Whereat the big chief exploded with laughter. But there’s no tunnel on the Bow, and the line wasn’t held up eighteen months. Those who knew Van Horne in his later years are familiar with his habit of keeping a cigar in his mouth, often unlit. He was, though, a great smoker; and when, during his last illness but one, the doctor reduced him to three cigars a day, he had some made over a foot long. Just before he finished his first whirlwind year at Winnipeg, he threw an unextinguished cigar stub into the waste basket, and the building--the Bank of Montreal, in the upper storey of which the C.P.R. had its headquarters--was burnt to the ground. Bank and railway moved to Knox Church, and Van Horne had his office in the pastor’s vestry; and Ogden, the auditor, presided in the Sunday school room. In view of Van Horne’s vocabularian range, it seemed an incongruous association; but it may have had something to do with a remark made thirty years afterwards by Van Horne to one of his astonished friends: “All my religion,” he said, “is summed up in the golden rule; and I practise it; and I think I am the only man in business who does. What are you laughing at?” Perhaps the best picture of the Van Horne who put zip into the C.P.R. was written in the Winnipeg Sun: “Van Horne is calm and harmless-looking. So is a she-mule; and so is a buzz-saw. You don’t know their true inwardness until you go up and feel them. To see Van Horne get out of the car and go softly up the platform you would think he was an evangelist on his way West to preach temperance to the Mounted Police. But you are soon undeceived. If you are within hearing distance you will have more fun than you have ever had in your life.” So much for the temper that was in the Canadian railway situation forty years ago. West of old Ontario there wasn’t much else but land, water and temper. When Van Horne went to Winnipeg between the Lake of the Woods and the Great Divide, and from the United States boundary to the Arctic ocean, red and white people combined were only sixty thousand. British Columbia, which had come into Confederation on promise of railway connection with the East, contained fifty thousand people, of whom half were Indians. Allowing for the low traffic value of the Indians, it is a liberal computation that from the American boundary to the Arctic Circle there weren’t forty people per mile to create the business between the Ontario frontier and the Pacific Ocean. Van Horne’s faith was force and his force was faith. Never was there a greater combination for a greater adventure. Literally, according to its faith, it has been to the C.P.R. CHAPTER IV. _Reviewing vanished practices, including ticket scalping and fast freight lines._