“Who all?”

“Why, everybody in Winnipeg.”

“Does Mrs. French?” said Jack quietly.

The boy’s face flushed hotly.

“No, no,” he said vehemently, “never her.”  Then after a pause and an evident struggle, “She wants me to stop, but all the men and the boys do it.”

“Kalman,” said French solemnly, “no one swears on my ranch.”

Kalman was perplexed, remembering the scene of the previous night.

“But you—­” he began, and then paused.

“Boy,” repeated French with added solemnity, “swearing is a foolish and unnecessary evil.  There is no swearing on my ranch.  Promise me you will give up this habit.”

“I will not,” said the boy promptly, “for I would break my word.  Don’t you swear?”

French hesitated, and then as if forming a sudden resolution he replied, “When you hear me swear you can begin.  And if you don’t mean to quit, don’t promise.  A gentleman always keeps his word.”

The boy looked him steadily in the eye and then said, as if pondering this remark, “I remember.  I know.  My father said so.”

French forbore to press the matter further, but for both man and boy an attempt at a new habit of speech began that day.

Once clear of the Saskatchewan River, the trail led over rolling prairie, set out with numerous “bluffs” of western maple and poplar, and diversified with sleughs and lakes of varying size, a country as richly fertile and as fair to look upon as is given the eyes of man to behold anywhere in God’s good world.  In the dullest weather this rolling, tree-decked, sleugh-gemmed prairie presents a succession of scenes surpassingly beautiful, but with a westering sun upon it, and on a May day, it offers such a picture as at once entrances the soul and lives forever in the memory.  The waving lines, the rounded hills, the changing colour, the chasing shadows on grass and bluff and shimmering water, all combine to make in the soul high music unto God.

For an hour and more the buckboard hummed along the trail smooth and winding, the bronchos pulling hard on the lines without a sign of weariness, till the bluffs began to grow thicker and gradually to close into a solid belt of timber.  Beyond this belt of timber lay the Ruthenian Colony but newly placed.  The first intimation of the proximity of this colony came in quite an unexpected way.  Swinging down a sharp hill through a bluff, the bronchos came upon a man with a yoke of oxen hauling a load of hay.  Before their course could be checked the ponies had pitched heavily into the slow moving and terrified oxen, and so disconcerted them that they swerved from the trail and upset the load.  Immediately there rose a volley of shrill execrations in the Galician tongue.

“Whoa, buck!  Steady there!” cried Jack French cheerily as he steered his team past the wreck.  “Too bad that, we must go back and help to repair damages.”

He tied the bronchos securely to a tree and went back to offer aid.  The Galician, a heavily-built man, was standing on the trail with a stout stake in his hand, viewing the ruins of his load and expressing his emotions in voluble Galician profanity with a bad mixture of halting and broken English.  Kalman stood beside French with wrath growing in his face.