Over Prairie Trails | Page 9

voice rang over from the still, distant farmstead. I knew the place. An American settler with a French sounding name had squatted down there a few years ago.
The road I followed was, properly speaking, not a road at all, though used for one. A deep master ditch had been cut from ten or twelve miles north of here; it angled, for engineering reasons, so that I was going northwest again. The ground removed from the ditch had been dumped along its east side, and though it formed only a narrow, high, and steep dam, rough with stones and overgrown with weeds, it was used by whoever had to go north or south here. The next east-west grade which I was aiming to reach, four miles north, was the second correction line that I had to use, twenty-four miles distant from the first; and only a few hundred yards from its corner I should be at home!
At home! All my thoughts were bent on getting home now. Five or six hours of driving will make the strongest back tired, I am told. Mine is not of the strongest. This road lifted me above the things that I liked to watch. Invariably, on all these drives, I was to lose interest here unless the stars were particularly bright and brilliant. This night I watched the lights, it is true: how they streamed across the sky, like driving rain that is blown into wavy streaks by impetuous wind. And they leaped and receded, and leaped and receded again. But while I watched, I stretched my limbs and was bent on speed. There were a few particularly bad spots in the road, where I could not do anything but walk the horse. So, where the going was fair, I urged him to redoubled effort. I remember how I reflected that the horse as yet did not know we were so near home, this being his first trip out; and I also remember, that my wife afterwards told me that she had heard me a long while before I came--had heard me talking to the horse, urging him on and encouraging him.
Now I came to a slight bend in the road. Only half a mile! And sure enough: there was the signal put out for me. A lamp in one of the windows of the school--placed so that after I turned in on the yard, I could not see it--it might have blinded my eye, and the going is rough there with stumps and stones. I could not see the cottage, it stood behind the school. But the school I saw clearly outlined against the dark blue, star-spangled sky, for it stands on a high gravel ridge. And in the most friendly and welcoming way it looked with its single eye across at the nocturnal guest.
I could not see the cottage, but I knew that my little girl lay sleeping in her cosy bed, and that a young woman was sitting there in the dark, her face glued to the windowpane, to be ready with a lantern which burned in the kitchen whenever I might pull up between school and house. And there, no doubt, she had been sitting for a long while already; and there she was destined to sit during the winter that came, on Friday nights--full often for many and many an hour--full often till midnight--and sometimes longer...

TWO Fog
Peter took me north, alone, on six successive trips. We had rain, we had snow, we had mud, and hard-frozen ground. It took us four, it took us six, it took us on one occasion--after a heavy October snowfall--nearly eleven hours to make the trip. That last adventure decided me. It was unavoidable that I should buy a second horse. The roads were getting too heavy for single driving over such a distance. This time I wanted a horse that I could sell in the spring to a farmer for any kind of work on the land. I looked around for a while. Then I found Dan. He was a sorrel, with some Clyde blood in him. He looked a veritable skate of a horse. You could lay your fingers between his ribs, and he played out on the first trip I ever made with this newly-assembled, strange-looking team. But when I look back at that winter, I cannot but say that again I chose well. After I had fed him up, he did the work in a thoroughly satisfactory manner, and he learnt to know the road far better than Peter. Several times I should have been lost without his unerring road sense. In the spring I sold him for exactly what I had paid; the farmer who bought him has him to this very day [Footnote: Spring, 1919.] and says he never