Big Timber | Page 3

and station, with hitching posts at which farmers' nags
stood dispiritedly in harness.
To the Westerner such spots are common enough; he sees them not as
fixtures, but as places in a stage of transformation. By every side track
and telegraph station on every transcontinental line they spring up,
centers of productive activity, growing into orderly towns and finally
attaining the dignity of cities. To her, fresh from trim farmsteads and
rural communities that began setting their houses in order when
Washington wintered at Valley Forge, Hopyard stood forth sordid and
unkempt. And as happens to many a one in like case, a wave of
sickening loneliness engulfed her, and she eyed the speeding Limited
as one eyes a departing friend.
"How could one live in a place like this?" she asked herself.
But she had neither Slave of the Lamp at her beck, nor any Magic
Carpet to transport her elsewhere. At any rate, she reflected, Hopyard
was not her abiding-place. She hoped that her destination would prove
more inviting.
Beside the platform were ranged two touring cars. Three or four of
those who had alighted entered these. Their baggage was piled over the

hoods, buckled on the running boards. The driver of one car
approached her. "Hot Springs?" he inquired tersely.
She affirmed this, and he took her baggage, likewise her trunk check
when she asked how that article would be transported to the lake. She
had some idea of route and means, from her brother's written
instruction, but she thought he might have been there to meet her. At
least he would be at the Springs.
So she was whirled along a country road, jolted in the tonneau between
a fat man from Calgary and a rheumatic dame on her way to take hot
sulphur baths at St. Allwoods. She passed seedy farmhouses, primitive
in construction, and big barns with moss plentifully clinging on roof
and gable. The stretch of charred stumps was left far behind, but in
every field of grain and vegetable and root great butts of fir and cedar
rose amid the crops. Her first definitely agreeable impression of this
land, which so far as she knew must be her home, was of those huge
and numerous stumps contending with crops for possession of the
fields. Agreeable, because it came to her forcibly that it must be a
sturdy breed of men and women, possessed of brawn and fortitude and
high courage, who made their homes here. Back in her country, once
beyond suburban areas, the farms lay like the squares of a chess board,
trim and orderly, tamely subdued to agriculture. Here, at first hand, she
saw how man attacked the forest and conquered it. But the conquest
was incomplete, for everywhere stood those stubborn roots, six and
eight and ten feet across, contending with man for its primal heritage,
the soil, perishing slowly as perish the proud remnants of a conquered
race.
Then the cleared land came to a stop against heavy timber. The car
whipped a curve and drove into what the fat man from Calgary
facetiously remarked upon as the tall uncut. Miss Benton sighted up
these noble columns to where a breeze droned in the tops, two hundred
feet above. Through a gap in the timber she saw mountains, peaks that
stood bold as the Rockies, capped with snow. For two days she had
been groping for a word to define, to sum up the feeling which had
grown upon her, had been growing upon her steadily, as the amazing

scroll of that four-day journey unrolled. She found it now, a simple
word, one of the simplest in our mother tongue--bigness. Bigness in its
most ample sense,--that was the dominant note. Immensities of distance,
vastness of rolling plain, sheer bulk of mountain, rivers that one
crossed, and after a day's journey crossed again, still far from source or
confluence. And now this unending sweep of colossal trees!
At first she had been overpowered with a sense of insignificance utterly
foreign to her previous experience. But now she discovered with an
agreeable sensation of surprise she could vibrate to such a keynote.
And while she communed with this pleasant discovery the car sped
down a straight stretch and around a corner and stopped short to unload
sacks of mail at a weather-beaten yellow edifice, its windows
displaying indiscriminately Indian baskets, groceries, and hardware.
Northward opened a broad scope of lake level, girt about with
tremendous peaks whose lower slopes were banked with thick forest.
Somewhere distant along that lake shore was to be her home. As the car
rolled over the four hundred yards between store and white-and-green
St. Allwoods, she wondered if Charlie would be there to meet her. She
was weary of seeing strange faces, of being directed, of being