Beside the platform were ranged two touring cars. Three or four of
those who had alighted entered these. Their baggage was piled over the
hoods, buckled on the running boards. The driver of one car approached
her. "Hot Springs?" he inquired tersely.

She affirmed this, and he took her baggage, likewise her trunk check
when she asked how that article would be transported to the lake. She
had some idea of route and means, from her brother's written
instruction, but she thought he might have been there to meet her. At
least he would be at the Springs.

So she was whirled along a country road, jolted in the tonneau between a
fat man from Calgary and a rheumatic dame on her way to take hot sulphur
baths at St. Allwoods. She passed seedy farmhouses, primitive in
construction, and big barns with moss plentifully clinging on roof and
gable. The stretch of charred stumps was left far behind, but in every
field of grain and vegetable and root great butts of fir and cedar rose
amid the crops. Her first definitely agreeable impression of this land,
which so far as she knew must be her home, was of those huge and
numerous stumps contending with crops for possession of the fields.
Agreeable, because it came to her forcibly that it must be a sturdy
breed of men and women, possessed of brawn and fortitude and high
courage, who made their homes here. Back in her country, once beyond
suburban areas, the farms lay like the squares of a chess board, trim
and orderly, tamely subdued to agriculture. Here, at first hand, she saw
how man attacked the forest and conquered it. But the conquest was
incomplete, for everywhere stood those stubborn roots, six and eight and
ten feet across, contending with man for its primal heritage, the soil,
perishing slowly as perish the proud remnants of a conquered race.