ss was hauled from its cache and
brought to the fort; but it failed to throw much later light upon the
meagre news of the previous evening. Old Adam was tried for verbal
intelligence, but he too proved a failure. He had carried the packet from
Norway House on Lake Winnipeg to Carlton for more than a score of
winters, and, from the fact of his being the bearer of so much news in
his lifetime, was looked upon by his compeers as a kind of condensed
electric telegraph; but when the question of war was fairly put to him,
he gravely replied that at the forts he had heard there was war, and
"England," he added, "was gaining the day." This latter fact was too much
for me, for I was but too well aware that had war been declared in
November, an army organization based upon the Parliamentary system was
not likely to have "gained the day" in the short space of three weeks.

To cross with celerity the 700 miles lying between me and Fort Garry
Became now the chief object of my life. I lightened my baggage as much as
possible, dispensing with many comforts of clothing and equipment, and on
the morn ing of the 23rd January started for Cumberland. I will not dwell
on the seven days that now ensued, or how from long before dawn to verge
of evening we toiled down the great silent river. It was the close of
January, the very depth of winter. With heads bent down to meet the
crushing blast, we plodded on, oft times as silent as the river and the
forest, from whose bosom no sound ever came, no ripple ever broke, no
bird, no beast, no human face, but ever the same great forest-fringed
river whose majestic turns bent always to the north-east. To tell, day
after day, the extreme of cold that now seldom varied would be to inflict
on the reader a tiresome record; and, in truth, there would be no use in
attempting it; 40 below zero means so many things impossible to picture
or to describe, that it would be a hopeless task to enter upon its
delineation. After one has gone through the list of all those things that
freeze; after one has spoken of the knife which burns the hand that would
touch its blade, the tea that freezes while it is being dlrunk, there
still remains a sense of having said nothing; a sense which may perhaps
be better understood by saying that 40 degrees below zero means just one
thing more than all these items--it means death, in a period whose duration
would expire in the hours of a winter's daylight, if there was no fire or
means