Most Of The Women I Saw About The Houses
Were Down In The Hollows, And Most Of The Men Were On The Crests And The
Flats.
Once, while we halted a woman drove straight down at us from the
sky-line, along a golden path between black ploughed lands.
When the
horse, who managed affairs, stopped at the cars, she nodded
mysteriously, and showed us a very small baby in the hollow of her arm.
Doubtless she was some exiled Queen flying North to found a dynasty and
establish a country. The Prairie makes everything wonderful.
They were threshing the wheat on both sides or the track as far as the
eye could see. The smoke of the machines went up in orderly perspective
alongside the mounds of chaff - thus: a machine, a house, a mound of
chaff, a stretch of wheat in stocks - and then repeat the pattern over
the next few degrees of longitude. We ran through strings of nearly
touching little towns, where I remembered an occasional shack; and
through big towns once represented by a name-board, a siding, and two
troopers of the North-West Police. In those days men proved that Wheat
would not grow north of some fool's line, or other, or, if it did, that
no one would grow it. And now the Wheat was marching with us as far as
the eye could reach; the railways were out, two, three hundred miles
north, peopling a new wheat country; and north of that again the Grand
Trunk was laying down a suburban extension of a few thousand miles
across the Continent, with branches perhaps to Dawson City, certainly to
Hudson Bay.
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