The girl from Winnipeg saw the morning frost lie white on the long grass
at the lake edges, and watched the haze of mellow golden birch leaves as
they dropped.
'Now that's the way trees ought to turn,' she said. 'Don't
you think our Eastern maple is a little violent in colour?' Then we
passed through a country where for many hours the talk in the cars was
of mines and the treatment of ores. Men told one tales - prospectors'
yarns of the sort one used to hear vaguely before Klondike or Nome were
public property. They did not care whether one believed or doubted.
They, too, were only at the beginning of things - silver perhaps, gold
perhaps, nickel perhaps. If a great city did not arise at such a
place - the very name was new since my day - it would assuredly be born
within a few miles of it. The silent men boarded the cars, and dropped
off, and disappeared beyond thickets and hills precisely as the first
widely spaced line of skirmishers fans out and vanishes along the front
of the day's battle.
One old man sat before me like avenging Time itself, and talked of
prophecies of evil, that had been falsified. 'They said there wasn't
nothing here excep' rocks an' snow. They said there never wouldn't
be nothing here excep' the railroad. There's them that can't see yit,'
and he gimleted me with a fierce eye. 'An' all the while, fortunes is
made - piles is made - right under our noses.'
'Have you made your pile?' I asked.
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