But now she was at the window watching for Anderson.
The trail from Donaldminster to Battleford passed in front of the house, dividing the farm. Presently there came slowly along it a covered wagon drawn by a pair of sorry horses and piled at the back with household possessions. In front sat a man of slouching carriage, and in the interior of the wagon another figure could be dimly seen. The whole turn-out gave an impression of poverty and misfortune; and Elizabeth looked at it curiously.
Suddenly, the wagon drew up with a jerk at the gate of the farm, and the man descended, with difficulty, his limbs being evidently numb with cold.
Elizabeth caught up a fur cloak and ran to the door.
"Could you give us a bit of shelter for the night?" said the man sheepishly. "We'd thought of getting on to Battleford, but the little un's bad--and the missus perished with cold. We'd give you no trouble if we might warm ourselves a bit."
And he looked under his eyebrows at Elizabeth, at the bright fire behind her, and all the comfort of the new farmhouse. Yet under his shuffling manner there was a certain note of confidence. He was appealing to that Homeric hospitality which prevails throughout the farms of the Northwest.
And in five minutes, the horses were in the barn, the man sitting by the kitchen fire, while Elizabeth was ministering to the woman and child. The new-comers made a forlorn trio. They came from a district some fifty miles further south, and were travelling north in order to take shelter for a time with relations. The mother was a girl of twenty, worn with hardship and privation. The father, an English labourer, had taken up free land, but in spite of much help from a paternal Government, had not been able to fulfil his statutory obligation, and had now forfeited his farm. There was a history of typhoid fever, and as Elizabeth soon suspected, an incipient history of drink. In the first two years of his Canadian life the man worked for a farmer during the summer, and loafed in Winnipeg during the winter. There demoralisation had begun, and as Elizabeth listened, the shadow of the Old World seemed to be creeping across the radiant Canadian landscape. The same woes?--the same weaknesses?--the same problems of an unsound urban life?