ase of comfort, opportunity and
sense of security in our lives and the lives of our families, the fight
will be long and hard.

"And we are going to need every man we can muster."

[1] See Appendix--Par. 1.

CHAPTER IV

"THAT MAN PARTRIDGE!"

Any man can work when every stroke of his hand brings down the fruit
rattling from the tree to the ground; but to labor in season and out of
season, under every discouragement, by the power of faith . . . that
requires a heroism which is transcendent. And no man, I think, ever
puts the plow into the furrow and does not look back, and sows good
seed therein, that a harvest does not follow.--_Henry Ward Beecher_.

It was a handy place to live, that little tar-paper shanty around which
the prairie wind whooed and whiffed with such disdain. So small was it
that it was possible to wash oneself, dress oneself and get breakfast
without getting out of bed. On the wall was a shelf which did duty as
a table. There were also a little box stove and some odds and ends.
When the roof leaked, which was every time it rained, it was necessary
to put pans on the bed to catch the drip.

But it was better than the tent in which E. A. Partridge and his
brother slept through their first star-strewn winter nights on the open
prairie--more pretentious than the tent and assuredly not so cold. The
two boys were proud of it, even though they were fresh from
civilization--from Simcoe County, Ontario, where holly-hocks topped the
fences of old-fashioned flower gardens in summer and the houses had
shingles on top to keep out the weather, and where there were no
coyotes to howl lonesomely at night, where--Well, never mind. Those
houses belonged to other people; the shanty was theirs. All around
stretched acres and acres of snow; but there was land under that
snow--rich, new land--and that was theirs, too, by right of
homesteading.

It was about Christmas time in 1883 when E. A. Partridge was
twenty-one. The place was near Sintaluta, District of Assiniboia,
North-West Territories, and homesteading there in the days before the
Rebellion was no feather bed for those who tackled it. A piece of
actual money was a thing to take out and look at every little while, to
show to one's friends and talk about.

Season after season the half starved agricultural pathfinders lost
their hard-earned crops by drouth and what was not burned out by the
sun was eaten by ubiquitous gophers. The drouth