The towns rose stark from the prairie in unsoftened ugliness, and there
was nothing to stir the imagination in the great waste of sun-bleached
grass. Day by day, while the dust whirled by them, and the gaunt
telegraph posts came up out of the far horizon and sank into the east,
they raced across the wide levels. The red dawns burned behind them,
the sunsets flamed ahead, and still there was only dust and grass,
chequered here and there with bands of stubble, while driving grit and
ugliness were the salient features of the little stations they stopped
at.

Miss Deringham had read enough to learn that pistol and bandolier had
long gone out of fashion in Western Canada, where, indeed, they had
rarely formed a necessary portion of the plainsman's attire, but she
had expected a little vivid colour and dash of romance. The
stock-riders she saw at the station were, however, for the most part
dress in faded jean, and many of them appeared to speak excellent
English, while the wheat-growers rode soberly in dusty and dilapidated
wagons. Still the romance was there, though in place of the
swashbuckling cavalier she found only quiet, slowly-spoken men, with
patience most plainly stamped upon their sun-darkened faces. Their
hands were hard with the grip of the bridle and plough-stilt in place
of the rifle, and the struggle they waged was a slow and grim one
against frost and drought and adverse seasons.

There was, however, a transformation when she awoke one morning and
found the Rockies had been left behind, and they were roaring down
through the passes of British Columbia. This was a new, and apparently
unfinished, world, a land of tremendous mountains, leagues of forests,
such as her imagination had never pictured, and untrodden heights of