threshold to new
activities and new outlets for his intense energies. Since the face
and form of Mary Allan had first enraptured him in his little
backwoods school district, a vast ambition had possessed his soul,
and to-day, which had seemed to be its end, he now knew to be but its
beginning. The ready consent of his betrothed to share his life in
the unknown wilderness between the Red River and the Rocky Mountains
had been a tide which, taken at its flood, might well lead him on to
fortune. At the conclusion of his fall term he had resigned his
position as teacher, and with his small savings had set about
accumulating equipment essential to the homesteader. A team of
horses, cows, a few ducks, geese, and hens; a plough, a wagon, a
sleigh, a set of carpenter's tools; a gun, an axe, a compass, a chest
of medicine, a box of books; a tent, bedding, spare clothing--these
he had gathered together at the village store or at farmers' "sales,"
and the doing so had almost exhausted the winter and his money.

Because his effects were not enough to fill a car he had "doubled up"
with Tom Morrison, a fine farmer whose worldly success had been
somewhat less than his deserts, and who bravely hoped to mend his
broken fortunes where land might be had for the taking. Their car had
already gone forward, with Morrison's hired man nestling obviously in
the hay, and two others hid under the mangers. When railways were
invented they were excepted from the protection of the Eighth
Commandment.

So John Harris and his bride took the passenger train from her city
home, while their goods and chattels, save for their personal
baggage, rumbled on in a box-car or crowded stolidly into congested
side-tracks as the exigencies of traffic required.

At a junction point they were transferred from the regular passenger
service to an immigrant train. Immigrant trains, in the spring of
'eighty-two, were somewhat more and less than they now are. The
tourist sleeper, with its comfortable berths, its clean linen, its
kitchen range, and its dusky attendant, restrained to an attitude of
agreeable deference by his anticipation of a gratuity, was a grey
atom of potentiality in the brain of an unknown genius. Even the
colonist car, which has done noble service in later days in the
peopling of the Prairie West, was only in the early stages of its
evolution. The purpose of immigrant trains was to move people. To
supply comforts as well as locomotion was an ext