The World For Sale | Page 3

my first book of fiction, Pierre and His
People, but with the exception of Monseigneur Fabre there is no
Frenchman in this book who fulfils, or could fulfil, the temperamental
place which I have indicated. Men like Monseigneur Fabre have lived
in the West, and worked and slaved like him, blest and beloved by all
classes, creeds, and races. Father Lacombe was one of them. The part
he played in the life of Western Canada will be written some day by
one who understands how such men, celibate, and dedicated to
religious life, may play a stupendous part in the development of
civilization. Something of him is to be found in my description of
Monseigneur Fabre.

NOTE
This book was begun in 1911 and finished in 1913, a year before war
broke out. It was published serially in the year 1915 and the beginning
of 1916. It must, therefore, go to the public on the basis of its merits
alone, and as a picture of the peace-life of the great North West.

PRELUDE
Harvest-time was almost come, and the great new land was resting
under coverlets of gold. From the rise above the town of Lebanon, there
stretched out ungarnered wheat in the ear as far as sight could reach,
and the place itself and the neighbouring town of Manitou on the other
side of the Sagalac River were like islands washed by a topaz sea.
Standing upon the Rise, lost in the prospect, was an old, white-haired
man in the cassock of a priest, with grey beard reaching nearly to the
waist.
For long he surveyed the scene, and his eyes had a rapt look.
At last he spoke aloud:
"There shall be an heap of corn in the earth, high upon the hills; his
fruit shall shake like Libanus, and shall be green in the city like grass
upon the earth."
A smile came to his lips--a rare, benevolent smile. He had seen this
expanse of teeming life when it was thought to be an alkali desert, fit
only to be invaded by the Blackfeet and the Cree and the Blood Indians
on a foray for food and furs. Here he had come fifty years before, and
had gone West and North into the mountains in the Summer season,
when the land was tremulous with light and vibrating to the hoofs of
herds of buffalo as they stampeded from the hunters; and also in the
Winter time, when frost was master and blizzard and drift its malignant
servants.
Even yet his work was not done. In the town of Manitou he still said
mass now and then, and heard the sorrows and sins of men and women,
and gave them "ghostly comfort," while priests younger than himself
took the burden of parish-work from his shoulders.
For a lifetime he had laboured among the Indians and the few whites
and squaw-men and half-breeds, with neither settlement nor progress.

Then, all at once, the railway; and people coming from all the world,
and cities springing up! Now once more he was living the life of
civilization, exchanging raw flesh of fish and animals and a meal of
tallow or pemmican for the wheaten loaf; the Indian tepee for the warm
house with the mansard roof; the crude mass beneath the trees for the
refinements of a chancel and an altar covered with lace and white linen.
A flock of geese went honking over his head. His eyes smiled in
memory of the countless times he had watched such flights, had seen
thousands of wild ducks hurrying down a valley, had watched a family
of herons stretching away to some lonely water-home. And then
another sound greeted his ear. It was shrill, sharp and insistent. A great
serpent was stealing out of the East and moving down upon Lebanon. It
gave out puffs of smoke from its ungainly head. It shrieked in triumph
as it came. It was the daily train from the East, arriving at the Sagalac
River.
"These things must be," he said aloud as he looked. While he lost
himself again in reminiscence, a young man came driving across the
plains, passing beneath where he stood. The young man's face and
figure suggested power. In his buggy was a fishing-rod.
His hat was pulled down over his eyes, but he was humming cheerfully
to himself. When he saw the priest, he raised his hat respectfully, yet
with an air of equality.
"Good day, Monseigneur" (this honour of the Church had come at last
to the aged missionary), he said warmly. "Good day--good day!"
The priest raised his hat and murmured the name, "Ingolby." As the
distance grew between them, he said sadly: "These are the men who
change the West, who seize it, and divide it, and make it