The train sped westwards through the Manitoba farms and villages.
Anderson slept intermittently, haunted by various important affairs that
were on his mind, and by recollections of the afternoon. Meanwhile, in
the front of the train, the paragraph from the _Winnipeg Chronicle_ lay
carefully folded in an old tramp's waistcoat pocket.



CHAPTER V

"I say, Elizabeth, you're not going to sit out there all day, and get
your death of cold? Why don't you come in and read a novel like a
sensible woman?"

"Because I can read a novel at home--and I can't see Canada."

"See Canada! What is there to see?" The youth with the scornful voice
came to lean against the doorway beside her. "A patch of corn--miles and
miles of some withered stuff that calls itself grass, all of it as flat
as your hand--oh! and, by Jove! a little brown fellow--gopher, is that
their silly name?--scootling along the line. Go it, young 'un!" Philip
shied the round end of a biscuit tin after the disappearing brown thing.
"A boggy lake with a kind of salt fringe--unhealthy and horrid and
beastly--a wretched farm building--et cetera, et cetera!"

"Oh! look there, Philip--here is a school!"

Elizabeth bent forward eagerly. On the bare prairie stood a small white
house, like the house that children draw on their slates: a chimney in