Joe Martin and several high provincial officers were on the ground. He caused the provincial chief of police to inform Whyte that the appointments of his special police had been canceled. A handy magistrate swore them in again. More men were brought up by the provincial powers, and it seemed as if they would attempt to make the crossing afresh. Whyte attached a hose to his locomotive, which stood close to the ditched engine, and said he would turn live steam on any gang which tried to work against him. It was impossible for the provincialists to get up steam against such steam; and so closed a perfectly Martinesque day. The double dare continued for five days of venomous but harmless hostility. Then Martin swore in a hundred and twenty constables and called out the military, under Colonel Villiers, who pitched their tents on the battlefield. A threat was made to lay the diamond further down the line, and Whyte built a fence, and kept his watchful forces waiting behind it. A battalion of farmers appeared carrying sundry woodware. They talked of lynching “Smooth William”, but retired, discerning that valour may be compounded with discretion. Whyte vowed that he would stay there as long as the crossing was unauthorized even if he had to tie up the C.P.R. from East to West to preserve its rights. For a fortnight the armies faced each other, and then the C.P.R. tired of waiting on Ottawa, sought an injunction restraining the provincial road from trespass. The courts refused the injunction, Superintendent Whyte called off his engines, his cars and his men, and Fort Whyte went into the history of bloodless campaigns. In the Van Horne biography the episode is called “as merry a game of bluff as he had ever known.” That there wasn’t a serious casualty list was due to the inherent good temper of men on both sides--perhaps most of all to the imperturbability of Mr. Whyte, who was on the whole, the West’s most outstanding citizen for more than a quarter of a century, and who wasn’t called “Smooth William” for nothing. One could not count the ambitious railway schemes that were conceived or cradled in Winnipeg during the eighties and nineties; some born to blush unseen, some to waste their prospects on the prairie air, and some to suffer a dolorous existence till they were gathered to the boundless bosom of the C.P.R. Often enough, the poorer the outlook of an enterprise, the more grandiose was its name. What is now a part of the Souris branch of the C.P.R., began as the Oregon and Transcontinental, and ended at the then forlorn station of Starbuck. The Great Northwest Central had a charter from Brandon to Battleford. It crawled for fifty miles northwestward and then stalled till the inevitable happened.