And when Scarlett, laughing, shook his head, refusing a moiety of his own ready money that, at Evelyn's direction, Sarah was proffering him, "Then at least tell me your name--for in the excitement I am ashamed to say I have clean forgotten it."
"Yes, yes," insisted the group, "your name!"
"'Tis the same as it has always been," he answered, blithely, turning on his heel. "I haven't changed it yet. Any time ye want me just ask at headquarters for Himself, for Scarlett of the Mounted."
A few days later Evelyn, accompanied by Sarah, knocked at the door of St. Andrew's Mission, near Perdu. An Indian woman opened to her, and on her asking for Mr. Maclane, the minister came forward with a cordial welcome.
"I won't invite you in, since just at present my study is in requisition as a hospital, and in any case you will doubtless prefer the veranda with its vista of the mountains."
"And your lovely garden," added Evelyn, glancing at the beds in which vegetables and ornamental plants were growing in orderly profusion. "I never supposed that cultivation was possible so far north."
"That is a common mistake," replied the minister. "But it is the same with plants as with people: wherever it is possible for them to grow it is intended that they should be cultivated; by which I do not mean that we should take the nature out of them, teaching them tricks and artificial ways; I mean that we should improve the conditions surrounding them, in order that their natural tendencies and activities may have the widest scope for beneficent purposes."
"And yet"--Evelyn looked up and down the road--"you seem to be almost the only one who recognizes these possibilities. All the cabins seem to have been dropped in uncompromising rows along the highways, as if they were so many children's toys taken out of cardboard boxes labeled 'Made in Germany'."
"Ah, most of the folk who come here are so busily engrossed in spading up the soil for treasure they have no time to till and sow. Yet our short summer of long days is capable of harvests that would yield pure gold in a land of canned supplies, where men get to long for green food as for water in the desert. Metz, the pioneer baker of Perdu, a far-sighted German, is raking in the gold-dust that other men laboriously pan out, by the sackful, simply by adding a fresh lettuce leaf, or radish, to every plate of fried eggs and bacon that he serves. Brackett of Atlin is famous for the beauty of his poppy patch that blazes like a banner on a dusty mountainside, no less than for the succulence of the turnips with which he regales his friends, all grown on a tiny corner of an auriferous claim that overhangs the sluiceboxes. Dr. Milne of Dawson received a prize for the tomatoes and celery he took down from his far-north home to the exposition in Victoria, on the occasion of the visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales. Indeed, there was a story going the rounds that on the third day of the exposition, when the good doctor wanted to substitute fresh produce for his own, which, by that time had wilted, he could find none in Victoria to match their size. And I myself am not a little proud of my own sweet-peas." He handed Evelyn the fragrant blossoms he had been cutting as he talked.
