Next morning the examination of the riversides was continued, the team again following the Saskatchewan’s southern skirt. About nine miles above Battleford, in the afternoon, MacLeod reached the mouth of a wide and wooded ravine, which seemed to offer prospect of the only good crossing he had seen in a tramp of nearly fifty miles. While he was exploring the ground, he saw Stovel above him, making all sorts of frantic appeals for company. Thinking that some calamity had befallen, MacLeod abandoned his job, to render aid to his distressed and distressing colleague. Nothing was the matter, except that the solicitous Stovel was afraid MacLeod would stay too long below; and he himself was determined to run no risk of recent history repeating itself with a dog’s bark. The two drove into Battleford, and stayed at the hotel then kept by Albert Champagne, who became Battleford’s first mayor three years later, sat a term in the Assembly of the North West Territories, and was M.P. for Battleford from 1908 to 1917. Next day the team of horses rested; but the team of men sought no repose. They walked up the river to the ravine where the search had been stopped overnight. The site of the great crossing was there and then determined. Stovel used to say he never walked so fast, in snow or out of it, all his life, as he did on that eighteen mile trip before dinner. Twenty years ago MacLeod was in splendid condition, and a terror to go when his walking mood was on. Stovel had a notion that MacLeod was giving him a silent admonition not to repeat the fears of the day before. Stovel was a good guesser. On the same trip the Elbow crossing and the one on the South Saskatchewan, at Clarkboro, just east of Warman, were located. On the best available information Armstrong’s surveying party was working on preliminary surveys for a bridge about thirty miles below the Elbow. But as soon as MacLeod had found the crossings that best met the demand for economical grading and bridging, and for good farming country alongside the location, he drove to Armstrong’s camp, and moved the party south, up the valley. It was the fifteenth of January when MacLeod and Stovel forsook their horses for the train, after a full month of hardship which they didn’t regard as hardship. Indeed, if MacLeod sees this account probably he will wonder why so much has been made of so ordinary an expedition. The transference of Armstrong’s party contains the genius of MacLeod’s genius. The information that took them thirty miles below the Elbow to survey a crossing was the best information available--until MacLeod himself looked over the ground. What his unassisted eye discerned, the blueprints, the finished bridge, the grades and the daily trains confirmed. It would be the same in Toronto.