"Neither am I," Jack agreed, "so far as they are concerned. But just how about us? We've got to get out."

"Why?"

Jack turned his full blue eyes on me with a sort of pity. "Do you think Marjorie is going to play second fiddle to a new mother? You don't know your sister, Frank."

In a moment I knew he was right. He had not asked me if I thought that Jack would play second fiddle to a new father, but that, too, may have been in his mind.

"Well, what are we to do about it?"

"Go west!" he said, emphatically. "Go west! I am beginning to think it's the only thing for a young fellow to do, anyway. What is there here for us? Drudge away in the mill, seven to six, seven to six, seven to six, seven to six, week in, month in, year in; then, some day, caught on a shaft, and they stop the mill just long enough to untangle your remains.

And that is life! By G.o.d, Frank, it's _not_ life--as I see it--as I'm going to see it!"

I turned to him in surprise; it was the first time I had heard him use such an expression. His teeth were set; his thin lips were pressed together; his eyes were big and luminous in the twilight; his pose was a picture of resolution, even of defiance. All unknown to me, Jack Lane had become a man, and his exclamation had had more of prayer than of profanity in it.

Presently he continued: "We can go out to that new country, west of Manitoba, and take up a homestead each. In a few years we will have land enough to make a dozen of these Ontario farms. Others are doing it--so can we. And it won't be so hard for us. The worst thing, usually, is the loneliness; holding it down in a shack, three years or more, all by one's self. But we can get claims beside each other, and, although we'll have to have separate shacks, the girls will keep house for us, so it won't be so bad."

He had touched on something which had already come into my mind. "Will the girls go?" I questioned.

"Frank," he said, and again he seemed to speak from some superior wisdom of his own, "those girls will go with us anywhere we ask them--anywhere!"

CHAPTER III.

When I laid the proposal before Marjorie, she listened with a complacency which suggested that the idea was not entirely new to her.

"I will go and keep house for you," she said, frankly, "if Jack and Jean go too."

It was Sunday afternoon before I had an opportunity to speak to Jean. We were strolling in secluded paths by the river, with bursts of autumn sunshine falling through a gently rustling canopy of gold and bronze and burnished copper and playing the rich hues of the woodland colors across the radiant ma.s.s of Jean's fair hair. She was seventeen now, and my wondering eyes had of late beheld her trim girlishness giving way to the first entrancing curves of womanhood. Her light step, her grace of motion, her clear, pink skin, her sensitive lips half parted over rows of well-formed teeth, her eyes large and dreamful, all whispered in some vague way in the ears of my boyhood that Jean was not as other girls; whispered of Jean the artist--Jean the idealist! Jean had not gone into the mill with the other girls of her age; she had continued longer at school, and then had taken up the study of music. Among the limbo of personalities which drifts into the bywaters of little towns, she had found, too, an artist; a man apparently of talent, who had sought the seclusion of our little milling centre in Ontario for reasons which were his own. He had immediately recognized the artistic strain in the girl and had bent his own genius to call it forth with no thought of reward other than the joy of seeing it grow.

"You are wonderful, Miss Lane," he had said, after the first few lessons. "You have perspective and proportion, which are the greatest things in life."

"I think I am a very stupid pupil," Jean had murmured in answer. "You are very patient with me--and all for nothing."

"For nothing! You leave me your debtor! You pay me a thousand times! You have given back to me a purpose in life--an excuse for being alive! Ah, Miss Lane, you do not know--yet--how empty a life can be. But you are an artist, and some day you will dip your brush in pain--perhaps in sorrow and regret--and after that you will _paint_. It is the law."

Jean told me these things that Sunday afternoon, and asked me if I knew what he meant. I did not; but I knew the artist had given Jean an instant's glimpse into life, and it was none the easier for me to suggest the loneliness of a homestead "somewhere west of Manitoba."

"Do you think you could dip your brush in--in the Saskatchewan?" I ventured.

She was gazing dreamily across the still river, and in the rich draperies of Autumn which were mirrored at her feet there was no fairer flower than Jean. She was the centre of a painting set against a background of nature's gorgeousness.

"I know," she said, simply. "Jack has told me. I will go, if you--and Marjorie--go."

It seemed to me that the reference to Marjorie came almost as a second thought; at any rate, I flattered myself with that idea.

We had no difficulty in persuading my father and Mrs. Lane to fall in with our ideas; in fact, they accepted our plan with some enthusiasm.

Father even insisted upon selling one of the farms and giving the proceeds to establish ourselves in the West. It was little enough, as we were to learn in due course, but Jack and I had also saved something of our earnings, and during this particular fall and winter we were unusually penurious.

"Nail down every dollar," said Jack, and we all were busy with our nailing.

We had decided to make no start until the spring; this on the advice of Mr. Edgar Gaines, a young man of the town who had gone west three years before with his worldly belongings in a grain bag, and had returned wearing tailor-made clothes and a horse-shoe tie pin set with something which, in a favorable light, resembled a diamond. He had "proved up" and sold out, and was living a lordly life on the proceeds--while they lasted.

"I'm settling with myself for three years on the 'bald-headed', and I've run up quite a bill," was Mr. Gaines' explanation of his gaiety. But he was able to give us some suggestions born of experience.

"No use going in the winter," he explained, "nor too early in the spring. You can't see land until the snow is off. And you have to _see_ it; otherwise you may take up a fine alkali mine. I took up my claim in winter. That's why I had to sell it in winter."

"But don't you have to be there to put a crop in in the spring?" asked Jack, who was eager to be away.

"First crop don't amount to much, anyway," said Mr. Gaines, making sure that his tie pin was still in place, as the girls were in the company, and seemed to regard him as something of a hero. "First crop don't amount to much. Likely to be rushed in in too much of a hurry, and in a dry season you lose your seed for your pains. Better take your time; pick out a prime piece of land, get your shacks up, and start plowing.

If you're pushed for money, work out for somebody for awhile the first year, or put up hay on the bald-headed; you can usually sell it to settlers next winter, and soak 'em hard, always soak 'em hard."

"On the bald-headed?" repeated Jean; "what does that mean?"

"That means the prairie," Mr. Gaines explained, "because it's as bare as a bald head, 'cept for a very short gra.s.s which makes wonderful good hay."

Armed with Mr. Gaines' generous advice we prepared to start for the West about the end of April, and, as it came about, my father and Mrs. Lane arranged a domestic event on the very day of our departure. The affair was quiet and unpretentious; ceremony in the church at eleven, and dinner at Mrs. Lane's--Mrs. Hall's, I should say--where Marjorie and Jean served, and we all tried to live in a joyous glow which was strangely shot through with streaks of unhappiness. That night at six we left for the West.

We travelled in a colonist car, and it was lucky that there were four of us, as we occupied just one section. At night we pulled the seats out, and let down the upper berth, so that there were two narrow beds. The girls had the lower one, around which we arranged an improvised curtain, and we had brought some blankets, which they spread on the wooden slats of their seats.

Jean rapped on her hard bed with her knuckles. "At least, the blankets will save the paint," she remarked facetiously.

"You're lucky," said Jack. "You should see our stone-boat."

Jack and I lay on the bare boards above. I say we lay, for during that first night there was little sleep. We were under high nervous tension, which the rhythmic clickety-click of the car-wheels could not immediately soothe. Gradually the sound droned itself into my consciousness as one word, with the accent on the last syllable--Mani-to-bah, Mani-to-bah, Mani-to-bah. Then, as I was about to fall asleep, the pent-up excitement of Marjorie and Jean would burst forth in little giggling exuberances which came rippling up to our station aloft.

It was with the morning that we really began to take stock of our surroundings. The car was full of people; the air was foul and heavy; sounds of most abandoned snoring came from various quarters. We made up our berths and opened our windows; a grey mist hung on the trees and swept by the train, but the smell of it was grateful and refreshing. We washed our hands and faces, and were glad that Mr. Gaines had suggested taking our own towels and soap. Marjorie discovered that there was a stove on which tea might be made and we breakfasted out of our lunch baskets.

By this time the other occupants of the car were astir. There were many women and children, and the degree in the social scale seemed to range from those with a considerable culture and a penchant for cleanliness to those who apparently interpreted the latter term with the greatest liberality. Several languages were spoken. Half-dressed men lolled in their berths, exposing swarthy arms and slabs of hairy chests, and slatternly women shuffled along the aisle, in imminent danger of tripping on their trailing skirts and disrobing themselves. Children whined or babbled, and, after the general disturbance of breakfast-making was over, raced up and down the aisle, occasionally tripping over a projecting foot or a suit-case, and raising a l.u.s.ty but short-lived outcry.

Some of the pa.s.sengers understood only the barest essentials of English, and were plainly confused over the values of a strange currency.

Whenever the conductor came through the car demanding tickets, which seemed to be unnecessarily often, they received him with panicky excitement or sullen stolidity. Our little party, although inexperienced in the customs of travel, had the great advantage, which the native-born never fully appreciates, of being in its own country. We were citizens of it, and we had a well-developed Anglo-Saxon pride in what that meant.

We understood the language, the currency, and the customs of the people.

Bra.s.s b.u.t.tons had no terrors for us. We had a general knowledge of the geography of the country through which we travelled, and we knew, with reasonable definiteness, where we were going. We had enough money in our pockets to bring us back home, if that should be necessary. Most outstanding fact of all, we had homes to come back to, should we so desire.

And yet, with all these advantages, as the day wore on, a profound melancholy, an intense loneliness, settled upon us. During the excitement of our preparations we had not felt the strain, the lesions of breaking away from parents and friends and surroundings made dear by a thousand tender a.s.sociations of childhood. But now all these things rose up within me, and filled my heart and my throat. . . .

The saving thing was the high spirits of the girls. They seemed to look upon the whole trip as a romantic adventure in which Jack and I, as their young knight-errants, were cast for a somewhat heroic part. For the most part our heroism was limited to the buying of fruit, sandwiches, and coffee while the train changed engines at divisional points.

"What a breakfast!" chortled Marjorie on the second morning out. "I have had over ten miles of sausages!"

"And I have just had three telegraph poles of tea," said Jean, setting her cup down. "When shall we see a Mounted Policeman?"

"Time enough," said I. "You may fall into their hands before you know it."

Jean eyed me roguishly. "Do you think there's a chance?" she murmured.

"That's one of the attractions of the country which you didn't mention."