at hand, he was happy.  He had never been happier.  There flashed across his mental vision a swiftly moving picture of the fight he had made for success.  It had been a magnificent fight.  Without vanity he was proud of it, for fate had handicapped him at the beginning, and still he had won out.  He saw himself again the homeless little farmer boy setting out from his Illinois village to take up life in a great city; as though it had all happened but yesterday he remembered how for days and weeks he had nearly starved, how he had sold papers at first, and then, by lucky chance, became errand boy in a big drafting establishment.  It was there that the ambition was born in him.  He saw great engineers come and go—­men who were greater than presidents to him, and who sought out the ends of the earth in the following of their vocation.  He made a slave of himself in the nurturing and strengthening of his ambition to become one of them—­to be a builder of railroads and bridges, a tunneler of mountains, a creator of new things in new lands.  His slavery had not lessened as his years increased.  Voluntarily he had kept himself in bondage, fighting ceaselessly the obstacles in his way, triumphing over his handicaps as few other men had triumphed, rising, slowly, steadily, resistlessly, until now—.  He flung back his head and the pulse of his heart quickened as he heard again the words of Van Horn, president of the greatest engineering company on the continent.

“Howland, we’ve decided to put you in charge Of the building of the Hudson Bay Railroad.  It’s one of the wildest jobs we’ve ever had, and Gregson and Thorne don’t seem to catch on.  They’re bridge builders and not wilderness men.  We’ve got to lay a single line of steel through three hundred miles of the wildest country in North America, and from this hour your motto is ‘Do it or bust!’ You can report at Le Pas as soon as you get your traps together.”

Those words had broken the slavedom for Howland.  He had been fighting for an opportunity, and now that the opportunity had come he was sure that he would succeed.  Swiftly, with his hands thrust deep in his pockets, he walked down the one main street of Prince Albert, puffing out odorous clouds of smoke from his cigar, every fiber in him tingling with the new joy that had come into his life.  Another night would see him in Le Pas, the little outpost sixty miles farther east on the Saskatchewan.  Then a hundred miles by dog-sledge and he would be in the big wilderness camp where three hundred men were already at work clearing a way to the great bay to the north.  What a glorious achievement that road would be!  It would remain for all time as a cenotaph to his ability, his courage and indomitable persistence.