to be found the most enterprising, the most daring, of the peoples of
the old lands. The broken, the outcast, the disappointed, these too
have found their way to the ranches among the Foothills. A country it is
whose sunlit hills and shaded valleys reflect themselves in the lives
of its people; for nowhere are the contrasts of light and shade more
vividly seen than in the homes of the ranchmen of the Albertas.

The experiences of my life have confirmed in me the orthodox conviction
that Providence sends his rain upon the evil as upon the good; else I
should never have set my eyes upon the Foothill country, nor touched its
strangely fascinating life, nor come to know and love the most striking
man of all that group of striking men of the Foothill country--the dear
old Pilot, as we came to call him long afterwards. My first year in
college closed in gloom. My guardian was in despair. From this distance
of years I pity him. Then I considered him unnecessarily concerned about
me--"a fussy old hen," as one of the boys suggested. The invitation from
Jack Dale, a distant cousin, to spend a summer with him on his ranch in
South Alberta came in the nick of time. I was wild to go. My guardian
hesitated long; but no other solution of the problem of my disposal
offering, he finally agreed that I could not well get into more trouble
by going than by staying. Hence it was that, in the early summer of
one of the eighties, I found myself attached to a Hudson's Bay Company
freight train, making our way from a little railway town in Montana
towards the Canadian boundary. Our train consisted of six wagons
and fourteen yoke of oxen, with three cayuses, in charge of a French
half-breed and his son, a lad of about sixteen. We made slow enough
progress, but every hour of the long day, from the dim, gray, misty
light of dawn to the soft glow of shadowy evening, was full of new
delights to me. On the evening of the third day we reached the Line
Stopping Place, where Jack Dale met us. I remember well how my heart