Two Knapsacks | Page 5

the girl with the cream coloured ribbons and crimson wrapper has asked that villainous news-agent if my name is not Wilkinson, and if I don't teach in the Sacheverell Street School. The rascal says her name is Miss Marjorie Carmichael, the daughter of old Dr. Carmichael, that was member for Vaughan, and that her friend, the long girl with the blue ribbons, knows you. O, my dear friend, this is awful. Better be back in Toronto than shut up in a railway car with two unblushing women."
"Stay here," said Coristine, making way for his friend, "they'll never dare come into this car after us." Yet his eye followed the retreating form of the South American warrior with apprehension. What if he should bring his 'dare young misthress' and her friend into the atmosphere of stale tobacco after their lawful game? Wilkinson sat down despairingly and coughed. "I feel very like the least little nip," he said faintly, "but it's in my knapsack, and I will not enter that car of foul conspiracy again for all the knapsacks and flasks in the world."
Now, Coristine had smoked two big pipes, and felt that it was dry work, but loyalty to his friend made him braver than any personal necessity would have done. "It's sick you're looking, Farquhar, my dear," he said, "and it's no friend of your's I'd be, and leave you without comfort in such a time of trouble. Here's for the knapsack, and woe betide the man or woman that stops me." So up he rose, and strode out of the car, glowering fiercely at the second-class passengers and all the rest, till he reached the vacated seats, from which he silently, and in deep inward wrath, gathered up the creations of cardboard and patent cloth, and retreated, grinding his teeth as he heard the veteran call out behind him, "Would yeez moind comin' this way a bit, Mishter?" He paid no attention to that officious old man, but hurried back to the smoking-car, where he extracted Wilkinson's flask from its flannel surroundings, removed the metal cup, poured out a stiff horn, and diluted it at the filter. "Take this, old man," he said sternly, pressing it to the lips of the sufferer, "it'll set you up like a new pin." So the schoolmaster drank and was comforted, and Coristine took a nip also, and they felt better, and laughed and joked, and said simultaneously, "It's really too absurd about these girls, ha, ha!"
Apprehension made the time seem long to the travellers, who gazed out of the windows upon a fine agricultural country, with rolling fields of grain, well-kept orchards and substantial houses and barns. They admired the church on the hill at Holland Landing, and the schoolmaster told his friend of a big anchor that had got stuck fast there on its way to the Georgian Bay in 1812. "I bet you the sailors wouldn't have left it behind if it had been an anchor of Hollands," said Coristine, whereupon Wilkinson remarked that his puns were intolerable. At Bradford the track crossed the Holland River, hardly flowing between its flat, marshy banks towards Lake Simcoe. "This," said the schoolmaster, "is early Tennysonian scenery, a Canadian edition of the fens of Lincolnshire," but he regretted uttering the words when the lawyer agreed with him that it was an of-fens-ive looking scene. But Lake Simcoe began to show up in the distance to the right, and soon the gentlemanly conductor took their tickets. "Leefroy," shouted the brakesman. They gathered up their knapsacks, dropped off the smoker, and sped inside the station, out of the windows of which they peered cautiously to see that no attempt at a pursuit was made by the ladies and their military protector. The train sped on its way northward, and feeling that, for a time, they were safe, the pedestrians faced each other with a deep-drawn sigh of relief. The station-master told them to walk back along the track till they met the old side-line that used to go to Belle Ewart. So they helped each other to strap on their knapsacks, and virtually began their pedestrian tour. The station-master would have liked to detain them for explanations, but they were unwilling to expose themselves to further misunderstanding. Walking on a railway track is never very pleasant exercise, but this old Belle Ewart track was an abomination of sand and broken rails and irregular sleepers. Coristine tried to step in time over the rotting cedar and hemlock ties, but, at the seventh step, stumbled and slid down the gravel bank of the road-bed. "Where did the seven sleepers do their sleeping, Wilks?" he enquired. "At Ephesus," was the curt reply. "Well, if they didn't efface us both, they nearly did for one of us." "Coristine, if