APRIL was in. There were sheets of flowers—mauve, yellow, pink, and purple—in the open spaces of the forest ground at Bratley. The streams were swollen and muddy from the melting snows on the higher hills, while the sun shone more warmly and the day grew longer.
Nell, child of nature that she was, grew entranced with the beauty and promise all about her, and but for the duty which chained her fast to the little office at the depot for twelve hours out of every twenty-four, she would have been out-of-doors the whole day long.
Her office was a perfect bower of beauty in these spring days, for so many people brought her flowers and other offerings of a similar nature, in return for kindly offices of one sort and another which she had at different times performed.
Having no exalted notions regarding her own dignity, she was always ready to help other people without fear of lowering herself thereby.
When Mrs. Nichols fell ill with a bad cold early in March, Nell got up at five o’clock in the morning and did the week’s wash before going to her office. More than once, too, she trimmed the lamps at the depot, when the baggage-clerk, whose duty it was, smashed his thumb. Many, also, were the bits of needlework, stocking-darning, patching, and so forth, which she performed during office hours for over-taxed mothers of families.
Now she was reaping the reward of her small services; and to her, lonely as she had been, it was inexpressibly sweet to earn the loving-kindness of those about her. Having no people of her own, she was fain to adopt everyone in any sort of need who crossed her path; and she was by far the most popular person in Bratley during that sweet springtime.
There were two drops of bitterness in her cup, however. The first was the fear lest her grandfather should find her out, or be himself found out and sent to prison on account of some of that old-time law-breaking of which he had been guilty; the other drawback to her happiness lay in the fact that Gertrude was to come back at the middle of the month to take up her work again, and then she, Nell, must find some other occupation.
As yet she had made no plans for the future, except to arrange with Mrs. Nichols that she would stay there for a week or two after her deputy work was done, while looking round for work of her own.
Meanwhile the days were as full of work as it was possible to crowd them, and every night Nell went to bed so tired that she fell asleep directly her head touched the pillow. There was her own office work, which had grown more exacting now that spring had opened sources of employment which had been closed during winter; then she had sewing to do for herself and her neighbours; while every spare minute was filled in with efforts to increase her scanty store of book-learning.
The sewing was a harder task than it would have been to a girl who had led a less toilsome life. Nell’s hands and arms, roughened and strengthened by much wood-sawing and chopping, digging, and similar tasks, felt the awkwardness of what our great-grandmothers called sewing white seam.
But sewing is a distinctly feminine accomplishment; and as Nell yearned to excel in all womanly occupations, she persevered with needles and cotton until she became an adept at the gentle art.
As the time drew on for Gertrude’s arrival, she found herself looking forward to it with an eager delight, which pushed her personal pain of losing her employment quite into the background. Some work would be sure to turn up for herself sooner or later. Meanwhile she would have the pleasure of seeing Gertrude, and hearing news of the children.
Just a week before the day when Gertrude was to come, Nell got a letter which set her pulses fluttering, and made her dance about her office in sheer joyfulness of heart.
The letter was from headquarters, and offered her the post of telegraph-operator at Camp’s Gulch, at a salary equal to what Gertrude received at Bratley.
She longed to rush over to Mrs. Nichols with the good news, only she could not leave her office. So she hurried off to find her good friend the baggage-clerk, and ask him to go to Mrs. Nichols as soon as he could spare five minutes and say how badly she wanted speech with her.
“No bad news, I hope?” he said, with clumsy kindness; for her face had grown white and strained with the intensity of her hidden emotion.
“It is good news—for me. I will tell you presently, only I want Mrs. Nichols to know first,” she said, turning abruptly away, and walking off to her office again, feeling horribly afraid that she would break down and cry like a baby before his face.
“She’s a queer girl in some things. I’m blessed if ever I saw anyone take good news like that before,” he muttered, as he watched her hasty retreat.
Then, because he was decidedly curious on the subject of Nell’s news, he went over at once to the house where Mrs. Nichols lived, and startled that worthy woman rather considerably by the manner in which he delivered his message.
“Miss Hamblyn wants you to step over to the depot as spry as you can, for she’s got some news she wants to tell you—good news, she calls it; but to me she looks as if she’d had a smartish blow of some sort.”
“Gracious me, Sam Peters! Why couldn’t you have come before I’d got my hands messing into this bread? Or else why couldn’t you have stopped until I was through with it, and had set it to rise?” exclaimed Mrs. Nichols, in great exasperation; for she, being a true daughter of Eve, was intensely anxious to know what Nell’s news was.
“Well, ma’am, not being blessed with what folks call second sight, I don’t see how I could be supposed to know when you were going to be busy with a batch of bread. But you’d better come along as quick as you can, for Miss Hamblyn was as white as a sheet when she spoke to me, and she went off back to her office with her lips a-quiver like a child that’s just in for a good cry; and I ought to know, seeing that I have got seven of them.” Having delivered himself of this statement, Sam Peters walked away with his head in the air, leaving Mrs. Nichols in a condition bordering on distraction.
“Did any one ever see such a man? And whatever can Nell have heard that she should call good news, and yet want to cry over? I hope that old man Doss Umpey hasn’t been finding out where she is, and trying to get her to go back and live with him. Or perhaps she has heard of a situation a hundred miles away, and feels bad at going so far from Bratley.”
Mrs. Nichols’s bread had but scanty consideration that morning. It was certainly poked, prodded, thumped, kneaded, and all the rest of it; but everything was done in such an absent-minded fashion that it was not wonderful, it was a trifle sad and lumpy, turning out vastly inferior to the usual excellence of her productions in that line.
As soon as it could be left to rise at its leisure before the fire, Mrs. Nichols flung her big grey shawl round her, slipped a pair of rubbers over her worn house-shoes, and set off for the depot.
But when she arrived, very much out of breath, and panting from the haste she had made, Nell was busy at the sounder, and held up her hand in token that she must not be interrupted.
For a whole twenty minutes after that, Mrs. Nichols sat wheezing and puffing on the chair in the corner, while Nell listened to communications being ticked out from Lytton, and sent back replies to questions which were being asked.
At last, just when the stout woman’s patience was exhausted, and she was on the point of getting up and going back to her bread, the irritating clicking of the sounder ceased, and she had the satisfaction of seeing Nell turn round ready to talk and be talked to.
“I meant you should know first; that was why I sent for you, for I should have had hard work to keep a secret like this the whole day through. I have been offered the post at Camp’s Gulch, and so I shall be only fifteen miles away.”
“Now, that is what I call real good news!” exclaimed Mrs. Nichols, briskly. “And I will just give Sam Peters a piece of my mind for coming along and frightening me in the fashion he did,” she added resentfully.
“But I told him it was good news,” said Nell, whose colour had come back by this time.
“So he said; but he also informed me that you went white in the face, and that your lips were quivering as if you were going to cry. He even had the impudence to tell me that he ought to know how people looked when they were going to cry, because he’d got seven children.”
Nell laughed merrily. “Judging from the frequency with which his children do cry, I really think that he ought to know. I’m afraid, too, that I did feel rather like tears, for it was such a wonderful thing to me that my need should be met like this, and that I should not have to be one day out of employment,” she added, in a graver tone.
Mrs. Nichols sniffed dubiously. “I would have been glad enough to have you for a few weeks, or even a few months, come to that. And perhaps by waiting you might have found something better. Camp’s Gulch is a dreadful rough place, and I should think you would be nearly the only woman there.”
“Not quite so bad as that, I hope,” said Nell, drawing a rather wry face. “But don’t you see that my especial delight in the matter is because I shall be only fifteen miles from Bratley, and sometimes I can come over and spend Sundays with you and Gertrude?”
“There is that to be considered, certainly,” admitted Mrs. Nichols, tacitly consenting to be mollified. “Only, so far as roughness goes, you would have been better off at Roseneath, or any of the little places this side of Lytton.”
“Never mind; I have had to get used to a lot of roughness in my time, so perhaps I shall not feel it as a better brought-up girl might have done,” Nell said hopefully. And in her heart she determined to make the best of it, however rough and disagreeable the place might be.
“Your life may have been rough of late, but I guess you’ve been as well reared as most girls. Parson Hamblyn’s daughter would know as much as most what true refinement is, I fancy,” the stout woman said, with a toss of her head.
But Nell was not going to be drawn into any sort of argument on that score, for she had already had to find by experience that she was no match for Mrs. Nichols, who could talk her down in a very short time, so she only said quietly—
“It will be very nice to feel that I have got a permanent post, and work that is really my own to do at last, for I am getting a little tired of being moved on so often.”
“Poor child! I only wish it was a nicer place than Camp’s Gulch at which you were going to settle down. However, we can only hope it will be for the best; and now I must go back to that bread, for what it will be like is more than I can imagine,” said Mrs. Nichols, rising in a great hurry, as she suddenly remembered the lump of dough which was warming in the pan before the fire, ready and waiting to be baked.
After that the days were fuller than ever. Nell scrubbed out her office until it was clean as hands could make it, and the men about the depot declared themselves afraid to set foot inside the door. Then she polished everything which could by any amount of rubbing be induced to shine, and when everything was done which love could suggest or ingenuity devise, she sat down to wait with what patience she might the day and hour of Gertrude’s arrival.
Mrs. Nichols had also been having a grand upheaval in preparation for the coming of Gertrude. Nell’s little wooden-walled bedroom had been turned out and scrubbed, while Nell herself was occupying the draughty old loft, until the day of her departure for Camp’s Gulch.
It was not a comfortable sleeping-apartment, certainly, but it was far better than the room in which she had had to sleep at Blue Bird Ridge, and, never having been brought up to luxury, she thought less of discomforts than many other girls might have done.
The condition of her wardrobe troubled Nell rather at this juncture. Ever since coming to Bratley she had hoarded the remnant of salary left over after board and lodging were paid for, and from this small surplus had paid Mrs. Lorimer for the brown coat and cap which had stood her in such good stead all the winter. Gertrude had cried out hotly against taking the money, declaring that the cost of the coat had been earned three times over during the weeks when Nell toiled for them all at Lorimer’s Clearing; but Mrs. Lorimer had decided to keep it, and so there was nothing more to be said.
Now the days were getting brighter, and the merciless spring sunshine would show up the shabbiness of the old blue merino, which had to serve for Sundays and weekdays alike. Nell just yearned for a new frock, but the difficulty was how to get it. If she had been expert at her needle, as some girls were, she might have bought a few yards of cloth and put a frock together for herself; but, although she could manage to sew a straight seam, and set on a patch with a fair degree of neatness, and might even have done the sewing of a frock, if it had been put ready for her, the cutting-out and fixing were quite beyond her capabilities.
There were, of course, the thirty dollars belonging to the stranger, which she had found under the settle at the Lone House; but Nell would have gone about in actual rags, rather than have touched this sum, which she was always hoping to be able to return to the rightful owner.
On the evening of the day before Gertrude’s arrival, the baggage-clerk came up to Nell as she was leaving her office. He had a long, thin dress-box in his hand, and looked rather more sheepish and dejected than usual.
“There’s this box come for you on the night cars from Lytton, Miss Hamblyn, and I would have taken it over to Mrs. Nichols’s place for you, but I’m just loaded down like a pack-donkey to-night,” he explained, in a tone of deprecating apology.
“For me? But I don’t expect any parcel. There must be a mistake, surely!” exclaimed Nell, in great astonishment.
“ ‘Miss Eleanor Hamblyn, care of Mrs. Nichols, Bratley,’ ” read the baggage-clerk. “It don’t look much like a mistake, seeing that there ain’t two of you. Will you carry it along with you, or shall I bring it over first thing in the morning?”
“I will carry it, of course. How much sleep do you suppose that I should get to-night, with the thought of a mysterious unopened parcel on my mind? Then the depot might get burned down in the night, or robbed—in fact, anything might happen.” And she laughed as she took the parcel, though she was trembling with nervous expectation.
“So it might, miss,” replied Peters, in a tone of solemn dejection. And he touched his cap as he turned away; but a careful observer would have detected a cheerful grin, which, beginning at his mouth, widened until it covered his whole countenance, like the ripples which cover a pond when a stone is thrown in.
Nell, being occupied with her parcel, did not see the smile, and would not have understood it if she had. As it was, she went off at a run, and burst in upon Mrs. Nichols like a whirlwind in miniature.
“Just look, a parcel has come for me by rail! Where can it be from, do you think?” she cried.
“Best open it and see,” suggested the stout woman, whose face, as she turned her head away, reflected the same smile as the baggage-clerk’s had displayed.
In agitated silence Nell wrestled with the knots. The quicker way would have been to cut the string; but where rigid economy had to be studied, cutting string was regarded as wilful, wicked waste, so the knots had to come undone.
“FOR ME? BUT I DON’T EXPECT ANY PARCEL!”
“FOR ME? BUT I DON’T EXPECT ANY PARCEL!”
When the box was unfastened, the lifted lid showed white tissue paper; when that also had been lifted, there was revealed a coat and skirt of dark grey cloth, and two blouses, one white, the other with little red spots on a white ground.
For a minute or two Nell stood speechless, staring into the box, and in the background Mrs. Nichols stood silent also, only now there was a half-anxious look on her face, as if she feared how Nell was going to take this love-prompted offering, which might, however, prove so hurting to her sensitive pride as to seem almost like an insult.
But Mrs. Nichols need not have been afraid. Nell turned presently, her face white to the lips, and her eyes shining like two stars.
“Who did it? You?” she asked, jerking out the words in an unsteady fashion.
“Only a part, everybody did something; even Sam Peters’ wife managed a dollar, because she said she didn’t know how she would have got through this winter if it hadn’t been for the help you had been with the mending. Mrs. Pringle, she gave two dollars; and so on all round. You see, we all owe you something, dear, in the way of kindness, for you have always stood ready to help everyone who needed it. We got the schoolmistress to buy the things, for we figured it out that a woman who knew so well what to buy for herself, would know how to set about suiting other people with clothes.”
Nell sat down suddenly and cried as she had not done for many a long day past. She had worn her poor shabby clothes with brave, uncomplaining patience, and had never dreamed that other people would feel sorry for her because of them. But this delicate and unobtrusive kindness, which had stepped in to prevent her from going in her worn garments to the new home, touched her keenly, and she, who had no family, began to feel as if all the world were her kin, and that loneliness was a word out of date and obsolete.
BLAKESON’S FERRY was a main-line depot. A small branch from here served a number of rural places, of which one was Nine Springs.
Blakeson’s had quite a historic past, if legendary lore might be believed. It was here, some fifty years ago, that an Englishman named Blakeson came to settle with a large family, consisting of nine sons and four daughters. The Salish Indians, resenting this invasion of their territory, immediately sought to wipe out the intruders, and several encounters followed, in each of which the intrepid settlers came off victorious, for every one of the family, down to the youngest child, was expert in the use of firearms.
Finally, feeling that the finger of fate was in it, the Indians desisted from aggressive warfare; then Blakeson, who was a man of business, approached them with offers of work, for which wages should be paid. But the lordly red man has a soul above toil, and the Salish tribe to a man would have turned their backs on the offer, but for the sight of the “wages,” which Blakeson proposed to pay in kind.
These took the form of gay red blankets, bright-hued cottons, gleaming knives, and other similar temptations to industry.
Even then the red man might have stood aside, and gone without these treasures which had labour for their price. But there were the red women to be considered; and the Salish squaws, driven to toil from babyhood, decideden massethat they might as well work for wages, when such were to be had, as work for no reward at all. So Blakeson got his labourers, who, although they were only women, proved quite as satisfactory as their men might have done, if work had not been an indignity which no red man would face.
But that was all over and past long ago, and there was only the name of Squawlands, by which the wide tract of cleared ground by the river was known, to remind one of the old story now.
Gertrude Lorimer thought of it, as she stood among a throng of other passengers waiting for the main-line cars to come along and stop. All the stories of the trials and tribulations of early settlers appealed to her by force of contrast between the past and the present. Present-day immigrants had only the forces of nature to repel and overcome, while if a solitary Indian did happen to appear on the scene, he was regarded very much as a curiosity and an object of charity, but certainly with no trepidation.
Then her attention was disagreeably recalled to the present by the jostling of a big fat man who was dressed like a miner, but who, when he apologized for his rudeness, spoke as a gentleman might have done.
Gertrude might have thought no more about the man and the incident but for the familiar and unpleasant leer which accompanied the courteously worded apology. Drawing herself up with a haughty movement, she turned away, just as a young man, dressed in similar fashion, exclaimed angrily, as he dragged at the fat man’s arm—
“Haven’t you the sense to know a lady when you see one?”
The young man’s voice had the same cultured intonation, and Gertrude, noticing it, supposed they must be immigrants fallen on hard times, and when she was sufficiently remote from the man who had jostled her, she turned to have another look at them. They had been joined now by an old man with bowed shoulders and a querulous, drawling voice, who spoke in rough tones, and was plainly just what he looked—an illiterate countryman; and the only noticeable thing about him was that the other two seemed to be in his command, and had to do his bidding.
The train came in at this moment, and, entering a car, she settled herself just behind a young man who had a five-years-old child on his knee.
Gertrude, having parted so recently from the little brood at Lorimer’s Clearing, was just in the mood for making friends with any child who crossed her path, and before ten minutes had gone by, had the little fellow in her arms, and was taking off the keenest edge of her home-sickness by amusing him.
Then the conductor passed up the car with an abrupt inquiry if there were a doctor on board.
“I am a doctor; what is wanted?” said the young man whose child Gertrude held.
“An old man has got a hurt and is bleeding heavily; wants binding up, or he’ll peg out,” answered the conductor, laconically, and then added, as if by an afterthought, “End car but one.”
“I’ll come,” said the young man, springing up; then, suddenly remembering the child, hesitated, looking at Gertrude.
“I will take care of the boy until you come back,” she said, answering the unspoken request, and smiling into the stranger’s face.
“Thank you,” he replied briefly; then laid his hand on the child’s shoulder, “Be a good boy, Sonny,” he said, and, lifting his hat to Gertrude, passed out of the car in the wake of the conductor.
“I always am a good boy,” explained the child, looking up into Gertrude’s face with innocent, candid eyes, “except when I am bad.”
She laughed outright. “That is what most of us are, Sonny, good except when we are bad, or bad except when we are good.”
“Are you bad sometimes?” he demanded, with a wondering look.
“Very often, I’m afraid; but I get good again as soon as I can, because being bad is horrid.” And she shrugged her shoulders, as if to emphasize the discomfort of the condition.
“Fader isn’t ever bad,” the boy remarked, with a pitying look at Gertrude as if he were very sorry for her.
“That is very nice,” she answered. Then she immediately absorbed him in a game of cat’s-cradle, being fearful lest he should begin to cry if allowed time to think about his father’s perfections just now.
But Sonny was laughing merrily at his success in cat’s-cradle when a little later his father re-entered the car.
“Look, fader, Sonny can do it most beautiful!” he shouted gleefully, insisting on going through the whole performance again in order that his father might witness his cleverness.
“It was kind of you to look after the laddie,” the young man said to Gertrude. “A doctor is never quite like other men, you see, and he must go where he is wanted regardless of everything, so Sonny has to be left occasionally.”
“I hope it was not a serious case,” she said, more from politeness than from any special interest in the man who had been hurt.
“No; only a flesh cut, although rather a deep one. The old man, evidently a countryman and a bit of a tartar, boarded the cars with two others at Blakeson’s Ferry—that was where you came on too, I believe. He commenced finding fault with his companions, and kept it up until one of them struck at him with a sharp-edged tin mug, and gave him a nasty cut over the eye.”
“I remember seeing that group at Blakeson’s, and the old man was quarrelling then,” Gertrude replied.
“A regular truculent old fellow, I should say, and quite equal to hitting back when he gets the chance. However, he gave me a half-dollar fee for my trouble, so I must not complain of my first paying patient in this part of the world,” the young man said, with a smile.
“Have you come to settle?” Gertrude asked, with the quick sympathy and interest which the native Canadian always feels for a new-comer.
“Yes; I’m going up into a mining district, and have been advised to settle at Bratley, which is on a branch line from Lytton, I believe. Do you know the place?”
He leaned forward as he put the question, and Gertrude was struck by the likeness between him and his child.
“I am going there,” she replied. “But I’m afraid you won’t find much work at Bratley; it is such a small place, only about ten or twelve houses round the depot, and the nearest mines are five miles away, and nearer to Roseneath than Bratley.”
“The question is, whether there is another doctor in Bratley or near it?” he said, setting his square jaw in lines of sterner determination.
“I have never heard of there being one, either at Camp’s Gulch or Roseneath,” Gertrude replied.
“Very well; I shall at least have what they call a sporting chance, then,” he said, his stern face relaxing into a smile, “while those of you who are my friends and well-wishers can occasionally fall ill out of pure neighbourly kindness, so that I can keep my hand in at the gentle art of healing.”
Gertrude laughed; then cradled the child, who had fallen asleep, still closer in her arms.
“I don’t expect there will be any necessity for that. As soon as it is known through the neighbourhood that a doctor is in residence, all sorts of needs will be cropping up, and instead of your neighbours falling ill in order to give you employment, it is much more likely that they will have to turn to and nurse the patients who are brought from a distance and dumped upon your hands to repair.”
“Ah, that is a good idea. I hadn’t thought of bringing the mountain to Mohammed in that fashion,” he said quickly. “Of course, if there is no doctor in the neighbourhood there would be no hospital either, and one would be as necessary as the other in a wild district like this.”
“Quite as necessary,” she answered. “They have terrible accidents at the mines sometimes, and there is nowhere for the poor fellows to be taken care of, so they have to lie in their miserable shelters, which are not worth the name of huts, until they get better, or die.”
“Ah, it would be uphill work, I dare say; but plainly there is room for me here, and that is the main thing I wanted to know,” he said, drawing a deep breath.
“There is always room in Canada, I think, for everyone,” she answered, with a touch of land-pride in her tone.
“There ought to be, for it is big enough,” he said. Then he was silent for a long time, looking out of the window with an absorbed gaze, which, however, saw nothing of the scenery through which they were passing. Presently he roused himself with a start, and, turning towards her again, said, in a courteous manner, “My name is Russell—Charles Russell; would you mind telling me yours?”
“I am Gertrude Lorimer,” she said simply; adding, with a blush, “but my home is not at Bratley, although I live there when I am at work. I am the telegraph operator at the depot.”
He bowed, thanked her, and would have taken Sonny into his own arms then; but the child sleepily protested, clinging fast to his comfortable resting-place and refusing to be moved.
“Please let him stay. I have brothers of my own as young as Sonny, and it has been a great wrench to leave them,” she said, looking up at him; but quickly dropping her gaze again, because her eyes were swimming with tears.
He made no further attempt to take the child then, understanding as if by instinct that there was some pain behind of which she could not speak.
In reality, it was not the parting with Teddy and the baby which had tried her most, nor even the straining clasp of Flossie’s thin arms about her neck, but the sad patience on her father’s face, and the unsteadiness in his voice when he had said to her—
“I wish you could have stayed on at home for a while, Gertrude; it is lonely having you go away.”
“Let me stay, father,” she had cried. “I will wire from Nine Springs to headquarters that I can’t come back.”
“No, no, child; it would never do—your mother wouldn’t like it,” he answered; and nothing that she could say would move him. Only when she had boarded the cars, and been carried from his sight, the weary patience of his look remained in her memory to haunt her.
Her father was a broken man, she knew; the shock of the double bereavement and his severe sickness had undermined a constitution already worn down by hard work and rough living. If only she could have stayed at home to cheer him with her presence how thankful she would have been! But Mrs. Lorimer had willed it otherwise, and in that house it was the mother who decided everything.
There was a wait at Lytton when they changed cars again; and afterwards, on the run to Bratley, Gertrude was wondering, with a little trepidation, how Nell would meet and greet her.
Nell was a dear good girl, of course; hard-working, devoted, and self-sacrificing to a most extraordinary degree. But she was not refined or elegant in her manners, and her fearful old clothes added to her awkwardness. Suppose she should rush out from the office with a loud impulsive greeting when the cars stopped, how Dr. Russell would stare and wonder!
Gertrude shivered at the mere thought of such a thing; then reviewed Nell by the mental pictures taken during the time she was at Lorimer’s Clearing, doing two people’s work in a house of invalids. Nell’s hair had always been rough, her face not invariably clean, while her clothes! But Gertrude shrugged her shoulders and tried not to think of it at all, only the worst of it was, the more she tried the less was she able to banish the subject from her mind, until at length it became such absolute torture that beads of perspiration came out on her brow.
Dr. Russell, looking at her now and then with a grave, intent gaze, wondered at her secret agitation; but it is probable that he would have wondered still more if he had known its cause, for Gertrude did not look like a girl who would be influenced by a littleness of this description; but then, every heart has its own feelings, which no outsider can even guess at.
The cars slowed down at Bratley, and, holding Sonny in her arms, Gertrude rose from her seat and went out on to the rear platform. Dr. Russell was close behind her, laden with bags and bundles.
One or two other passengers only were alighting here, although the train was packed with miners going on to Roseneath, where a mining boom was on just now.
Sam Peters touched his cap in recognition, gave her a melancholy smile, and immediately bestowed his attention on her trunk, as if that, after all, were the only thing in life worth living for.
Gertrude was a little surprised, even a trifle resentful in her thoughts, for surely Nell might have come out of the office to greet her, and, quite forgetting her agitation on the subject a few minutes before, she was disposed to regard the want of welcome as a grievance.
Suddenly a girl in a well-cut dark grey skirt, and a pretty blouse with a fluttering red ribbon, came darting out from the office, and seized upon Gertrude with a sort of whirlwind of greeting.
“Oh, my dear, how lovely to see you again! Who is this? At the first glance I thought you had brought Teddy with you, and I was dreadfully disappointed when the second look showed him to be a stranger.”
Was this well-dressed, eager-faced girl really Nell? Gertrude gave a little gasp of amazement as she looked at her; then straightway became heartily ashamed of those grudging thoughts which had tormented her all the way from Lytton to Bratley.
“Dear Nell, how you have altered and improved!” she exclaimed. “No, it isn’t Teddy, but a deputy little brother, borrowed to ward off home-sickness. Is he not a darling? and his name is Sonny Russell.”
Nell wanted to make friends with the child too, but Sonny, in an unwonted fit of shyness, put his face down on Gertrude’s shoulder and was not to be beguiled from there.
At this moment the train began to move on again, the pace quickening with each car that slid past.
“Why, there’s Nell!” exclaimed a fretful, high-pitched voice.
Nell turned sharply at the sound of her name in a voice she remembered full well, but there was no one to be seen, and the cars were speeding on to Roseneath.
THE depot at Camp’s Gulch looked as if it were planted on the extreme end of civilization. A person seeing it for the first time might wonder why the railway had been made so far, or why, seeing that it had come so far, it had not been carried farther still.
It was fifteen miles from Bratley, the track following the windings of a valley which, always of sufficient width to allow room for river and rail, broadened in places until it was several miles wide, then narrowed again where the towering hills encroached upon the fertile lowlands.
Very rich were some of those hills in copper ore, veins of silver and gold being seen here and there among great masses of porphyry and granite; while heights of ironstone occurred here and there, that attracted thunderstorms and drew down the lightning, which split and shattered the great boulders as a mammoth battering-ram might have done.
The depot consisted of a water-tank, elevated on four posts, a log-hut divided into two rooms, which were telegraph-office, waiting-room, and everything else combined. Another log-hut, at a few yards’ distance, was the home of the station-master and his wife; and standing close beside the track was a big, strong, well-built shed with great double doors—a properly equipped storehouse, in fact, which often contained valuable merchandise.
Camp’s Gulch was a great base for supplies, and although it looked so desolate, and lay so solitary among the hills, those hills yet teemed with life of a strange, rough sort.
There were even little villages of picturesque wooden houses framed in straggling forests of bull-pines, tall larches, and Douglas firs, hidden away among the hills; and there were great holes and wide caverns in the precipitous sides of the high cliffs, where pockets of copper ore had been worked out by the miner’s pick.
It was to serve these isolated, out-of-sight places that the depot at Camp’s Gulch existed, and two trains every day, except Sunday, brought up stores and carried away minerals from the smelters higher up among the hills.
“I shall feel as if I am back on Blue Bird Ridge again,” Nell said to herself, with a first sensation of dismay, when she stepped out of the cars at Camp’s Gulch next morning and looked round upon her new surroundings.
Then she shivered a little, as she had done many times since the previous afternoon, when, standing by the side of the track at Bratley, she had heard that fretful voice exclaim, “Why, there’s Nell!” as the moving cars slid past.
The voice had belonged to Doss Umpey, of that she was quite sure, and, remembering the warning telegram, she was miserably uneasy about the matter. Having seen no one, it was plainly no business of hers to report the circumstance. But someone else would see him and his companions, if he had any, so it was only a question of time, perhaps very short time, before he would be under police supervision, maybe even in prison, for some law-breaking of the past which had but recently come to light.
The incident had spoiled all her pleasure at Gertrude’s arrival, but it had also the effect of dulling her pain about leaving Bratley. Indeed, she had been feverishly glad to get away, and could have wished that the distance had been a hundred miles instead of only fifteen, because then the chances of another encounter with Doss Umpey would have been so much lessened.
It was only the first look at Camp’s Gulch which dismayed her, for a turn round revealed the open door and pleasant, curtained windows of the house where she was to board with the station-master and his wife.
Then a white-haired old man, frail of aspect and with a most benevolent face, accosted her, bowing profoundly.
“Our new young lady, ain’t you, miss? Very glad to see you, I’m sure. Hope you’ll be happy up here. Trip, my name is—Joey Trip at your service—and marm indoors there is just spoiling for a sight of you.”
“I will run and speak to her at once, then,” Nell said, with a laugh; “but I will come back quickly, because I shall be wanted in the office.”
“The young man what’s been catching on here since Miss Irons got married week afore last goes back to Lytton in half an hour’s time. Marm says she’s just awful glad he’s going, for he’s that sickly she’s afraid he’ll take to his bed one of these days, and won’t get up again. It’s dreadful bad to be weakly; I hope you don’t have bad health,” the old man said, as he courteously waved Nell towards the door of the log house, before which a white-haired woman was standing. Then, as Nell moved towards her, he called out, “You’ll have to raise your voice a bit, miss, for marm is rather hard of hearing.”
As a matter of fact, Mrs. Trip was stone deaf, and when Nell had shouted to the utmost extent of her vocal powers without making herself heard, the old woman laid her wrinkled hand on Nell’s arm and whispered impressively—
“Try whispering, dear; and do it rather slowly.”
Nell did as she was bidden, and with complete success, which was to her a matter of rejoicing, for it would have been a fearful ordeal to be compelled to shout at the top of her voice every time she had a want to make known.
“Yes, I can hear that way; and I am very glad to see you. Come in, Miss Hamblyn, dear, and look at your room. The place is small, but it is clean and comfortable,” the old woman whispered back, as she led Nell into a cosy, spotless kitchen, and from there into an equally spotless bedroom.
“What a delightful place! I am sure that I am going to be ever so happy here!” exclaimed Nell, her heart warming to the frail old woman with the gentle, kindly face; then, stooping, she bestowed a hearty kiss and a warm hug upon her hostess, before hurrying away to the office to take over duty from the young man who had been acting as her deputy since the marriage of the former clerk had left the post vacant.
To her surprise she found that the deputy was no other than the boy Robertson who had been the inspector’s assistant when he came to Bratley.
The poor lad looked more delicate than ever, and thoroughly disgusted likewise.
“I never saw such a place as this is,” he grumbled to Nell, as she bustled about arranging matters in the office more to her own satisfaction. “It is not a telegraph operator they want here, but a heavy-goods porter. Why, I’ve had to lend a hand at loading wagons or unloading them nearly every day since I have been here, and what you, a girl, will do is more than I can imagine.”
Nell laughed. She was thinking of the snow-shoe incident; but she was not cruel enough to remind him that on a previous occasion she had shown herself very much his superior in the matter of achievement, and only remarked, in an easy tone—
“Oh, I guess I shall manage comfortably enough. I was brought up to do most things that came along; and Mr. Trip looks a nice, amiable old man.”
“He is a silly, futile old creature, and seems to regard himself quite on a level with a gentleman,” Robertson replied, in a pettish tone. Nell laughed again, understanding that the young man’s grievance lay in his not having been treated with what he deemed to be proper respect.
“It isn’t how other people treat us so much as how we treat ourselves that matters,” she said quietly, making a wry face at the dust and dirt on the instrument table, which threatened to leave ugly marks on her clean blouse.
“What do you mean?” he asked, with an offended air which would have made her laugh again but for the hollow cough which accompanied it, and that woke her pity instead.
“My father used to say that if we always respected ourselves, and were careful never to do anything we were ashamed of, other people would respect us too,” Nell said softly.
“It is about time I was going, I expect,” the boy remarked stiffly, and with his head held rather high. She did not even guess how acutely those words of hers had struck home.
Nell soon had to find that, although there was not so much telegraphy to be done at Camp’s Gulch as at Bratley, the post was decidedly not a sinecure.
Before the train had been gone half an hour, old Joey Trip came in gently apologetic to know if she could lend him a hand in moving some sacks in the big store.
Out went Nell with the brisk willingness which she always displayed in helping other people. But a brief ten minutes showed her that it was not she who helped Joey, so much as she who did the work with a little help from him.
He had no bodily strength, poor old fellow, although his spirit and energy were as great as ever. But Nell was strong, so she pushed, pulled, and hustled the bags into their place; then went off back to her office, leaving the old man quite happy in the belief that he had done all the work, with just a little help from the new young lady clerk.
The view from her office window showed a steep mountain-side with a white line of road peeping out here and there where the trees thinned out. This was the main road away from the depot; but there were others, some branching from this one, and others leading away on every side into the heart of the hilly wilderness.
It was a very lonely life upon which Nell had entered; she had no society at all, saving old Mrs. Trip and her husband. A few women did occasionally come to the depot from the mining villages, but they were a sorry-looking lot for the most part, and she felt no desire to have any acquaintance with them.
Nearly every night, when the depot work was over, Joey Trip would start off to the store in Camp’s Gulch Settlement, which was about three miles away, and he was rarely back much before midnight, when he came home primed with all the gossip of the mining-camps. He was a sociable old fellow, and loved nothing so much as gossiping with his neighbours; and the stories he had to tell Nell of the hardships endured by the miners often used to make her heart ache for the men who had to lose their health, and sometimes their lives, in their desperate efforts to wrest wealth from the hidden stores of the rugged mountain heights.
“It’s the food what kills most of ’em,” Joey used to say. “A good many of the poor fellows come out from England, and have been used to proper cooked food all their lives; but when they get up at the mines, and have to get along on hard tack and reesty bacon—that’s bacon gone wrong, you know—why, it ain’t long before they go wrong themselves, don’t you see?”
Nell did see, and very plainly too; but there seemed no way out of it, for an ordinary average woman would certainly not endure life in those lonely mining villages if she could get a chance of earning a living elsewhere.
One day, when Nell had been about six weeks in Camp’s Gulch, Joey Trip was talking enthusiastically of a successful American who had found a vein of copper so rich on the higher side of Donaldson’s ridge, that he was simply coining money.
“He spends it, too, like a gentleman; and it is drinks all round every night at the Settlement now, only I have to take mine in lemonade, because I’m too weak in the head to stand anything stronger,” Joey remarked, with a plaintive reflection on his infirmity which was irresistibly comic.
“It would be a good thing for the pockets of a great many of the miners if they also were weak in the head as you are,” said Nell, when she had done laughing; but she started and grew rather white at his next words.
“It would be a rather good thing for Mr. Brunsen, I make no doubt, for, poor young man, he drinks a terrible lot of one sort and another; but he is very good company, when he hasn’t had too much, leastways.”
“What Mr. Brunsen is that?” she asked brusquely, turning so that Joey Trip could not see her face, and moving bales of hessian and barrels of hard-tack biscuits with great energy.
She was helping him to stow away a lot of freight which had come up by the morning train, and was wearing a very big coarse apron which she had made herself for this kind of rough work, thus enabling her to render the old man valuable service without damaging her attire.
“Why, he’s just Mr. Brunsen, I suppose,” said Joey, with a cheerful cackle of laughter; “though the men at the Settlement call him Darling Dick when he treats them, and——Why, there he is over yonder, on the other side of the track, talking to a stranger!”
Nell gave one look at the two men who were talking at a little distance; then, with a half-articulate cry, she turned and fled out of the freight-shed by a small door in the rear, and, darting round the empty freight wagons, succeeded in reaching her office unnoticed by the two men, who were still talking, both of them now having their backs turned in her direction.
Her cheeks were burning and her heart was fluttering wildly, for in one of the men who stood talking she had recognized the stranger who had arrived at the Lone House in a state so near to utter collapse.
Very wretched she felt as she bent over the instrument table, dusting where no dust was to be seen. She had regarded that exhausted stranger as the most courteous and polished gentleman she had ever seen, so it came as a crushing blow to her that he was just a vulgar drunken fellow who would treat a low saloon rabble until they all became intoxicated together.
The sounder began its insistent call at that moment, and a message began to come through from Vancouver City regarding a consignment of copper. It was a long message, and was followed by one from New Westminster, both of them having reference to the same business.
As the telegraph wires went no farther than the rail, Nell had to take and send all messages from her office. But she never had to trouble about delivering them, as they were left until called for, like letters in a country store.
Half an hour later a man on horseback rode down from the smelter with a sheaf of messages to be sent off, and, as some of them would bring speedy answers, he lounged away an hour talking to Joey, and coming at intervals to stare at Nell through a pane of glass let in at the upper half of the office door.
She had made it a hard-and-fast rule to allow no one inside her office, and the miners, even the roughest of them, had speedily come to understand that this rule must on no account be infringed.
It was an unusually busy morning, and she had no time to think in the pauses of her work, which was perhaps a good thing, her thoughts being in a state of turmoil because of that incident of which Joey had told her, and which her own eyes had so unexpectedly confirmed when she looked from the open doors of the big shed and saw Dick Bronson standing on the opposite side of the railway track.
Unconsciously, she had made a hero of the stranger who had come to the Lone House, and she had credited him with almost every virtue under the sun. His face had looked good, his manners were refined, and to her he had been exceedingly gentle and courteous.
The rush of her work ended at noon; and the long hours of the spring afternoon were uninterrupted in their slumbrous quiet.
Mrs. Trip sat dozing in her spotless kitchen, with door and window both open. Joey sat on a log on the sunny side of the big shed, snoring peacefully. But Nell, in her little office, worked with feverish haste, sewing as diligently as if her life depended on the number of stitches she could make before supper-time.
Her thoughts were flying even faster than her fingers. Now that she had leisure to think and to plan she was settling many things, and one of them was that first and foremost came the necessity of at once returning to Mr. Bronson, or Brunsen, the case containing the thirty dollars and the portrait of the sweet-faced elderly lady, which she had found under the settle at the Lone House when she cleared up after the departure of the stranger.
But she did not wish him to know that she was in his immediate neighbourhood. He might recognize her if he came to the depot, but even this was doubtful, because she was altered so much in every way.
While she was meditating on how she could get the money to him without his getting any clue to her whereabouts, the sounder began its call, and was followed by the signal, “Gertrude talks.”
A smile quivered over Nell’s troubled face. Every day, when business was not pressing, they talked to each other over the wires; but this was the first time to-day that she had received a word from her friend.