Ida Stirling was an unusually fortunate young woman, in so far, at least, as that she had only to mention any desire that it was in her father's power to gratify.

He was a strenuous man, whose work was his life; subtle where that work was concerned when force, which he preferred, was not advisable, but crudely direct and simple as regards almost everything else.
"I'm going west across the Rockies to-morrow," he said.

"We'll have a private car on the Pacific express.

You'd better bring these folk along and show them the Mountain Province." Ida was pleased with the idea; and Stirling and his party started west on the morrow.
In the meanwhile, Construction Foreman Cassidy was spending an anxious time.

He was red-haired and irascible, Canadian by adoption and Hibernian by descent, a man of no ideas beyond those connected with railroad building, which was, however, very much what one would have expected, for the chief attribute of the men who are building up the western Dominion is their power of concentration.