It was with difficulty I refrained from embracing the bearer of such good tidings.
"Be easy," he commanded. "Ye'll need these demonstrations, I'm thinkin'--huntin' one lass and losin' y'r heart to another."
We arranged he should go to Fort Douglas for Frances Sutherland and I was to set out later. They were to ride along the river-path south of the forks where I could join them. I, myself, picked out and paid for two extra horses, one a quiet little cayuse with ambling action, the other, a muscular broncho. I had the satisfaction of seeing Father Holland mounted on the latter setting out for Fort Douglas, while the Indian pony wearing an empty side-saddle trotted along in tow.
The information I brought back from Fort Douglas delayed any more hostile demonstrations against the Hudson's Bay. That very morning, before I had finished breakfast, Governor McDonell rode over to Fort Gibraltar, and on condition that Fort Douglas be left unmolested gave himself up to the Nor'-Westers. At noon, when I was riding off to the buffalo hunt and the Missouri, I saw the captain, smiling and debonair, embarking--or rather being embarked--with North-West brigades, to be sent on a free trip two thousand five hundred miles to Montreal.
"A safe voyage to ye," said Duncan Cameron, commander of Nor'-Westers, as the ex-governor of Red River settled himself in a canoe. "A safe voyage to ye, mon!"
"And a prosperous return," was the ironical answer of the dauntless ruler over the Hudson's Bay.
"Sure now, Rufus," said Father Holland to me a year afterwards, "'twas a prosperous return he had!"
Fortunately, I had my choice of scouts, and, by dangling the prospects of a buffalo hunt before La Robe Noire and Little Fellow, tempted them to come with me.
When the prima-donna of some vauntful city trills her bird-song above the foot-lights, or the cremona moans out the sigh of night-winds through the forest, artificial townsfolk applaud. Yet a nesting-tree, a thousand leagues from city discords, gives forth better music with deeper meaning and higher message--albeit the songster sings only from love of song. The fretted folk of the great cities cannot understand the witching fascinations of a wild life in a wild, free, tameless land, where God's own hand ministers to eye and ear. To fare sumptuously, to dress with the faultless distinction that marks wealth, to see and above all to be seen--these are the empty ends for which city men engage in a mad, feverish pursuit of wealth, trample one another down in a strife more ruthless than war and gamble away gifts of mind and soul. These are the things for which they barter all freedom but the name. Where one succeeds a thousand fail. Those with higher aims count themselves happy, indeed, to possess a few square feet of canvas, that truly represents the beauty dear to them, before weeds had undermined and overgrown and choked the temple of the soul. That any one should exchange gilded chains for freedom to give manhood shoulder swing, to be and to do--without infringing on the liberty of others to be and to do--is to such folk a matter of no small wonderment. For my part, I know I was counted mad by old associates of Quebec when I chose the wild life of the north country.