train since entering the mountains, and she understood now why some one in
the coach had spoken of the Miette Plain as Sunshine Pool. Where-ever she
looked the mountains fronted her, with their splendid green slopes reaching
up to their bald caps of gray shale and reddish rock or gleaming summits of
snow. Into this "pool"--this pocket in the mountains--the sun descended in
a wonderful flood. It stirred her blood like a tonic. She breathed more
quickly; a soft glow coloured her cheeks; her eyes grew more deeply violet
as they caught the reflection of the blue sky. A gentle wind fretted the
loose tendrils of brown hair about her face. And the bearded man, staring
through the car window, saw her thus, and for an hour after that the
hollow-cheeked girl wondered at the strange change in him.

The train had stopped at the edge of the big fill overlooking the Flats. It
was a heavy train, and a train that was helping to make history--a
combination of freight, passenger, and "cattle." It had averaged eight
miles an hour on its climb toward Yellowhead Pass and the end of steel. The
"cattle" had already surged from their stifling and foul-smelling cars in a
noisy inundation of curiously mixed humanity. They were of a dozen
different nationalities, and as the girl looked at them it was not with
revulsion or scorn but with a sudden quickening of heartbeat and a little
laugh that had in it something both of wonder and of pride. This was the
Horde, that crude, monstrous thing of primitive strength and passions that
was overturning mountains in its fight to link the new Grand Trunk Pacific
with the seaport on the Pacific. In that Horde, gathered in little groups,
shifting, sweeping slowly toward her and past her, she saw something as
omnipotent as the mountains themselves. They could not know defeat. She
sensed it without ever having seen them before. For her the Horde now had a
heart and a soul. These were the builders of empire--the man-beasts who
made it possible for Civilization to creep warily and without peril into
new places and new worlds. With a curious shock she thought of the