The Sky Pilot | Page 4

these valleys,
remote and lonely, a spot where they could forget and be forgotten.
The waving skyline of the Foothills was the boundary of their lookout
upon life. Here they dwelt safe from the scanning of the world, freed
from all restraints of social law, denied the gentler influences of home
and the sweet uplift of a good woman's face. What wonder if, with the
new freedom beating in their hearts and ears, some rode fierce and hard
the wild trail to the cut-bank of destruction!
The story is, too, of how a man with vision beyond the waving skyline
came to them with firm purpose to play the brother's part, and by sheer
love of them and by faith in them, win them to believe that life is
priceless, and that it is good to be a man.

CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I.
The Foothills Country

II. The Company of the Noble Seven
III. The Coming of the Pilot
IV. The Pilot's Measure
V. First Blood
VI. His Second Wind
VII. The Last of the Permit Sundays
VIII. The Pilot's Grip
IX. Gwen
X. Gwen's First Prayers
XI. Gwen's Challenge
XII. Gwen's Canyon
XIII. The Canyon Flowers
XIV. Bill's Bluff
XV. Bill's Partner
XVI. Bill's Financing
XVII. How the Pinto Sold
XVIII. The Lady Charlotte
XIX. Through Gwen's Window
XX. How Bill Favored "Home-Grown Industries"
XXI. How Bill Hit the Trail

XXII. How the Swan Creek Church was Opened
XXIII. The Pilot's Last Port

THE SKY PILOT
CHAPTER I
THE FOOTHILLS COUNTRY
Beyond the great prairies and in the shadow of the Rockies lie the
Foothills. For nine hundred miles the prairies spread themselves out in
vast level reaches, and then begin to climb over softly rounded mounds
that ever grow higher and sharper till, here and there, they break into
jagged points and at last rest upon the great bases of the mighty
mountains. These rounded hills that join the prairies to the mountains
form the Foothill Country. They extend for about a hundred miles only,
but no other hundred miles of the great West are so full of interest and
romance. The natural features of the country combine the beauties of
prairie and of mountain scenery. There are valleys so wide that the
farther side melts into the horizon, and uplands so vast as to suggest the
unbroken prairie. Nearer the mountains the valleys dip deep and ever
deeper till they narrow into canyons through which mountain torrents
pour their blue-gray waters from glaciers that lie glistening between the
white peaks far away. Here are the great ranges on which feed herds of
cattle and horses. Here are the homes of the ranchmen, in whose wild,
free, lonely existence there mingles much of the tragedy and comedy,
the humor and pathos, that go to make up the romance of life. Among
them are to be found the most enterprising, the most daring, of the
peoples of the old lands. The broken, the outcast, the disappointed,
these too have found their way to the ranches among the Foothills. A
country it is whose sunlit hills and shaded valleys reflect themselves in
the lives of its people; for nowhere are the contrasts of light and shade
more vividly seen than in the homes of the ranchmen of the Albertas.
The experiences of my life have confirmed in me the orthodox

conviction that Providence sends his rain upon the evil as upon the
good; else I should never have set my eyes upon the Foothill country,
nor touched its strangely fascinating life, nor come to know and love
the most striking man of all that group of striking men of the Foothill
country--the dear old Pilot, as we came to call him long afterwards. My
first year in college closed in gloom. My guardian was in despair. From
this distance of years I pity him. Then I considered him unnecessarily
concerned about me--"a fussy old hen," as one of the boys suggested.
The invitation from Jack Dale, a distant cousin, to spend a summer with
him on his ranch in South Alberta came in the nick of time. I was wild
to go. My guardian hesitated long; but no other solution of the problem
of my disposal offering, he finally agreed that I could not well get into
more trouble by going than by staying. Hence it was that, in the early
summer of one of the eighties, I found myself attached to a Hudson's
Bay Company freight train, making our way from a little railway town
in Montana towards the Canadian boundary. Our train consisted of six
wagons and fourteen yoke of oxen, with three cayuses, in charge of a
French half-breed and his son, a lad of about sixteen. We made slow
enough progress, but every hour of the long day,