“Who’s your new friend?” he asked.

“She’s no friend of mine,” snapped the girl.  “She’s another one of them Dolly Dimples come out to save the world.  She’s that innocent she wonders why Tete Jaune ain’t a nice place for ladies without escort.  I thought I’d help eggicate her a little an’ so I sent her to Bill’s place.  Oh, my Lord, I told her it was respectable!”

She doubled over the seat in a fit of merriment, and her companion seized the opportunity to look out of the window.

The tall, blue-eyed stranger had paused for a moment on the last step of the car to pin up her veil, fully revealing her face.  Then she stepped lightly to the ground, and found herself facing the sunlight and the mountains.  She drew a slow, deep breath between her parted lips, and turned wonderingly, for a moment forgetful.  It was the first time she had left the train since entering the mountains, and she understood now why some one in the coach had spoken of the Miette Plain as Sunshine Pool.  Where-ever she looked the mountains fronted her, with their splendid green slopes reaching up to their bald caps of gray shale and reddish rock or gleaming summits of snow.  Into this “pool”—­this pocket in the mountains—­the sun descended in a wonderful flood.  It stirred her blood like a tonic.  She breathed more quickly; a soft glow coloured her cheeks; her eyes grew more deeply violet as they caught the reflection of the blue sky.  A gentle wind fretted the loose tendrils of brown hair about her face.  And the bearded man, staring through the car window, saw her thus, and for an hour after that the hollow-cheeked girl wondered at the strange change in him.

The train had stopped at the edge of the big fill overlooking the Flats.  It was a heavy train, and a train that was helping to make history—­a combination of freight, passenger, and “cattle.”  It had averaged eight miles an hour on its climb toward Yellowhead Pass and the end of steel.  The “cattle” had already surged from their stifling and foul-smelling cars in a noisy inundation of curiously mixed humanity.  They were of a dozen different nationalities, and as the girl looked at them it was not with revulsion or scorn but with a sudden quickening of heartbeat and a little laugh that had in it something both of wonder and of pride.  This was the Horde, that crude, monstrous thing of primitive strength and passions that was overturning mountains in its fight to link the new Grand Trunk Pacific with the seaport on the Pacific.  In that Horde, gathered in little groups, shifting, sweeping slowly toward her and past her, she saw something as omnipotent as the mountains themselves.  They could not know defeat.  She sensed it without ever having seen them before.  For her the Horde now had a heart and a soul.  These were the builders of empire—­the man-beasts who made it possible for Civilization to creep warily and without peril into new places and new worlds.  With a curious shock she thought of the half-dozen lonely little wooden crosses she had seen through the car window at odd places along the line of rail.