The Flats was a forlorn little trading station fifteen miles up
the river from Prince Albert, with a scanty population of
half-breeds and three white men. When Jerome Carey was sent to
take charge of the telegraph office there, he cursed his fate in
the picturesque language permissible in the far Northwest.
Not that Carey was a profane man, even as men go in the West. He
was an English gentleman, and he kept both his life and his
vocabulary pretty clean. But--the Flats!
Outside of the ragged cluster of log shacks, which comprised the
settlement, there was always a shifting fringe of teepees where
the Indians, who drifted down from the Reservation, camped with
their dogs and squaws and papooses. There are standpoints from
which Indians are interesting, but they cannot be said to offer
congenial social attractions. For three weeks after Carey went
to the Flats he was lonelier than he had ever imagined it
possible to be, even in the Great Lone Land. If it had not been
for teaching Paul Dumont the telegraphic code, Carey believed he
would have been driven to suicide in self-defense.
The telegraphic importance of the Flats consisted in the fact
that it was the starting point of three telegraph lines to remote
trading posts up North. Not many messages came therefrom, but
the few that did come generally amounted to something worth
while. Days and even weeks would pass without a single one being
clicked to the Flats.
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