For a week John Keith followed up the shores of the Saskatchewan. It
was a hundred and forty miles from the Hudson's Bay Company's post of
Cumberland House to Prince Albert as the crow would fly, but Keith did
not travel a homing line. Only now and then did he take advantage of a
portage trail. Clinging to the river, his journey was lengthened by
some sixty miles. Now that the hour for which Conniston had prepared
him was so close at hand, he felt the need of this mighty, tongueless
friend that had played such an intimate part in his life. It gave to
him both courage and confidence, and in its company he could think more
clearly. Nights he camped on its golden-yellow bars with the open stars
over his head when he slept; his ears drank in the familiar sounds of
long ago, for which he had yearned to the point of madness in his
exile--the soft cries of the birds that hunted and mated in the glow of
the moon, the friendly twit, twit, twit of the low-flying sand-pipers,
the hoot of the owls, and the splash and sleepy voice of wildfowl
already on their way up from the south. Out of that south, where in
places the plains swept the forest back almost to the river's edge, he
heard now and then the doglike barking of his little yellow friends of
many an exciting horseback chase, the coyotes, and on the wilderness
side, deep in the forest, the sinister howling of wolves. He was
traveling, literally, the narrow pathway between two worlds. The river
was that pathway. On the one hand, not so very far away, were the
rolling prairies, green fields of grain, settlements and towns and the
homes of men; on the other the wilderness lay to the water's edge with
its doors still open to him. The seventh day a new sound came to his
ears at dawn. It was the whistle of a train at Prince Albert.

There was no change in that whistle, and every nerve-string in his body
responded to it with crying thrill. It was the first voice to greet his