Out of that south, where in
places the plains swept the forest back almost to the river's edge, he
heard now and then the doglike barking of his little yellow friends of
many an exciting horseback chase, the coyotes, and on the wilderness
side, deep in the forest, the sinister howling of wolves. He was
traveling, literally, the narrow pathway between two worlds. The river
was that pathway. On the one hand, not so very far away, were the
rolling prairies, green fields of grain, settlements and towns and the
homes of men; on the other the wilderness lay to the water's edge with
its doors still open to him. The seventh day a new sound came to his
ears at dawn. It was the whistle of a train at Prince Albert.
There was no change in that whistle, and every nerve-string in his body
responded to it with crying thrill. It was the first voice to greet his
home-coming, and the sound of it rolled the yesterdays back upon him in
a deluge. He knew where he was now; he recalled exactly what he would
find at the next turn in the river. A few minutes later he heard the
wheezy chug, chug, chug of the old gold dredge at McCoffin's Bend. It
would be the Betty M., of course, with old Andy Duggan at the windlass,
his black pipe in mouth, still scooping up the shifting sands as he had
scooped them up for more than twenty years.
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