The Gold Trail | Page 2

direct and simple as regards
almost everything else.
"I'm going west across the Rockies to-morrow," he said. "We'll have a
private car on the Pacific express. You'd better bring these folk along
and show them the Mountain Province."
Ida was pleased with the idea; and Stirling and his party started west on
the morrow.
In the meanwhile, Construction Foreman Cassidy was spending an
anxious time. He was red-haired and irascible, Canadian by adoption
and Hibernian by descent, a man of no ideas beyond those connected

with railroad building, which was, however, very much what one
would have expected, for the chief attribute of the men who are
building up the western Dominion is their power of concentration.
Though there were greater men above Cassidy who would get the credit,
it was due chiefly to his grim persistency that the branch road had been
blasted out of the mountainside, made secure from sliding snow, and
flung on dizzy trestles over thundering rivers, until at last it reached the
swamp which, in his own simple words, had no bottom.
There are other places like it in the Mountain Province of British
Columbia. Giant ranges, whose peaks glimmer with the cold gleam of
never-melting snow, shut in the valley. Great pine forests clothe their
lower slopes, and a green-stained river leaps roaring out of the midst of
them. The new track wound through their shadow, a double riband of
steel, until it broke off abruptly where a creek that poured out of the
hills had spread itself among the trees. The latter dwindled and rotted,
and black depths of mire lay among their crawling roots, forming what
is known in that country as a muskeg. There was a deep, blue lake on
the one hand, and on the other scarped slopes of rock that the tract
could not surmount; and for a time Cassidy and his men had floundered
knee-deep, and often deeper, among the roots while they plied the ax
and saw. Then they dumped in carload after carload of rock and gravel;
but the muskeg absorbed it and waited for more. It was apparently
insatiable; and, for Cassidy drove them savagely, the men's tempers
grew shorter under the strain, until some, who had drawn a sufficient
proportion of their wages to warrant it, rolled up their blankets and
walked out reviling him. Still, most of them stayed with the task and
toiled on sullenly in the mire under a scorching heat, for it was summer
in the wilderness.
Affairs were in this condition when Clarence Weston crawled out of the
swamp one evening and sat down on a cedar log before he followed his
comrades up the track, though he supposed that supper would shortly
be laid out in the sleeping-shanty. The sunlight that flung lurid flecks of
color upon the western side of the fir trunks beat upon his dripping face,
which, though a little worn and grim just then, was otherwise a pleasant
face of the fair English type. In fact, though he had been some years in

the country, Englishman was unmistakably stamped upon him. He was
attired scantily and simply in a very old blue shirt, and trousers, which
also had once been blue, of duck; and just then he was very weary, and
more than a little lame.
He had cut himself about the ankle when chopping a week earlier, and
though the wound had partly healed his foot was still painful. There
were also a good many other scars and bruises upon his body, for the
cost of building a western railroad is usually heavy. Still, he had an
excellent constitution, and was, while not particularly brilliant as a rule,
at least whimsically contented in mind. His comrades called him the
Kid, or the English Kid, perhaps on account of a certain delicacy of
manner and expression which he had somehow contrived to retain,
though he had spent several years in logging camps, and his age was
close onto twenty-five.
While he sat there with the shovel that had worn his hands hard lying at
his feet, Cassidy, who had not recovered from the interview he had had
with Stirling that morning, strode by, hot and out of temper, and then
stopped and swung round on him.
"Too stiff to get up hustle before the mosquitoes eat you, when supper's
ready?" he said.
Weston glanced down at his foot.
"I was on the gravel bank all afternoon. It's steep. Seemed to wrench
the cut."
"Well," said Cassidy, "I've no kind of use for a man who doesn't know
enough to keep himself from getting hurt. You have got to get that foot
better right away or get out."
He shook a big, hard fist at the swamp.
"How'm I going to fill up that pit with a