainted wooden structures, and running alongside the railway station, Bert and Sam set about purchasing their goods.