Her expression was rea.s.suring when he turned to her again.

"I was a retail chemist in a little pottery town when I discovered the properties of one or two innocuous fluxes, and how to make a certain leadless glaze," he said. "Probably you do not know that there were few more unhealthy occupations than the glazing of certain kinds of pottery. I was also fortunate enough to make a good deal of money out of my discovery, and as I extended its use, I eventually started a big enamelling works of my own. After that I married; but the Nasmyths never quite forgave me my little idiosyncrasies and some of my views. They dropped me when my wife died. She"--his face softened curiously--"was in many ways very different from the rest of them."

He broke off, and when he sat silent a moment or two Laura felt a curious sympathy for him.

"Won't you go on?" she said.

"We had no children," said the man. "My own folks were dead, but I contrived to see Derrick now and then. My wife had been very fond of him, and I liked the lad. Once or twice when I went up to London he insisted on making a fuss over me--took me to his chambers and his club, though I believe I was in several ways not exactly a credit to him."

Laura liked the little twinkle that crept back into his eyes. It suggested the genial toleration of a man with a nature big enough to overlook many trifles he might have resented.

"Well," he continued, "his father died suddenly, and, when it became evident that his estate was deplorably involved, Derrick went out to Canada. None of his fastidious relatives seemed inclined to hold out a hand to him. Perhaps this was not very astonishing, but I was a little hurt that he did not afford me the opportunity. In one way, however, the lad was right. He was willing to stand on his own feet. There was pluck in him."

He made an expressive gesture. "Now I'm anxious to hear where he is and what he is doing."

Laura was stirred by what he had said. She had imagination, and could fill in many of the points Wisbech had only hinted at. Nevertheless, she was not quite pleased to recognize that he seemed to consider her as much concerned about his nephew as he was himself.

"He is"--she tried to speak in an indifferent tone--"He is at present engaged in building a difficult trestle bridge on a railroad. It is not the kind of work any man, who shrank from hazardous exertion, would delight in; but I believe there is a reason why the terms offered were a special inducement. He has a new project in his mind, though I do not know a great deal about it."

"I think you might tell me what you do know."

Laura did so, though she had never been in the canon. The man listened attentively.

"Well," he said, "I fancy I can promise that he shall, at least, have an opportunity of putting that project through. You haven't, however, told me where the railroad bridge is."

The girl made him understand how he could most easily reach it, and, while she was explaining the various roads he must follow, there was a beat of hoofs outside. Wisbech rose and held out his hand.

"I expect that is the man with my horse, and I'm afraid I have kept you talking a very long while." He pressed her hand as he half apologized. "I wonder if you will permit me to come back again some time?"

Laura said it would afford her and her father pleasure, and she did not smile when he went out and scrambled awkwardly into his saddle.

The man who had brought the horse up grinned broadly as he watched Wisbech jolt across the clearing.

"I guess that man's not going to make the settlement on that horse. He rides 'most like a bag of flour," he remarked, with evident enjoyment of the stranger's poor horsemanship.

CHAPTER XIII

ON THE TRESTLE

It was with difficulty that Wisbech reached the railroad track upon which Laura Waynefleet had told him Nasmyth was occupied. From the winding waggon-road, he was forced to scramble down several hundred feet through tangled undergrowth, and over great fallen logs. Then he had to walk along the ties, which were s.p.a.ced most inconveniently apart, neither far enough for a long stride nor close enough for a short one. It is, in fact, unless one is accustomed to it, a particularly wearying thing to walk any distance along a Western railroad track; since local ticket rates are usually high on the Pacific slope, and roads of any other kind are not always available, the smaller ranchers and other impecunious travellers frequently tramp miles upon the ties.

Wisbech, however, had not very far to go, and, though it entailed an occasional stumble, he endeavoured to look about him. He was progressing along the side of the wonderful Fraser gorge, which is the great channel clearly provided by Nature for the commerce of the mountain province, and he was impressed by the spectacle upon which he gazed. In front of him rose great rocky ramparts, with here and there a snow-tipped peak cutting coldly white against the glaring blue.

Beneath these the climbing pines rolled down in battalions to the brink of a vast hollow, in the black depths of which the river roared far below. Wisps of gauzy mist clung to the hillside, and out of them the track came winding down, a sinuous gleaming riband that links the nations with a band of steel. There were, as he knew, fleet steamers ready at either end of it, in Vancouver Inlet, and at Montreal, two thousand four hundred odd miles away, for this was the all-British route round half the world from London to Yokohama and Hong-Kong.

That fact had its effect on Wisbech as he plodded painfully along the ties. He had Democratic notions, but he was an Imperialist, too, which was, perhaps, after all, not surprising, for he knew something of England's great dependencies. There are a good many men with similar views in the Dominion, and they have certainly lived up to them. Men undoubtedly work for money in Western Canada, but one has only to listen to their conversation in saloon and shanty to recognize the clean pride in their manhood, and their faith in the destiny of the land to which they belong. They have also proved their faith by pitting their unshrinking courage and splendid physical strength against savage Nature, and, among their other achievements, that track blown out of the living rock, flung over roaring rivers, and driven through eternal snow, supplies a significant hint of what they can bear and do. They buried mangled men in roaring canon and by giddy trestle, but the rails crept always on.

Wisbech came to the brink of a gorge which rent the steep hillside. He could not tell how deep it was, but it made him dizzy to look down upon the streak of frothing water far below. The gorge was spanned by the usual Western trestle bridge, an openwork fabric of timber just wide enough to carry the single track rising out of the chasm on tapering piers that looked ethereally fragile in that wilderness of towering trees and tremendous slopes of rock. The chunk of axes and ringing of hammers jarred through the roar of the stream, and he could see men clinging in mid-air to little stages slung about the piers, and moving among the pines below. A man in a ragged duck suit strode by him with an axe on his shoulder, and Wisbech half-diffidently ventured to inquire if he could tell where Derrick Nasmyth could be found. The man, who paid no attention to him, stopped close by, and shouted to some of his comrades below.

"You ought to get that beam fixed before the fast freight comes through, boys. There's no sign of her yet," he called in a loud voice.

Somebody answered him, and the man turned to Wisbech.

"Now, sir," he replied tardily, "you were asking for Nasmyth?"

Wisbech said he wished to see Derrick Nasmyth, and the man nodded.

"Well," said he, "you'll have to wait a few minutes, I guess he's busy. There's a log they want to put into the trestle before the train comes along. It's not his particular business, but we're rather anxious to get through with our contract."

"Ah," returned Wisbech, "then I fancy I know who you must be. In fact, I'm rather glad I came across you. You are evidently the man who looked after my nephew when he was ill, and from what Miss Waynefleet told me, Derrick owes you a good deal."

Gordon looked at Wisbech with a little smile, as he recalled what Nasmyth had said about the man who had sent him the draft.

"Well," he remarked, as he pointed to the hillside, "it would be quite hard to fancy there was very much the matter with him now."

Wisbech agreed with Gordon when he saw a man, who was running hard, beside four brawny oxen that were hauling a great dressed fir-log by a chain. They came from an opening between the pines, and rushed along the rude trail, which had a few skids across it. The trail led downhill just there, and man and oxen went down the slope furiously in the attempt to keep ahead of the big log that jolted over the skids behind them. Wisbech had never seen cattle of any kind progress in that fashion before, but he naturally did not know that the Bush-bred ox can travel at a headlong pace up and down hills and amidst thickets a man would cautiously climb or painfully crawl through. As they approached the level at the foot of the slope, the man who drove them ran back, and slipping his handspike under it, swung the b.u.t.t of the log round an obstacle. Wisbech gazed at his nephew with astonishment when Nasmyth came up with the beasts again. His battered wide hat was shapeless, his duck trousers were badly rent, and the blue shirt, which was all he wore above the waist, hung open half-way down his breast. He was flushed and gasping, but the men upon the trestle were evidently urging him to fresh exertion.

"Oh, hit her hard!" shouted one of them; and a comrade clinging to a beam high above the river broke in: "We're waiting. Get a hump on.

Bring her right along."

It was evident that Nasmyth was already doing all that reasonably could have been expected of him, and in another moment or two, four more men, who ran out of the Bush, fell upon the log with handspikes, as the beasts came to a long upward slope. They went up it savagely, and Wisbech was conscious of a growing amazement as he watched the floundering oxen and gasping men.

"Do you always work--like this?" he asked.

Gordon laughed. "Well," he answered, "it isn't the bosses' fault when we don't. As it happens, however, a good many of us are putting a contract through, and the boys want to get that beam fixed before the fast freight comes along. If they don't, it's quite likely she'll shake it loose or pitch some of them off the bridge. It has stood a few years, and wants stiffening."

"A few years!" said Wisbech. "There are bridges in England that have existed since the first railways were built. I believe they don't require any great stiffening yet."

"Oh, yes," said Gordon. "It's quite what one would expect. We do things differently. We heave our rails down and fill up the country with miners and farmers while you'd be worrying over your parliamentary bills. We strengthen our track as we go along, and we'll have iron bridges over every river just as soon as they're wanted."

Wisbech smiled. It seemed to him that these men would probably get exactly what they set their minds upon in spite of every obstacle.

"Why don't they stop the train while they get the beam into place?" he inquired.

"Nothing short of a big landslip is allowed to hold that fast freight up," Gordon replied. "It's up to every divisional superintendent between here and Winnipeg to rush her along as fast as possible. Half the cars are billed through to the Empress liner that goes out to-morrow."

In the meanwhile the men and oxen had conveyed the big log up the slope, and, while Nasmyth drove the beasts back along the skidded track, it swung out over the chasm at the end of a rope. Men leaning out from fragile stages clutched at and guided it, and when one of them shouted, Nasmyth cast the chain to which the rope was fastened loose from his oxen. Then little lithe figures crawled out along the beams of the trestle, and there was a ringing of hammers. Gordon, who gazed up the track, swung his arm up in warning.

"You've got to hump yourselves, boys," he admonished.

The faint hoot of a whistle came ringing across the pines, and a little puff of white smoke broke out far up the track from among their sombre ma.s.ses. It grew rapidly larger, and the clang of the hammers quickened, while Wisbech watched the white trail that swept along the steep hillside until there was a sudden shouting. Then he turned and saw his nephew running across the bridge.

"Somebody has forgotten a bolt or a big spike," said Gordon.

Wisbech felt inclined to hold his breath as he watched Nasmyth climb down the face of the trestle, but in another minute or two he was clambering up again with several other men behind him. There was another hoot of the whistle, and, as Wisbech glanced up the track, a great locomotive broke out from among the pines. It was veiled in whirling dust and flying fragments of ballast, and smoke that was grey instead of white, for the track led down-grade, and the engineer had throttled the steam. The engine was a huge one, built for mountain hauling, and the freight cars that lurched out of the forest behind it were huger still. Wisbech could see them rock, and the roar which they made and which the pines flung back grew deafening. Most of the cars had been coupled up in the yards at Montreal, and were covered thick with the dust that had whirled about them along two thousand four hundred miles of track, and they were still speeding on through the forests of the West, as they had done through those of far-off Ontario.