of it. Two, with a
certain courtliness which also was foreign to that district, helped an
elderly lady down from a light carriage luxuriously hung on springs, which
must have been built specially at the cost of many dollars, and the rest
led their well-groomed horses toward the store stables, or strolled beside
the track jesting with one another. None of them wore the skin coats of
the settlers. Some were robed in furs, and others in soft-lined deerskin,
gaily fringed by Blackfoot squaws, which became them; but except for this
they were of the British type most often met with gripping the hot
double-barrel when the pheasants sweep clattering athwart the wood, or
sitting intent and eager with tight hand on the rein outside the fox
cover.

Still, no one could say they had suffered by their translation to a new
country, which was chiefly due to Colonel Carrington. He had been
successful hitherto at wheat-growing on an extensive scale, and though few
of the settlers liked him they could not help admiring the bold far-seeing
way in which he speculated on the chances of the weather, or hedged
against a risky wheat crop by purchasing western horses. Still, not
content with building up the finest property thereabout, he aspired to
rule over a British settlement, and each time that he visited the old
country at regular intervals several young Englishmen of good family and
apparently ample means returning with him commenced breaking virgin
prairie. They were not all a success as farmers, the settlers said, and
there were occasional rumors of revolt; but if they had their differences
with the grim autocrat they kept them loyally to themselves, and never
spoke in public of their leader save with respect. Now it was evident that
his daughter was expected; they had come to escort her home in state, and
no princess could have desired a finer bodyguard. They were the pick of
the old country's well-born youth when they came out, and now they had
grown to a splendid manhood in the wide spaces of the prairie.

Though they answered our greetings with good fellowship, I am afraid we
regarded them a little enviously, for the value of some of their horses
would have sown us a crop, and even Harry seemed unkempt beside them. We
lived and dressed very plainly at Fairmead that year. Then amid a grinding
of brakes, with lights flashing, a long train rolled in, and the group
stood, fur cap in hand, about the platform of a car from which a dainty