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, from the dim, gray, misty
light of dawn to the soft glow of shadowy evening, was full of new
delights to me. On the evening of the third day we reached the Line
Stopping Place, where Jack Dale met us. I remember well how my heart
beat with admiration of the easy grace with which he sailed down upon
us in the loose-jointed cowboy style, swinging his own bronco and the
little cayuse he was leading for me into the circle of the wagons,
careless of ropes and freight and other impedimenta.
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