Part 6 (2/2)

He stopped and listened to the music as it stole plaintively from the distance into the room. When he began to move toward the door again he was absently repeating the haunting refrain:

”Home, home, sweet, sweet home--.”

The music, as well as his words, had floated to the deep bay window; the curtains had swiftly and noiselessly parted, and she was stealing after his retreating figure with an expression mantling her face which brought out every detail of its great beauty.

As he raised his hand to open the door the organ drifted from the refrain to the air.

He began sadly to repeat the pathetic words:

”An exile from home--.”

Two warm, loving arms had stolen around his neck from behind and smothered the words on his lips: ”Not an exile from home, Harold; no, no, not that, dear! The boots--we understand better now--forgive me, Harold. Don't go. I----.”

Once more the organ had reached the refrain:

”Home, home, sweet, sweet home--.”

As he folded her pa.s.sionately in his arms she drew his face down to hers and said, with the happy light still glowing and beautifying her face: ”We will take it as a good omen; to us, now, there shall be no place like home, shall there, dear?”

As he looked into her eyes he answered by lovingly repeating the refrain which was now dying softly away in the distance:

”Home, home, sweet, sweet home--.”

A Prairie Episode.

The fierce rays of the sun, which had turned the prairie gra.s.s into a lifeless-looking dusty brown, continued to pour pitilessly down on the horde of perspiring workmen, exhausted Indian ponies, and long-eared morose mules.

At intervals, gusts of hot parching winds bent the rank gra.s.s, which gave forth a dry, almost rasping sound, very different from its usual musical rustle.

”In ten minutes more it will be noon, and we can get out of this into the shade for an hour,” said Joe Swan, a huge muscular laborer, as he pushed the nose of the steel sc.r.a.per into the earth.

The words were addressed to a pale-faced young man who was driving the pair of mules. .h.i.tched to the sc.r.a.per. The only reply was a tired tug on the reins, and the next moment the sc.r.a.per had torn up half a yard of the tenacious prairie sod and cast it to one side. As he turned the mules around to get them into position again, Joe glanced covertly at the weary face, shook his head in a troubled manner, and muttered, ”It ain't the work that's breaking him up like this; it's her, and it's going to end in trouble long before we reach the Rockies.”

It was a strange, almost fantastic life these two men, with hundreds of others, were leading away out here on the vast prairie, whose long solitude was now being broken by the babel that attends track-laying, and whose vast bosom, for the first time, was being girded with a band of steel which was to connect the Atlantic with the Pacific, and bring home most forcibly to the Mother Country the value of her great Canadian colony.

Stretching away in front of and behind the two men were hundreds of other sc.r.a.pers, tearing up the sod, while closely following them came gangs of track-layers, who laid the ties and fastened the rails to them as quickly as the sod was removed. It was easy work track-laying on the flat expanse, where grading for hundreds of miles at a stretch was practically unnecessary. Such, indeed, was the rapidity with which the rails were laid that camp had to be moved from two to three miles westward every day, so that the men never knew what it was to sleep twice in the same place.

As Joe was about to scoop up another load, a gunshot echoed and re-echoed across the prairie. ”Dinner time; just what we have been waiting for!” shouted Joe, as he let go the handles of the sc.r.a.per, unhitched the mules, sprang on the back of one of them, and stooping, swung Harry Langdon, his delicate-looking driver, laughingly across the back of the other. The next moment they were das.h.i.+ng towards the camp half a mile away. Other laborers, similarly mounted, were straining every muscle to reach the same place, for they knew that the rule of ”first come, first served,” would be religiously adhered to.

A fast friends.h.i.+p had sprung up between the huge sc.r.a.per-handler and his young driver. The very day the little fellow had wandered into camp, two months before, with his hands and face swollen with mosquito bites, and asked for a job, big-hearted Joe took a liking to him. It was owing to Joe's influence with the foremen that he was at last, grudgingly, given work, as his slim, girlish figure told strongly against him among such a crowd of sinewy, hardy men.

Had he been put driving for any other sc.r.a.per-handler than Joe he would never have succeeded; for before he had been in camp a week the thick tepid surface water, which they all had to drink, coupled with the intense heat, told on him, and for weeks he was so ill that he could scarcely drag his feet along.

Owing to the custom of each sc.r.a.per being compelled to clear a certain distance every day, it was impossible--on account of the great stretch to be covered by all the sc.r.a.pers--for the foremen to more than two or three times a day visit the works, and thus it was that Joe, unknown to the foremen, was able to let his little driver lie for hours, when he was at his weakest, in the thick gra.s.s, while he wrestled with the stubborn mules and the sc.r.a.per at the same time.

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