At twilight—­an unearthly sort of twilight—­there came another curious picture.  Thus—­a wooden town shut in among low, treeless, rolling ground, a calling river that ran unseen between scarped banks; barracks of a detachment of mounted police, a little cemetery where ex-troopers rested, a painfully formal public garden with pebble paths and foot-high fir trees, a few lines of railway buildings, white women walking up and down in the bitter cold with their bonnets off, some Indians in red blanketing with buffalo horns for sale trailing along the platform, and, not ten yards from the track, a cinnamon bear and a young grizzly standing up with extended arms in their pens and begging for food.  It was strange beyond anything that this bald telling can suggest—­opening a door into a new world.  The only commonplace thing about the spot was its name—­Medicine Hat, which struck me instantly as the only possible name such a town could carry.  This is that place which later became a town; but I had seen it three years before when it was even smaller and was reached by me in a freight-car, ticket unpaid for.

That next morning brought us the Canadian Pacific Railway as one reads about it.  No pen of man could do justice to the scenery there.  The guide-books struggle desperately with descriptions, adapted for summer reading, of rushing cascades, lichened rocks, waving pines, and snow-capped mountains; but in April these things are not there.  The place is locked up—­dead as a frozen corpse.  The mountain torrent is a boss of palest emerald ice against the dazzle of the snow; the pine-stumps are capped and hooded with gigantic mushrooms of snow; the rocks are overlaid five feet deep; the rocks, the fallen trees, and the lichens together, and the dumb white lips curl up to the track cut in the side of the mountain, and grin there fanged with gigantic icicles.  You may listen in vain when the train stops for the least sign of breath or power among the hills.  The snow has smothered the rivers, and the great looping trestles run over what might be a lather of suds in a huge wash-tub.  The old snow near by is blackened and smirched with the smoke of locomotives, and its dulness is grateful to aching eyes.  But the men who live upon the line have no consideration for these things.  At a halting-place in a gigantic gorge walled in by the snows, one of them reels from a tiny saloon into the middle of the track where half-a-dozen dogs are chasing a pig off the metals.  He is beautifully and eloquently drunk.  He sings, waves his hands, and collapses behind a shunting engine, while four of the loveliest peaks that the Almighty ever moulded look down upon him.  The landslide that should have wiped that saloon into kindlings has missed its mark and has struck a few miles down the line.  One of the hillsides moved a little in dreaming of the spring and caught a passing freight train.  Our cars grind cautiously by, for the wrecking engine has only just come through.  The deceased engine