The other man also laughed.  “You ride straight home, Harry, before you make it worse,” said he.  “One might figure that you’d mixed things up enough already.”

Alton turned away, and found Seaforth awaiting him.  They mounted, and Alton rode in silence until when they were climbing out of the valley he said, “I wonder, Charley, if there’s a man in the Dominion who feels as mean as I do.”

Seaforth smiled curiously, and there was bitterness in his voice which Alton was too disturbed to notice.  “I think there is,” he said.  “You haven’t asked what kept me, but you will see if you look at the horse’s knees.  It’s a little difficult to understand why he must get his foot in a hole to-day.”

It was late that night when they reached Somasco, but Alton found Miss Deringham upon the verandah, and she glanced at him with very pretty sympathy.  Still, Seaforth fancied that she seemed a trifle anxious.

“Have you seen the man who brought the message?” she said.

“I have,” said Alton.  “You were right, of course.  He’d had too much whisky.”

The girl appeared, so Seaforth fancied, curiously relieved.  “I was almost afraid you might think I was in some respects to blame,” she said.

“No,” said Alton simply, “That was one of the things I couldn’t do.  It was right out of the question.”

He went in, and the warm colour crept into Miss Deringham’s face as she presently followed him.

CHAPTER XII

IN VANCOUVER

Autumn was merging into winter when one morning Alton and his comrade strolled along the water-front at Vancouver.  It was still early, and the store and office clerks were just hastening to their occupations, but Alton had spent an hour already in a great sawmill.  His face was thoughtful, and he seemed to be repeating details of machines and engines half aloud.  Presently he stood still and gazed about him, and Seaforth, who followed his gaze, knew there was something working in his comrade’s mind.  The scene was also inspiriting and suggestive.

Across the wide inlet, mountain beyond mountain towered against the blueness of the north.  To the east, sombre forest shut the sheltered basin in, its black ridge serrated by the ragged spires of taller pines, and blurred in places by the drifting smoke of mills.  Between them and the water stood long lines of loaded cars, with huge locomotives snorting in the midst of them, and where the metal road which commenced at Quebec ended, the white shape of an Empress liner rose above the wharf, the clasp of the new steel girdle which bound England to the East.  Above the pines which shrouded the narrows shone the topsails of a timber-laden barque, and a crawling cloud of smoke betokened a steamer coming up out of the wastes of the Pacific, while four-masted ships lay two deep beneath the humming mills.  Then, rising ridge on ridge, jumbled in picturesque confusion, and flanked by towering telegraph poles, store and bank and office climbed the slope of the hill.  It was a new stone city which had sprung, as by enchantment, from the ashes of a wooden one, and would, purging itself of its raw crudity, rise to beauty and greatness yet.