"good-night", and as soon as he had left the room her sweet-faced mother
would smother her with kisses before she tucked her darling between the
spotless sheets of her cradle, and many were the times that I turned
away from this picture of perfect domestic happiness as tears were
welling into my eyes, for I realized that I had missed that which is
most sublime in all creation:

A loving wife and devoted mother; a healthy baby and one's own "Home,
sweet Home."

[Illustration: Baby Helen playing in the fields]




CHAPTER III.

"The Wreck."


Gradually I regained the use of my one-time totally frozen limbs, and
when I felt myself able to do the severe labor required of men who toil
upon a railroad section to earn their daily bread, I begged Foreman
McDonald to allow me to work with his crew. I explained to him that this
would be the greatest favor he could do for me, who found himself
marooned many hundreds of miles from a city, without a job and
penniless, in the midst of a bleak, snow-buried prairie. I also argued
with him that to give me employment would be the easiest means for me to
discharge my debt to him, which, although he absolutely refused to
listen to any talk of indebtedness on my part, amounted to a tidy sum.