The train was climbing slowly to the summit of the Crow's Nest Pass. To the northward rose an extraordinary mountain, deeply tinted at its base with greens and purples, and capped with a dazzling crown of snow and ice. Around the glowing base, like children gathered at the knees of a monstrous mother, rose seven inferior monoliths, pillars of rock which in the morning light flamed like torches. All around were mountains, some flat-topped and hooded, some broken spires as of a vast cathedral ruined; beneath them wild gullies yawned, intricate defiles, deep canyons to whose sides the pines clung in an agony of effort; and so far below that it appeared but a thread of silver ran a silent river. Into these defiles the train moved timorously; now hanging for an instant on a wall of precipice, now suspended on a groaning trestle-bridge over depths of air, but ever moving on, like a living creature animate with the unconquerable energy of man. How good this mountain air, chill and clear and bright; how welcome this irregularity of form, passing through every grade from the exquisite to the magnificent, after the long, barren monotony of the plains! It was the transition from prose to poetry, from barbarian prose to lyric music. It was with a sinking heart that Arthur had remarked the long unfolding of the plains. They oppressed the mind, they lay like a weight upon the eyes, they breathed a savage and a hostile spirit. The scattered towns had an air of dereliction; the very houses seemed frozen to the soil, and around them was a silence, like the silence of death. But here once more Nature became a living thing, a hospitable and kindly mother. And to Arthur, who had never seen a mountain, this sudden revelation of grandeur and magnificence came with a shock of exquisite pain. His eyes filled with happy tears, his nerves tingled with delight, he drank long draughts of crystal air, he could have sobbed and shouted. For the first time he knew the bliss of being alive.
On that long westward journey he had had time to reflect on many things. New York had already sunk into the past like a disordered dream. Legion and Horner were alike unsubstantial figures, shapes that had moved for an instant on a tinted cloud and had disappeared. But Bundy travelled with him; the spirit of the man still warmed his heart like a cordial. He saw his honest features wet with tears as he recalled his home; heard his reverberating eloquence in Parlour A.; was subdued and reverent before the generosity and ardour of the man. He had parted with him two days after that memorable midnight conversation. He was now upon his way to England—and Mrs. Bundy. If Arthur could have chosen, he would have wished to be the sole architect of his own fortunes. That had been his proud dream, and he had been slow to relinquish it. His pride had struggled to the last against Bundy's generosity, until remonstrance seemed ungracious and insulting. He saw now that that pride was the least worthy thing about him. The refusal to accept generosity was scarcely less base than the refusal to confer it. God had not designed man to stand alone; He had surrounded him with a network of obligations and relationships; total independence was impossible in a world where all living creatures existed by a dependence on each other. He had been in peril of becoming an Ishmael by renunciation of the social bond; Bundy had re-created that social bond for him.
And, strangely enough, Bundy's generosity owed itself to a similar generosity in his father—the father whom he had deserted. There was plentiful food for irony in that thought. He had condemned his father's mode of life, applied to him unsparing judgments, fled from him; and here, six thousand miles away, he was travelling toward an opportunity that would not have existed but for a quality of goodness in Archibold Masterman. He had refused partnership with his father in London; here, in a strange and distant land, he was still the partner of his father's deeds. The thought sensibly softened his heart toward his father. He had long ago ceased to think of him with anger; enmity he had never felt; now there came to him a gush of tender recollection, and with it the power of truer comprehension. He saw that no man is either wholly good or wholly bad; that character cannot be limned in plain black and white; that a thousand delicate gradations separate yet unite the two extremes; and that the final verdict on any man lies beyond the human mind. Man must be taken as he is; he is at all times a contradiction, an enigma, a creature that exceeds his category. To see this is to become human; to miss this vision is to remain a Pharisee, whose cardinal defect is inhumanity. And it was this wider and more charitable temper that came to birth in him as he reflected on the new course his life had taken.
From his pocket he took a bundle of letters, and re-read them slowly. The latest in date was from Elizabeth, and it closed with a phrase that had clamoured in his memory through all that week of journeying—"Well I know my true knight will not fail me." No emotional utterance could have moved his so deeply. It was the affirmation of a vow which he knew would endure as long as time, and after. It braced his spirit to repeat it; he accepted with a swelling heart its brave implication, and wore it like a badge of honour.
The longest letter was from Vickars. It was the last letter he had received before he left New York, and he had read it so often that he almost knew it by heart. "I have shot my arrow in the air," he wrote, "and God alone knows where it may fall. My book is out, and there are some signs that it may succeed. You know what I mean by that. The only success I crave is to influence other minds in right directions. Men have called me a dreamer, perhaps you yourself have thought so too; but I know, and I think you know, that I have dreamed true. We are moving toward a revolution. It is impossible that the present system can endure much longer. My message is for the day after the revolution is accomplished. Then will begin the reconstruction of life again from the base upward, a simpler and an ampler life. It is for that day I write, and my bones will thrill to it even in the grave. As for me, I am like Balaam; I shall see it, but not now; I shall behold it, but not nigh. Even so, I am content." There followed a fuller expression of his social ideals, and the whole closed with this paragraph—"Your mother came to see us last week. It was a great but very happy surprise. Can you guess what we talked of? Of you, Arthur. For we three know you as no others do, and we love you, and believe in you. She kissed Elizabeth at parting, and said, 'Some day——' and then stopped; but we knew what she meant. Well, you must work on toward that some day. Poor lady! Deal tenderly with her. I think she has sore wounds in her heart, and remember it was harder for her to part from you than for you to go. By so much her quiet sacrifice is greater than yours. She is the tarrier by the stuff, a harder lot, I think, than his that goes down into the battle."
Tears filled his eyes as he read the words. There came to him a sudden vision of the London he had left—the vast tribes of toiling men, the blind pain and suffering of so many millions, the silent agonies that hid beneath those gray skies and congregated roofs. And then, looking from the windows, the eye dwelt again upon this magnificent heritage that bore the flag of England, and he marvelled why men fought for bare life in cities when an empty empire called for them. Surely some day the wizard's spell would break, and London would pour its wasted tribes into this land of fertility and beauty. To reconstruct life from the base upward, that could never be done there; it might be done here. Here the simpler, ampler life was possible. Ah! if he could not fight by Vickars' side in London, he was still fighting for him here, and was it not better to create the new than to rebuild the old?
The mountain peaks were gradually receding. The train crawled slowly round the walls of precipice, hung suspended for a giddy instant, and then, with a tumult of squealing brakes and hissing steam, plunged into the abyss, doubling on itself a score of times, till it reached the valley and the roaring river. It was past noon when the train stopped beside a placid lake. Immense forests rose on every side; an immemorial silence lay on all things, broken only by the gentle ripple of the waters. A steamer lay beside the landing-stage; an hour later he was afloat.
There were not many passengers, and what there were seemed uncommunicative. They were for the most part long-limbed, sturdy men, ranchers, traders, lumber-jacks, their faces bronzed with outdoor life. They eyed him narrowly and critically. He knew quite well what their criticism implied. He was a greenhorn, and no doubt looked like one. As long as the light lasted he took no notice of them; he was too absorbed in the unfolding beauty of the lake, and in curiosity as to what it would reveal for him. Somewhere on the lake lay his small estate, and he found himself studying with eager interest the wooded shores, in the hope of discovering something that gave a hint of human habitation. There was very little to reward his gaze. Twice he saw a blue curl of smoke rising from the forest; once a rude hut, whose one window glittered like a gem in the setting sun; beyond this nothing met the eye but a shore of snow, the black bare poles of charred trees rising above the living pines, and the solitary sky. The scene was sombre; the silence so profound that the churning stern-wheel sounded like the passage of an army. Night fell swiftly. It was seven o'clock when a lighted hillside met the eye, and he was told that it was Nelson.
He slept that night at a small hotel near the shore, and rising early next morning was quite unprepared for the beauty of the scene that awaited him. The distant hills of snow were touched with rosy fire, the lake was like a turquoise, and the town surprised him by its sober aspect of prosperity. He scarce knew what he had expected in this remote outpost of the Empire, but certainly not what he saw—broad streets, buildings of hewn stone, substantial shops and warehouses, all gathered round a curve of lake so exquisite that few places could surpass it in its natural loveliness. The hotel was kept by an Englishman, who made haste to cultivate his acquaintance. He was a lightly built, bearded fellow, with a shrewd eye and a perpetual smile, one of the numerous family of Smith.
"So you're going up the lake?" he inquired.
"Yes. I want a ranch called Bundy's."
"Bundy. Let me see. I don't know of any Bundy here."
"He isn't here. It's his ranch I want to find."
"Did he tell you where it was?"
"Poplar Point."
"Ah! now I know. If you'll come with me, I think I can show you whereabouts it is." He took him to the landing-stage, and pointed out a deep fold in the hills. "You make for that," he said. "Unless I disremember, Bundy's ranch is there or thereabout. But people are always going and coming here. These 'ere ranches are always changing hands. Young fellows like you come out, and get tired of the work at the end of the summer, and sell out. They're the plague of Nelson. Quitters, we call 'em. I hope you ain't a quitter."
"I don't think I am. I've come here to live."
"Well, sir, you've come to a good place. But let me give you a word of warning. It's only hard work that pays here, and you'll have to work hard and wait long if you want to do anything in fruit. This is no place for quitters."
He went on to give him many brief histories of the obnoxious tribe of quitters. They were all looking out for a soft job—that was what was the matter with them. Mamma's darlings—that's what they were. Did he know what it was to handle an axe. No, he thought not. Land had to be cleared—did he know what that meant?
"But mine is cleared," Arthur interrupted. "At least, fifty acres are."
At this he looked puzzled.
"I never heard of fifty acres of cleared land anywheres near Poplar Point," he observed.
There happened to come along the landing-stage at that moment a somewhat extraordinary-looking old man. He wore blue jeans, a red wool sweater, and a battered felt hat. His hair and beard were unkempt, and both were gray. A beggar could not have been worse dressed, and yet there was about him something of the dignity that marks the open-air man.
"That's Jim Flanagan," remarked Smith; "he ought to know. Here, Jim, I want to speak to you."
The old man came towards them in silence.
"Jim, do you know a ranch at Poplar Point called Bundy's? You know most of the places up and down the lake, don't you?"
"Yes, I know it. It lies back a quarter of a mile or so, on a bench."
"Cleared, is it?"
"Not much. It was once, but most of it's growed up again."
"Well, this gentleman's going there. Maybe you could give him pointers."
"Going to live there?" asked Flanagan.
"Yes, I'm going to live there," said Arthur.
"Well, I don't know but what you can. There's a pretty good log-house. I'm living not far away myself."
"Can't you row me over?"
"No, I can't do that. It wouldn't be no good if I did. You can't live there without a good bit of preparation. There ain't no shops at Poplar Point, and there ain't no hotel," he remarked with a grin.
"Now I'll tell you what I would do, if I was you," said the landlord. "You just let Jim give you some pointers. He'll treat you right, will Jim."
"I'll be glad to do anything I can," said the old man. "I've got an hour to spare, any way."
Arthur took Flanagan up to the hotel with him, and was soon interested in his strange preceptor. It seemed he was an old hunter and prospector, a man of infinite adventures, with a dislike of civilisation, which was perhaps his most marked characteristic. There was no remote solitude of the surrounding woods with which he was not acquainted.
"As for this ranch of yours, I guess you've been expecting too much," he remarked. "It's good enough land, that I believe. And I won't say but what it has been planted all right once. But it's been let grow up. I kind of remember a man called Bundy bought it—took it for a debt, 'twas said. But he's never been here, not a£ I remember. And I've been here and hereabout a matter of a dozen years."
So it appeared that Bundy had let the light of his imagination gild Kootenay Lake with a delusive splendour, as it did all those "propositions" which engaged his ardent rhetoric. But Arthur was in no mood to judge his benefactor critically. The land was there—that was something; and it would go hard with him if he could not make it all that Bundy had imagined it. He might have known that Bundy had never seen it for himself. The story of his having taken it for a debt had the accent of truth. The mouth of the gift-horse must not be too closely examined, but at least he was a veritable beast. And in spite of the passing shadow of disappointment, Arthur's spirits rose at the menace of unexpected difficulty.
"Well," said Flanagan. "I must be getting along. When will you be coming out?"
"Immediately. Some time this afternoon."
"In that case you'll have to get a move on. You've a lot to do."
Flanagan thereupon sat down again and gave him a series of elaborate instructions. He must first of all buy a boat; he'd need one, any way. There was a boat he knew of that might be had second-hand for twenty dollars. Then he'd want to buy an axe or two, a grub-hoe, a sack of flour, sugar, rice, tea, coffee, tinned milk, and may be a side of bacon and a case of eggs. That would do for a beginning.
The boat was duly bargained for upon the wharf. It was an interesting ruin: the paint had long since disappeared, it had no rudder, and it leaked like a sieve. Its owner, remarking Arthur's innocence, wished to raise the price, but Jim kept him to the twenty dollars.
"That or nothing," he said sternly. "And put a couple of baling-tins in. They'll be needed."
Arthur looked upon this ancient tub with frank dislike and with some dismay. The beauty of the rose-tinted morn was over; the sky was gray, and a rising north-west wind was making more than ripples on the lake.
"How far is Poplar Point?" he asked.
"Five miles," Jim answered. "But I guess you'll do it. You look strong."
"It isn't myself I'm thinking of; it's the boat. Do you think she can do it?"
"I've seen worse," said Jim. "Not many of them, though. But she'll do it, never fear. That there old boat have been on the lake ever since I knowed it."
Which, under the circumstances, was scarcely a recommendation.
By one o'clock, somehow or other, Arthur had got through his preparations. His story had got about; he found himself stared at in the streets as a greenhorn; but every one had shown him civility, and some a rough kindness. At the bank a great surprise awaited him. He found that Bundy had telegraphed a considerable sum of money to his credit, more than enough to give him a fair and even generous start. Willing hands helped him to pack his goods. They were all there—the axes, the grub-hoe (with whose uses he was totally unacquainted), the sack of flour, and the various provisions. His valise was shoved under the stern seat, and with it half a dozen pamphlets on fruit-growing which he collected in the town. Flanagan had gone two hours earlier, with the promise that he would look out for him at Poplar Point.
"Keep your eye on the gap in the hills," was his final instruction, "then push up the creek to the left; and if it's dark, I'll burn a flare."
He had no sooner left the landing than he began to feel the force of the wind. It blew with a steady and increasing violence, dead ahead; pull as he would, he made little progress, and, to add to his discomfiture, he had to be continually baling. The moment he stopped to bale, the boat swung round or was driven backward. His hands were soon blistered, his muscles ached, yet toil as he would the far-off gap in the hills seemed no nearer. The water ran black and foam-flecked in short, choppy waves; the sky had darkened rapidly, and presently a cutting hail fell. In ordinary circumstances he would have turned back, but he had a lively recollection of Smith's stinging phrases, and had no mind to be written down a mamma's darling or derided as a quitter. This was, in its way, his first test, and to succumb would be to lose nerve for future difficulties. He was now in the very centre of the lake, and a thrill of apprehension seized him as he saw how small an object this crazy boat appeared in that loneliness of angry water. Black water, black forests, and on the upper hills pale rays of watery sunset—that was what he saw, and himself scarcely more noticeable than a bird, buffeted by the impending storm. But he toiled on, and at last got a little shelter from the shore. More than three hours had passed since he left Nelson; and in this deep fissure of the hills the night had already camped. The darkness deepened rapidly. It was five o'clock when he rounded the point of the creek. Here the water was smoother, and he could pull more leisurely; but it was now quite dark. All his hopes were fixed on Flanagan. For another hour he searched the shores eagerly for any sign of light. Nothing met his eye but the tiny twinkling of a lamp here and there in the window of some unseen house. At last, just when he had made up his mind to spend the night upon the lake and wait for dawn, a sudden shaft of red flame soared up not a hundred yards away. A voice hailed him, and never did a human voice sound sweeter. Ten minutes later Flanagan's hand grasped his, and he stepped ashore.
"The old boat's done it, then," said Flanagan. "I rather guessed she would. Now you come right along with me."
"So it was only a guess, was it?"
"Well, most things in this world are a sort of guess," said the old man. "The only thing sure is that men don't die till their hour's come." He turned away gruffly, and at once began to shoulder Arthur's goods.
"But you can't carry all that," cried Arthur, as the old man hoisted the sack of flour upon his shoulders.
"Needs must when the devil drives," he said grimly. "There ain't no hotel hereabouts, didn't I tell you? You've got to get all your goods into the shack to-night. That wind's bringing up snow, and the sooner we get this job done the better."
Arthur grasped his valise, and such impedimenta as Flanagan would let him carry, and followed the old man.
The snow was deep and soft, in spite of the cold wind. The darkness was like a solid wall on either side of the thin ray that fell from Jim's lantern. Through the wood there ran a perpetual ghostly murmur, a sound of sighing, groaning, struggling, as the branches beat to and fro and rubbed against each other. Suddenly a long and terrible cry rose above the noises of the forest, a cry of infinite pain, despair, melancholy, and Arthur started back, shouting, "What's that?"
"Why, that's only a coyote," said Jim—"just an old dog coyote. Bless you! he won't hurt you."
Arthur said no more, but he was glad that no one could see the colour of his face. He struggled breathlessly in the steps of his guide. The hill was steep, the foothold uncertain; more than once he waded to his knees in a hidden bog-hole. And yet, in spite both of his discomfort and his fear, he was conscious of a gradual heightening of his spirits. There was something wild and savage in these black walls of forest that encompassed him, in the mystery and solitude of this primeval place, something that exhilarated while it awed him. He was conscious of the falling from him of the trappings of a discarded civilisation. He had come to a place where the artificialities of life had no significance; where the natural man stood front to front with the stubborn earth, with no weapons to subdue her but his own thews and muscles, his own right of domination, and his unconquerable will.
The ground was easier now, and they moved more swiftly on a level narrow trail. At last the darkness thinned a little; they had reached a small clearing, and a light shone brightly.
"Here we are," said Jim. "And not sorry to get here either."
He pushed open the door of a log-hut. It was perhaps fourteen feet square; a stove burned red-hot in the centre of the hut; on one side was a long bunk built of red cedar.
"I done my best to clean it up," said Jim. "Maybe there's a rat or two around, and perhaps a porcupine, but they won't hurt you. It's dry, that's one thing. And now I'll say good-night."
He tramped off into the wood. Arthur stood a long time listening, but Jim's footsteps were soon lost amid the groaning of the trees. The long, melancholy cry of the coyote again thrilled the air. Arthur shut the door.
And it was so that he came into his heritage.
He contrived to make himself some coffee, and after a while extinguished the lamp and crawled into the bunk. The red-hot stove filled the hut with a dim light, and he fell asleep.
An hour later he woke in a sweat of terror. The fire in the stove had died down, the hut was bitterly cold, and he was in total darkness. The darkness was like nothing he had known before; it closed round him with a pressure that was almost tangible, and it seemed alive. There was a horrible sense of something hostile in it; he could have thought it moved stealthily, with a faint rustling of unseen robes, that it breathed and palpitated, that it was a presence inimical to life. A rat ran across his bed, and on the roof there was a long grating sound. Outside, in the wide night, he could recognise the melancholy cry of the coyote; but there were other cries and sounds which he could not recognise. Close to the door of the hut there was audible what seemed like deep, stertorous breathing, deepening into a human groan. From the depth of the wood came a fearful wail, as of a woman in distress. He sprang from the bunk, rushed to the door, and opened it. There was a soft flutter of wings, and the groaning ceased; but the wailing in the woods went on, upon a scale of rising agony. There was nowhere any sign of life. The moon had risen, and the snow-laden trees rose pure and mystic in the silver light. They were like a cohort of silent watchers round his lonely hut, and he welcomed them as comrades. Slowly his fears subsided. It was not until the next day he learned from Flanagan that the soft groaning at the door proceeded from nothing more alarming than a mountain owl, and that the wailing in the forest was merely a mountain lion in search of prey.
This unforgetable night was his first and last occasion of terror. It is only when the causes of phenomena are hidden from us that the phenomena themselves are terrible. When we know that the tapping in the wainscot is caused by an innocent insect, the movements in the forest to be the work of wind or frost, the breathing in the dark to be a sleeping owl, the mind at once regains the equipoise of reason. Perhaps if we knew what really lay behind the mystery of death, we should fear it as little as we do the commonplace phenomena of birth and life.
The morning came at last in floods of living light, and as Arthur once more stood at the cabin door, he thought that he had never looked upon a scene so exquisite. Pale rays of colourless and pure fire spread like a fan along the eastern sky; they deepened into momentary purple, throbbed as with a pulse, and suddenly were quickened with a flood of scarlet. The distant peaks of snow one by one caught the elemental splendour, the higher summits topped with flame, the lower stained with rose; and across the dim and quiet lake, from an open gateway of the hills a shaft of light shot, slender as a spear and vibrating with the joy of speed. A gust of air shook the forest, and the ice-clad boughs tinkled like a chime of bells. There was no other sound except the little song of water, running underneath its roof of ice. All around rose the still and solemn woods. The miniature plains of snow gathered at their feet glittered like a floor of diamonds. And from sky and lake and forest came an air inimitably virginal, the cold and taintless air of unviolated Nature, infinitely pure and strong and vital.
He stood for some moments quite silent, in that intense clarity of dawn, scarcely conscious of himself, his whole being drawn out in a kind of effortless and sacred awe. He had an inward sense of lustration and release: the soul rose clean as from a bath of fire; the will, so often misdirected, was modulated to the perfect harmony of this external world. Such moods lie beyond reason, and are therefore beyond the explication of the reason. The pivots upon which life moves consist of a few rare and exquisite moments; for one man a sunrise, for another a strain of music heard at midnight, for yet another the sudden, arrowy fragrance of violets in a wood, and behold! life is changed, something has been withdrawn from it and something added—a new element, wholly authentic, yet wholly indefinable. It was such a moment with this solitary exile. The dawn came to him as an omen and a challenge. It was the porch of a new life, and he entered it with willing feet.
He returned to the cabin, and breakfasted in haste after a fashion which would have provoked pity and derision in the bosom of the British house-wife. His coffee was boiled in a discarded meat-tin; bread he had none; and his effort to fry eggs was probably among the least successful of all recorded operations known to culinary science. In the midst of his crude performance Jim Flanagan arrived, surveying him from the doorway with a smile of irony.
When the meal was over, Jim began to talk in his slow, caustic way. Like many men who have passed their lives in the open air and solitude, Jim had acquired a certain rude philosophy, the fruit of much silent thinking, experience, and observation. He had worked in lumber-camps, mines, and on the railroads, but only by necessity; no sooner had he acquired a little money than he had always gone off into solitude again. Carrying all his scant possessions with him, he would disappear into the forests and mountains, and would be lost to sight for many months. What was he doing? Hunting, prospecting for gold and copper, and loafing. He would return from these expeditions not a penny piece the richer, a little raggeder, and with deeper lines upon his face, having often suffered great privations, yet at the first opportunity he would resume them. For all settled ways of life he had a positive aversion, and not all the gold of Golconda could have bribed him to reside in cities. This was the more remarkable because he had spent his childhood and early youth in Liverpool, from which dim and dreary city he had been thrust out by chance and poverty into the Canadian wilderness. Till he landed in Canada he had never seen a forest or a mountain, had scarcely looked upon a flower, and had breathed only the tainted air of slums; but on his first view of the wooded heights of Montreal, something woke in his heart, a dumb love of Nature, a passion for freedom, an appetite for solitude. Friends he had none, and if he ever had relations, he had long ago forgotten them. Thus left wholly to himself, he had fashioned his own way of life with neither memory nor obligation to restrain him; had considered his debt to civilization cancelled; had become a wanderer upon the face of the earth, a taciturn but contented nomad, whose feet had traversed the breadth of a mighty continent, and penetrated a hundred savage solitudes where none but he had trodden. Thus, in his own way, he had solved the problem of existence; he had achieved freedom, and had enrolled himself among the humble Argonauts of Empire.
The greatness of this half-discovered empire was his chief thought, and upon this theme he was always ready to speak.
"England don't know what she's got in Canada," was a frequent sentiment of his, often expressed with biting scorn. "She sends her worst out here," he would continue—"dumps her rubbish on us." He made this remark now, to which Arthur replied with a laugh, "I hope you don't consider me rubbish, Jim."
"No, you're young, and I guess you're strong. But there's lots of hard work ahead of you, and I've seen many a chap like you fly the tracks."
"I wish you'd tell me what I've got to do."
"Well, I ain't no fruit-rancher myself," said Jim. "But maybe I can teach you. Suppose you and me take a look round."
They went out together into the keen air. Around the cabin for a space of several acres the snow lay deep, its pure surface broken only by black tree-stumps. Farther back was a tangle of young wood, and beyond this the primeval forest. At a distance of fifty yards from the cabin the snow was discoloured, and Arthur recognised the bog-hole into which he had stumbled on the previous night.
"There seems a lot of bog, and I don't see any apple-trees," he remarked.
"That there bog's the best land you've got," Jim answered, "but it's got to be drained. The apple-trees are in the bush somewheres; didn't I tell you they've got growed up? You've got to start slashing that bush. It's a job that must be done. And I don't see how you're to do it all alone."
"Neither do I," said Arthur. "But if you'd help me, Jim, I think I could soon learn."
"I ain't no fruit-rancher," he began again.
"Unless I'm mistaken, you're just what you choose to be," said Arthur. "Name your own wage, Jim, and be my teacher."
"Well, I'll consider it," said the old man.
A couple of days passed, during which Arthur saw nothing of Jim. On the afternoon of the third day Arthur saw his boat moving toward the landing.
"I've been getting some things we'll want," said Jim. "You'll find 'em put down to your account. I may as well tell you I've been drunk. Maybe you won't want me now," he added with a grin.
"I'll take my chance on that, Jim."
"It's a thing what has to be," said the old man with a solemn roll of his gray head. "I ain't no drunkard, understand. I'd think shame of being that. But an occasional booze hurts no one, and is a necessity of life. It kind of limbers up one's wits."
"We'll let it go at that," laughed Arthur.
And thus the articles of this strange partnership were settled.
From that day began a life of furious and unremitting toil. Days and weeks passed unremarked in those Homeric labours; Arthur worked in blinding sweat, with aching muscles; rose early in the biting cold, plied the axe from morn to eve, and no sooner ate his rough evening meal than he was fast asleep. A hundred times it seemed as if no human organism could sustain the immense fatigue which he endured. As the snow melted, his task became the heavier. There were tree-stumps to be blasted, and the fumes of the blast left him with a splitting headache. There was the bog to be drained, and he worked for hours to his knees in water. There were trees to fell, to cut up into lengths for building, and the rest to be burned. Yet amid it all he was conscious of a growing sanity of mind and body. His hands, at first torn and wounded by his toil, hardened to their task; his shoulders broadened, his muscles grew supple, and on his cheek was the glow of health. A curt word of praise from Jim seemed the superlative of approbation; to hear him say, "Well, I guess you ain't no quitter," warmed him like a draught of wine. And the mental transformation was not less definite than the physical. The immediacy of his work, the constant need of patience, caution, and alertness, the mere brute vigour of his life, drove from his mind a hundred haunting ghosts. He had no time to debate on thin-spun theories of the universe and life, and even social problems sunk into insignificance. To see that a tree fell rightly, to disengage a fertile soil from the neglect of ages, to drain the bog—these were his problems, and he found them sufficiently absorbing. He had got back to the primeval; work and sleep and work again, all slowly issuing in a visible success—was not this the oldest and the one divine task of man, pursued through countless centuries, and furnishing the one solid base on which all human domination rested?
It might have been supposed that such a hard insistency of toil would have dulled the finer faculties. In so far as these faculties depended for their nourishment on books, no doubt they suffered; but they found a new and more vital food in the scenes which surrounded him. The inexhaustible surprise of sunrise and of sunset, the music of the forest, perpetual as the music of the sea, the blue expanse of lake, the wide array of snow-clad mountains—these and a hundred lesser things, such as the magic wrought by shafts of light in the deep shadows of the wood, trees glittering in a sheath of ice, moonlight upon snow, fascinated and absorbed him. He had never guessed how wonderful the world was. The laborious exercises of the human mind in quest of beauty seemed a tedious absurdity compared with this opulence of loveliness that met him everywhere. And he saw too that there is a kind of wisdom deeper than any that is found in books, which flows in upon the spirit which is in accord with Nature. Flanagan, with all his crudity and ignorance, had something of this wisdom. He moved at ease in his environment, envied no man, coveted no man's goods, brought to each returning day a strength precisely equal to his task; and Arthur asked himself if either religion or philosophy could produce a form of life more admirable or more efficient. In these daily toils Jim was his sole companion. They worked and ate together, and in the long evenings sat in the warm cabin talking endlessly. To his surprise, he found that the old man was an indefatigable reader, but of not more than half a dozen books. The Bible he knew with thoroughness, and upon it had built up theories of life which would have surprised the theologians.
"Them Jews were like us," he would declare. "They stole a country and drove the other people out. Like us with the Injuns, I guess. A dead Injun is the only kind of Injun I've got any use for. Them Philistines was a kind of Injun, by all I make out."
One story which he loved to discuss was the desire of Israel to have a king. "What did they want a king for?" he would cry. "They'd got on well enough without one, and they never had no luck after they'd got one. They should have stuck to Samuel." And then he would go on to recount all he knew about the wickedness of kings. "They'd never been no good. They just sucked the people's blood, that's what they did. Why, they wer'n't even soldiers, not nowadays—just dressed-up dolls. Some day the world would get rid of them, and the sooner the better, so said he. A pretty thing indeed that decent folk should pay taxes to support such a rotten lot as they were."
The one poet whom he knew was Burns. He carried with him in the pocket of his ragged coat an old leather-bound copy of Burns, with a brass clasp, closely printed in blinding type upon a page nearly destitute of margins. It was a tiny book, in size about three inches by two, published within a few years of the poet's death. It bore signs of hard usage: the cover was stained and polished by the touch of hands that long since were dust; doubtless it had been carried in the pockets of a race of humble men, read in swift glimpses behind the plough, as like as not, within sight of the very hills the poet loved, or pored over by eager eyes round peat fires in solitary clachans. It was safe to say that a book so humble had never known the touch of hands polite; its pages had been turned by clumsy fingers hardened with excessive toil, and the faces that had stooped above it were plain and homely faces, roughened with wind and weather. To this forgotten race of men it had doubtless brought gaiety and hope, the brief vision of things lovely and eternal, and above all the message of that inward liberty which man never loses save by his own cowardice or folly. From the soiled pages Jim Flanagan drew the same inspiration. They breathed into him the pride of freedom, fed his fierce joy of independence, helped him, as they had helped ten thousand others, to walk upright in a world where an innumerable host of men bend their backs to the unjust yoke and learn to cringe and crouch. As Jim recited the well-remembered verses in this lonely hut at night, his voice trembled, his eyes glowed, and all aspects of meanness and commonness fell from him, leaving something that was intrinsically fine and great. That a man so crudely ignorant as Flanagan should have anything to teach a youth like Arthur appears absurd; yet so it was. What that teaching was it would be difficult to state in words, but its effect was clear. By its quiet assertion of undeniable qualities where they might be least expected, a general sense of the worth of mankind was produced, an essential worth, which was wholly independent of outward circumstance.
As time went on, Arthur discovered also that his life was not nearly so isolated as he had supposed. Scattered along the shores of the lake were other men, like himself, engaged on a daring experiment of life. One or two were sullen, unapproachable, apparently afraid lest their dignity should be compromised by chance acquaintanceships, the kind of men who carry into a new world all that is socially most narrow and petty in the old. But these were the exceptions; among the rest there was a real and kindly sense of community. Many of them were persons interesting in themselves and in their histories. There were ex-army officers, public-school and university men, even a musician—all, for some cause or other, fugitives from the vain strifes of civilised life. They never complained, they never thought of going back, they were all full of hope about the future. They talked with buoyant faith of the day when Kootenay Lake would be as well known as Geneva or Lucerne, and when its shores, now clothed with darkling forests, would become one of the gardens of the world. They pointed out how each year marked the growing invasion of the orchard on the forest. And, whatever the hard tasks of their life, they were clearly in love with it, desired no better, and would not have exchanged it for anything that cities could have offered them.
He found among these settlers a disposition toward mutual service, notable in itself, and unique in his experience. A man thought nothing of giving a day's service to a neighbour, of loaning him a team, or helping him to build his house. Being all engaged on the same tasks, each relied upon the other, expecting and assuming that the help given to-day would be loyally returned when his own occasion came.
And, besides this, there was much mutual visiting, concerts, suppers, dances—a free and simple hospitality, without elaboration or pretence. The concerts might not have satisfied a Queen's Hall audience, and the dances were but feebly illumined with the grace of woman; but all was homely, honest, and sincere. And then the walk back along the narrow trail, with the moon riding overhead, or beneath a roof of stars, each keenly bright, and the fresh lake-breeze moving through the forest in low-breathed symphonies—ah! this was life indeed! Often and often, as he walked that trail at night, he opened his lungs to drink in the crystal air that seemed a draught of life itself, and he thought with commiseration of the herded life on city pavements, and thanked God for his deliverance.
The spring came with melting snow and soft winds, and he began to realise some progress in his work. When the new growth was cleared away, he discovered a few hundred apple-trees of five years' growth.
"You're luckier than I thought," said Jim. "They're Spitzenbergs. You'll get something from them this year, I guess."
Then June came with a rush of heat and light. A long procession of days followed, the sky exquisitely bright, the hills clad in living green, the lake sparkling like a floor of amethyst. And then the winter once more, with its wonder of snow, and skies full of unearthly splendour.
So two years passed, and at their close he saw the triumph of his labour. The forest was pushed back by many acres; where the dense undergrowth had thrived, there spread the level fields, with long rows of budding trees; and the bog was a fertile garden. He had built himself another house, more commodious than the first rude cabin. Upon its walls hung the ranchman's usual pictures, coloured prints from magazines; there was also a goodly shelf of books, and the photographs of those he loved. Here he sat and meditated in the long summer evenings. From Vickars he had received many letters, keen, witty, sad; it seemed he was famous, after a London fashion, but his constant complaint was that no one really listened to his message. Elizabeth had written him even more frequently, and each letter had strengthened the implicit bond between them. Love-letters they could not be called, for love was rarely mentioned in them; but they were letters that only love could write—they exhaled the very perfume of her heart. From his father and his sister he had heard not a word. Latterly even his mother's letters had become irregular, and he sometimes thought he could discern in them an effort at concealment, as if she purposely avoided something which her whole nature urged her to say.
He sat thus, thinking over all the past, upon a summer's evening, when he heard Jim's tread upon the wood-path. Jim had been into Nelson upon some errand in the afternoon, and had hurried back, contrary to his custom, for there was some heavy work to be done upon the morrow.
"Well, Jim, any news?"
"Not as I know of. But I've got you a paper. It's the EnglishDaily Mail. You're always glad to see that."
"All right, Jim. Thank you. I'll look at it to-morrow."
Jim moved off to his own shack, and Arthur went into the house. It was quite late, it seemed hardly worth while to light the lamp, and he was about to get into bed in the dark, when the white outline of the paper lying on the table attracted his eye.
"I may as well look at that," he thought; "I'm not sleepy."
He lit the lamp, and unfolded the paper. His eye wandered casually over the crowded columns, finding little that was interesting. Then, with a sudden chill of apprehension, his eye caught the name of Masterman.
"The Affairs of the Amalgamated Brick Co.," the paragraph was headed. "It has been long suspected that the affairs of this company were not as prosperous as could be wished, but no serious complications were expected until the close of last week. There were various unpleasant rumours on the Stock Exchange late on Friday afternoon, and the stock dropped rapidly. On Monday morning it became known that serious frauds were charged against the company. The nature of these charges is not yet ascertained, but we understand that warrants have been issued for the arrest of Archibold Masterman, the chairman of the company, and Elisha Scales, its secretary. If the allegations made against the company are at all such as rumour represents them, very sensational developments may be anticipated."
The blood rushed back into his heart as he read. His very being was suspended.
"My God!" he cried. "I must go home at once!"
And in that cry all the old loyalties awoke, and, chief of all, the son's loyalty to his father.