The Project Gutenberg eBook ofThe inverted pyramidThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: The inverted pyramidAuthor: Bertrand W. SinclairRelease date: December 12, 2023 [eBook #72392]Language: EnglishOriginal publication: Toronto: Frederick D. Goodchild, 1924Credits: Al Haines*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INVERTED PYRAMID ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: The inverted pyramidAuthor: Bertrand W. SinclairRelease date: December 12, 2023 [eBook #72392]Language: EnglishOriginal publication: Toronto: Frederick D. Goodchild, 1924Credits: Al Haines
Title: The inverted pyramid
Author: Bertrand W. Sinclair
Author: Bertrand W. Sinclair
Release date: December 12, 2023 [eBook #72392]
Language: English
Original publication: Toronto: Frederick D. Goodchild, 1924
Credits: Al Haines
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INVERTED PYRAMID ***
BY
BERTRAND W. SINCLAIR
BOSTONLITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY1924
Copyright, 1924,BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.
All rights reserved
Published January, 1924
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
"From the duality of man's nature and the competition of individuals the life-history of the earth must in the last instance be a history of a really very relentless warfare. Neither his fellows, nor his gods, nor his passions will leave a man alone."
JOSEPH CONRAD.
The Inverted Pyramid
Item: one boy aged eighteen, name Roderick Norquay; one girl aged fifteen, named Mary Thorn; one gaudy cedar dugout canoe got up in the Siwash style of high-curving bow and stern, both ends grotesquely carved and brilliantly colored in flaming red, blinding yellow, piercing blue; one stretch of tiderace running swiftly between an island shore and a forbidding rock-strewn point.
The tides of Fundy and the maelstroms of the Scandinavian coast have been variously hymned since Jules Verne vulgarized holy science and proved himself an unwitting prophet with Captain Nemo's submersible. But there are tides and maelstroms on the Pacific seaboard as worthy as these others, which have as yet no place in literature save through the dull medium of admiralty charts and blue-bound North Pacific pilot books. These sheets and tomes are thumbed and conned by men nowise concerned with that color, form, and substance which imparts magic to the written word. They seek therein only knowledge of reef and shoal, of anchorages, currents, depths, for the safe passage of their sea-borne keels.
Rod Norquay, sitting on the shore of Little Dent, waiting for the flood tide to wax strong and the race of it through the choked pass to grow swifter, found himself wondering why no poet had sung the song of this swirling water; why no novelist had lovingly portrayed this land as a back drop for his comic and tragic puppets? Why was there no Iliad of the pioneers, no Human Comedy of men and manners peculiar to the North Coast? If McAndrews sighed for a Burns to sing the song of steam, so young Norquay found himself wishing that some one with the gift of living words could catch and transfix the beauty and majesty, the invisible yet pulsing spirit of his native land. That it deserved a Homer and a Burns he did not doubt. Rod had been reading Homer with his tutor that morning. Perhaps the thought in his mind now was only the reflex of a question put then.
"Why should a fellow have to learn all about these frowsy old Greeks?" he had demanded, as much in mild mischief, to scandalize his tutor, as for any reason. Yet he was suddenly earnest when he followed up this by saying, "It would be much more interesting to read poetry about our own people. How they sailed this coast in small ships, how they fought Indians and settled the country and founded families, and all that sort of thing."
He could not quite comprehend when Mr. Spence shook his gray head and gravely stated in a precise, tutorial voice:
"There is, my dear Rod, no epic literature dealing with the pioneers. That is merely in the nature of things. It takes leisure and culture to embody a tradition in language that will live. American civilization has been too occupied with grasping material power, with cutting trees and digging mines, making machinery and so on. This country has tradition, but little culture. It is too young and lusty, too new and crude—raw, one might say."
Rod Norquay had muttered "rats!" under his breath. He did not accept as gospel all that his elderly tutor vouchsafed. Young? Four generations of men had been born in the house where they sat. Its stone walls had been fabricated by English masons who rounded the Horn before the day of steam. Rod believed the Anglo-Saxon took his culture with him—in so far as he possessed culture—wherever he went. It was not something indigenous to the soil in which he planted his roots.
At any rate that was a passing thought and Rod put it by as youth so easily puts abstractions aside. His eyes rested critically on the flooding tide, the line of current that poured with accelerating speed through its narrow gate. Northward, up Cardero Channel, the level was beginning to rise. Southward, where the four-mile boomerang curve of the Euclataw Passage opened into the Gulf the tide was falling fast. Vancouver Island, spreading its sinuous length like a barrier against the Pacific, crowded the sea into the shape of an enormous hourglass. Queen Charlotte Sound formed one bulb, the Gulf of Georgia the other. An hourglass three hundred miles from north to south. The Euclataw Passage was the neck, and the rapids between Little Dent and Valdez was a constriction of this neck to a span six hundred feet across, through which at the full strength of the tidal flow the sea ran with hurrying feet and a loud, complaining voice, as a mountain river hastens roaring over its stony bed.
Rod turned to the girl.
"It's running pretty good," he remarked. "Let's go, Mary."
She smiled assent. They got off the mossy rock. The green-bodied dugout with its futuristic bow and stern rubbed against a shelf convenient for embarking. The girl sat amidships, Rod in the stern, squatting on their knees, paddles in hand. Forty feet out from shore the water dropped with a murmur over a sunken ledge. It stood like a low, green wall, curling over with a white-edged crest. In two hours that murmur would rise to a thunderous roar, the low green wall would be a man's height with hissing whirlpools below. Already the suction was strong. The indraught took the canoe backward the instant they let go the shore hold. They bent to the paddles, plying short, swift strokes, won clear to the slack water well above the rapids and pointed for the Valdez side.
Here the current, thirty fathoms deep, free of all obstruction, shot through the Euclataws in a clear, straight line, pitching down in a slant perceptible to the eye, a strip of smooth jade-green bordered to right and left by eddies, whirlpools, white-tipped waves where conflicting currents met and slashed up foam. The song of running water crooned gently between wooded banks,—that song which would presently fill the air with deep-toned antiphony to the whisper of the winds.
"Now," Rod commanded. "Stow your paddle till I shout."
It was like a path between precipices, that strip of smooth, swift-flowing water, after the first dizzy swoop at the overfall. A boat length on either hand spun whirlpools. A sudden sheer of their craft meant almost sure destruction. The guiding thrust of Rod's paddle held the dugout true. Their breath came quickly. Their eyes glowed. Their lips parted in a set smile, as if an alteration of feature might destroy their equilibrium.
"Right," young Norquay said curtly.
The girl's paddle dipped with a sure, vigorous thrust. In the stern Rod held his blade at an angle, like a rudder, and the dugout shaved a whirling hollow in the vortex of which a drift log stood upended, spinning like a top, going slowly down end-on in the suction.
"Steady."
She held her paddle poised again. The canoe came back to midway of the green path. The Valdez shore flew by, stubs of trees, tall cedars with lancelike crests and drooping boughs. A gull swooped over them, crying. The swiftness made a cool breeze in their faces, flung the girl's hair in a loose brown cloud about her head.
The high, carved bow dipped into broken water, among cross-surges. They rode over "boils,"—deflecting currents that shot up from the depths and broke into strange watery mounds with a sinister muttering. They shipped a little spray, rolled uncertainly in this agitation. Then they were through, floating in a great eddy that swept them back toward Little Dent. They had shot the rapids.
Mary looked over her shoulder. They smiled at each other in perfect understanding, and young Norquay thought:
"I'd like to take old Spence through. He wouldn't grin. Poor old duffer, he gets all his fun second-hand—out of books."
Aloud he said, "We'd better get under the Dent shore before the eddy carries us back among the swirls."
"Among the Devil's Dishpans, you mean," she laughed, keeping stroke with him. "That's what daddy calls them."
"Good name," he grunted. "They're devil's something when they get to spinning good. Paddle, Brownie. We're losing ground."
They got in under the weedy shore of Little Dent and worked up to the overfall. They got ashore. Rod took a light line from the bow and hauled. Mary held the canoe off with a slender pole. Thus they worked their craft up over the jump-off and reached the northern side of the small island where the flood tide parted and where its sweep was slow. Then they reëmbarked and stood clear, paddling in a wide detour until they drove into the straight current again and were swept down like a gaudy arrow.
Close on their heels as they made the second voyage came a white power cruiser, all agleam in the afternoon sun, her housework varnished oak, bright flashes reflected off polished brass and copper. She plowed down the green spillway, her bow wave spreading like an ostrich plume. When Rod and Mary skilfully picked smooths in the broken water and swung aside into the comparative calm of the great eddy the white cruiser followed and hauled up close to them.
Out her pilot-house window a capped, red face grinned genially. On her low after deck half a dozen people sat in wicker chairs, the women in cool summer stuff, the men in flannels and colored sweaters. A girl about Mary Thorn's age, a fair-haired, blue-eyed creature like a bisque doll, stood with one arm around the slender signal mast. A little below her a tall young man with the reddish-brown hair and fine clear skin and grayish-blue eyes of the boy in the canoe leaned over the pipe rail.
"Hello, everybody," Rod greeted casually.
His brother disregarded this.
"Better climb aboard and tow that thing," he suggested. "How did you manage to get caught in the rapids?"
"We didn't get caught," Rod answered mildly.
"Then what the deuce are you doing in them?" Phil demanded.
"Oh, just running 'em for fun," Rod drawled.
"For fun!" One of the matrons on the after deck contrived a horrified inflection.
Phil Norquay's brow wrinkled a trifle. He looked inquiringly down at his brother. That youth gazed up at him with bland innocence.
"You'll be getting in among those big swirls if you don't watch out," Rod said to him. "Never mind about us."
Phil glanced, up and ahead, called an order to the man leaning out the pilot house.
"You'd better——"
But his sentence to Rod was cut off, for that imperturbable youth drove the dugout well clear of the power boat with a thrust of his paddle, and Mary Thorn's blade dipped in unison. They pointed straight for shore.
The launch swung in a short circle, gathered way, passed up the channel. Rod steered the canoe over to Little Dent, caught a drooping bough and held it against the streaming tide.
Mary looked after the white cruiser, turning now into Mermaid Bay.
"What a pretty girl that was by the mast. Who is she?"
"Oh, Isabel Wall. Sister to a girl Phil's got half a crush on," Rod answered carelessly. "I don't think she's so pretty. Too dolly-dolly. Shall we run 'em once more?"
"She looked pretty to me. She was so beautifully dressed," Mary said thoughtfully.
"Oh, clothes," Rod answered disdainfully. "That's all the bunch around our place does these days; doll up and look pretty. Come on, let's shoot the shoots again."
"No. It's running too fast now. The boils are beginning to break in the straight current," Mary said. "I want to go home."
"All right."
Rod let go the branch. They paddled against the eddy, crossed the small stretch of broken water where a lesser flood poured in from behind Little Dent, and slid down on the tide along the Valdez shore to a point a mile inside the rapids. Facing north, looking across the channel into Mermaid Bay, a planked float gave them landing. Back from the beach an unpainted house of split cedar lifted in a square of cleared land in the edge of virgin forest.
Mary sprang lightly to the float.
"What's the rush?" Rod asked, breaking a long silence. "What's wrong anyway? What made you turn clam all at once?"
"Me?" she turned a pair of clear hazel eyes on him with every indication of surprise. "Nothing. I have to pick some blackberries for mamma before supper."
Rod sawed the paddle blade up and down in the green water streaming under the float.
"Shall I come and help?"
"No," she said decisively. Then mockingly, "Thanks very much for your offer of assistance, just the same, Mr. Norquay."
Rod smiled at her.
"All right," he acquiesced. "I'll go home, if you're going to be haughty. Listen. If I can get away from that bunch to-morrow, I'll bring my tackle and we'll hike up to the lake and get some trout. Eh?"
"Maybe. If mamma'll let me."
"She will, if I ask her," he observed. "'By, Mary."
"'By, Rod."
He tied the gaudy dugout—which in its barbaric color scheme of Rod's own devising was alternately a joke and a provocation to his brothers—to the Hawk's Nest landing, after the lapse of an hour, which hour he spent coasting under the western shore of Big Dent, alone in the canoe, watching the herring flash in silver shoals among the kelp, the scuttle of crabs over the shingle, the deep purple and brick-red of starfish against flat rocks, in gazing up at a blue dome arched over the hurrying tide and the encircling mountains. Vast peaks, from the green-mantled cones near by, to distant pinnacles lifting far above timber line and capped with everlasting white.
Rod did not consciously apply his intellect to considering his environment. He felt it. It satisfied him, filled him with an indefinable sense of well-being. His people for a hundred years had filled their eyes with that and found it good. Against this background they had lived and loved and died. No matter. Rod, floating lazily in his canoe, was not looking backward, introspectively considering if he were the sum of five generations, each of which had contributed its quota to subduing a wild land to its use and need, to its ambition as well as to its necessity, and becoming one at last with that portion of the earth the first Roderick Norquay had made his own and handed to his sons.
No, eighteen mercifully wears invisible blinkers, and Rod was no exception. Life sat lightly on him. No emotional spur had as yet been forged to rowel him with the barbed thrust of ambition, desire, hot struggle, frustrated hopes and keen dissatisfactions, glows of possession and achievement, dead ashes of loss, all the curious patterns a man must weave with uncertain fingers in the tapestry of his life. So far as Rod was concerned on this bright August day, these things were not.
He walked up from the float toward a stone house with a warm red roof of tiles sitting amid a reach of emerald grass and clumps of exotic shrubbery against a background of magnificent native trees, his hands in his trousers pockets, bare-headed, whistling.
The path Rod walked approached the house by a circuitous route. It turned aside here and there like a leisurely pedestrian to skirt red-trunked arbutus with oily-green leaves and clusters of unripe berries, to curve around the base of massive firs that rose like dun pillars in a blue-vaulted forum, to pass great fibrous-barked cedars with drooping boughs wherein unseen squirrels chattered. Everywhere grass clothed the ground, a carpet with green velvet pile, close shorn. Stones great and small had been gathered in artless piles so long ago that their granite nakedness was hidden under thick moss, disguised with ivy, or bright with flowering plants, brilliant dabs of color against vivid greens and somber browns. This walk brought him at last to one end of a great stone house with wide, cool porches, deep window recesses, a roof of tiles that glowed in the sun like a cardinal's hat.
There were people sitting about on the porch, a dozen or more. Rod greeted them without halting until he reached the corner. Then he looked back over his shoulder. Through the trees on the parked slope he got a flash of the racing tide. The voice of the rapids waxed strong. Across the channel Oliver Thorn's weather-beaten house was a drab spot on the forest's edge. Over the low shoulders of Valdez the distant backbone of Vancouver Island cut the sky line into jagged tracery. That three-hundred-mile wall which stopped the marching surges from tropical seas loomed in a bluish haze out of which rose high, conical peaks, far and white and faintly shining.
He skirted the house. If he had destination or purpose Rod was not conscious of either as a definite urge. He was simply strolling. But as he turned the corner he came upon a girl leaning on a parasol and staring at some letters cut in a massive cornerstone where the thick foundation rose out of the earth.
"Oh, Rod," she said. "Do answer about a million questions for me, please."
"Have you got a list?" he asked.
"A list? Oh, no," she chuckled. "I'm still on an even keel."
"Nautically all right," Rod smiled.
He didn't know Laska Wall very well. He hadn't seen much of her. She had only been at Hawk's Nest three days. Prior to that he had heard more or less about the Walls. They were people who had lately begun to cut quite a figure in Vancouver society. His brothers knew them. Both Phil and Grove had pretty well monopolized Laska since her arrival here. But what Rod had seen of her he liked. She was a quiet girl, with a slow smile that wonderfully transformed a piquant, delicately tinted face. Rod looked at her now admiringly. He wondered if Isabel, the pretty, bisque-doll creature whose dainty clothes Mary Thorn had remarked, would be like that when she was twenty-one. He supposed so, since they were sisters, but he could scarcely believe it. He detested Isabel. She giggled incessantly, flaunted herself before him with an irritating archness, annoyed him with her glib French, with numerous manifestations of what Rod contemptuously termed (to himself) "kindergarten stuff." He was a man,—in his own estimation. It was a trial, which he bore as a gentleman, to be expected to act as Isabel's cavalier, merely because they were the juveniles of this house party. Isabel was juvenile enough, Rod admitted. He exempted himself from the charge of extreme youth. But it was provoking to have every one else blandly proceed on that assumption.
Perhaps that was why he warmed to this fair-haired young woman who addressed him as an intellectual equal who could impart knowledge.
"What does that signify, Rod?" she asked, pointing to a group of letters and figures graven deep in the stone.
"Oh, that's the cornerstone of the first course of masonry above ground, of the first wing of the old house, built by the first Norquay," Rod told her with a trace of pride that he covered by assumed casualness. "Those are his initials. R.S.N. for Roderick Sylvester Norquay. And the year."
"1809," the girl murmured. "A hundred years exactly. You know I have always thought of this country as a semi-wilderness—the last American frontier. How many generations, Rod?"
"We're the fifth from his time," he indicated the chiseled stone. "Grove and Phil and myself and Dorothy. I don't know if you've met Dorothy. She's married to a chap named Hale. Lives in Victoria."
"A century since that stone was laid by a man's hands," Laska continued musingly. "Five generations. No, certainly I did not imagine one would find any such well-established ancestral heritage on this wild coast."
"What's a century?" Rod commented. "Greece and Egypt had philosophers and poets and noble ruins when our ancestors were wearing skins and killing their meat with clumsy spears."
The girl paid no heed to this.
"I knew this place was old the moment I stepped ashore," she continued. "I knew it must have a history. Who was this first enterprising Norquay, Rod? Where did he come from and how did he pitch on this spot so long ago as the place for his baronial hall? I wonder if you realize what a—an air of distinction this place has? As if it were so well established that all the crudities had been ironed out—an atmosphere like—well, of permanency and power."
"Well, it's home, and that's a good deal," Rod answered, a little doubtful of too eager response. "I don't know about the power, but it's permanent enough."
"You can hardly imagine other people dispossessing you and making ittheirhome, eh?" Laska asked mischievously.
"No chance," Rod grinned at the suggestion. "I should say not."
"Tell me about the first Norquay," she wheedled. "I am sure it's vivid history. What was he—great—great—"
"Great-great-grandfather," Rod supplied. "Have you seen the family boneyard?"
She shook her head.
"I have seen most of the interior of the house. I have sat on the porch and drank tea and stared at these wonderful mountains that stick up everywhere, I have walked about on this lovely turf, in these grounds that are like an English park—and marveled how it had been made so beautiful. But I haven't seen the family boneyard. Is that literal?"
The boy nodded.
"There have been quite a few of us born here at one time and another," he said in his pleasant low-toned voice, "and buried here finally. Come and I'll show you, Miss Wall."
"My name's Laska," she smiled at him.
"All right then, Laska," he agreed. "Odd name. I like the sound."
"R.S.N. Eighteen hundred and nine.Hoc saxum posuit. I've forgotten all my Latin, Rod."
"He placed this stone," Rod translated. "Come on. I'll show you where the old chap's buried and tell you something about him."
Big Dent passes on map and chart for an island, by a geographical laxity. But it is an island only for brief moments at an extremely high tide. Otherwise it is a peninsular out-thrust, that helps to choke the Euclataw Passage.
Big Dent was a mile wide and twice as long. From side to side and from end to end it stood clothed in its ancient garment, the forest. Everywhere lifted enormous firs in whose plumy crests had sighed the winds that blew the first Norquay's trading vessel down Cardero Channel, cedars that were lusty when Columbus crossed the Western Ocean. For profit there had never been ax laid to tree on that twelve hundred acres. On its northern extremity Big Dent remained the natural forest of the region, a hushed jungle of devil's club, salal brush, ferns that grew man-high, salmonberry, branchy dogwood, vine maple. Out of this lesser growth the great trees rose in their majesty, silent, immobile, brooding. The sun blazed on their lofty heads. About their boles were silence and shade, a coolness at midday heat, the commingled smells of moist, fecund earth and rotting wood.
But all across the southern portion, the greater half of Big Dent, the thickets had been cut away, the patriarchal trees freed of the litter about their solidly planted feet, the sun let in, grass sowed, so that the eye could reach far down wooded corridors and get glimpses of sparkling sea; so that a Norquay or his guests could walk abroad in those friendly places and observe—if they were minded to observe—how man had imposed order and beauty upon the wasteful processes of nature by sweeping away all the detritus of the arboreal struggle to survive.
Leaving the house Rod and Laska walked a little way up the slope. They came to a small square enclosed by a low wall of masonry, the half-acre of the Norquay dead. A gate of grilled iron let them in. A red cedar rose in the middle of the plot like an enormous brown mast which had sprouted flat, feathery boughs that drooped as if tired with the weight of long-borne years, and cast a deep shadow over part of this burial ground. In this shaded portion uprose a number of gray granite slabs, the native rock every Norquay had used for such of his works as he wished to endure. Apart from these simple slabs stood a row of uniform design: a headstone four feet high, three feet wide; another, the width of the headstone and the length of a tall man, laid flat on the earth. Ornamentation there was none. Plain gray stone, worked to a smooth polish, briefly lettered,—that was all. A few flower beds were let into the turf between. A simple, unpretentious place in which plain men could take their long sleep.
Rod stopped by the first of the larger headstones.
"This was the first of our family here," he said.
The girl looked down at the inscription.
RODERICK SYLVESTER NORQUAY
Born 1770Died 1834His eye was not dimNor his natural force abated
"This was his wife," Rod pointed. "The first white woman to live on the Pacific coast north of California. That was his youngest son. That was his eldest son, my great-grandfather. And that was his youngest son, who was killed by the Chilcotin Indians on their second raid. There's grandfather's wife, and a son and daughter. There is my mother's grave. And over there is my oldest brother, who died before I was born."
"How interesting," the girl murmured. "What an adventurous time these first people of yours must have had."
"Rather," Rod agreed, "when you think of some of the things they had to face. Still, by all accounts, they rather enjoyed themselves. It never seems to have occurred to them to go elsewhere. There were lots of men pioneered after Vancouver's first voyage, but all of them except old Roderick seem to have come here to make a fortune in the fur trade and go home to live on their gains. Old Roderick kept a journal all his life. It's a queer matter-of-fact account of what he did, mixed up with a lot of philosophic speculation on why he did it. It appears that from the first time he dropped anchor in Mermaid Bay to wait out a fair tide through the narrows, he had the feeling that right here was the place to make a stand. He says quite frankly in his journal that a few determined men could easily subdue the natives and possess great estates. He says further that shortly after letting go the anchor he saw a hawk fly from its nest in a great tree, and he thought to himself that, by the grace of God and his own resolution, he would some day build on this silent headland a stout nest in which many a brood of Norquays should be hatched.
"Imagine a man who had crossed the Atlantic and rounded Cape Horn in a hundred-ton sailing vessel on a fur-trading venture looking at a savage coast and planning to found a family!"
"He had vision," Laska supplied.
"He needed to have, those days," Rod grinned. "The North Pacific was a fur-trader's paradise, but it was several thousand miles from anything like civilization. Old Roderick knew that well enough. He knew a good deal about this region before he came here on his own hook, you see. He happened out here first when Captain George Vancouver made his voyage of exploration in 1792. He was a petty officer on theDiscovery. He had the journal habit, even in those days. He tells about the surveys they made that year and the next. The idea of this country—after he'd seen a lot of it—took such a hold of him that three or four years later he got out of the British navy, scraped up all the money he could beg and borrow, outfitted a barque called theHermesand sailed for the Northwest to make a fortune trading beads and brass wire and Sheffield knives to the Indians for sea-otter skins.
"On that first voyage he got the idea of settling here. It evidently grew on him, because when he came out the second time—the first venture was a very profitable one—he brought a couple of dozen extra men, artisans of different trades, and set up a trading post here just as Captain John Meares tried to do at Nootka Sound a few years earlier—you'll find a very interesting account of Meares and his clash with the Spaniards over that post in Begg's 'History of British Columbia.' Meares and Don Martinez between them very nearly got Spain and Great Britain into war. Vancouver came out here to look into that squabble as much as for anything else.
"But ancestor Norquay had this spot pretty much to himself. He bought Big Dent from a local chief for six sheets of copper, an old cutlass, and a pint of glass beads. Think of it! He built a blockhouse of logs with a sixteen-foot stockade. His men cultivated some land for vegetables. He had cattle and pigs and sheep—brought 'em out in theHermes, like Noah with the animals aboard the Ark. But fur-trading was the chief business. He traded for sea otter as far north as Sitka. Here at home he got beaver, mink, marten, whatever the Indians brought in. The Northwest Fur Company claimed this territory. They were carrying on a big scrap with the Hudson's Bay Company at the time. Finally the Hudson's Bay swallowed the Northwest concern and got a free hand. They tried for years to make all North America their private fur preserve. But they didn't scare old Roderick off. Apparently he wasn't afraid of them. Too well-equipped, I suppose, to be driven off.
"On his fourth voyage in 1804 he took a cargo of twenty-two hundred sea otter which netted him fifty-six thousand dollars—so you can see what the fur trade meant in those times. On that trip he made off with the daughter of a country gentleman of Northumberland—he was Scotch himself, you know—an English girl named Dorothy Grosvenor. Her people considered him a low-class adventurer. So they took the bit in their teeth, boarded theHermesand sailed away. Sounds quaint. They brought out three or four families with them. The men stationed here had mostly gotten Indian wives by that time. Dorothy sailed with great-great-grandfather wherever he went with the barque for three or four years. But their first child was born here on Big Dent in 1807.
"The next year the Chilcotins came down. They're a fighting tribe from the interior. They had a way of coming down a river to the head of Bute Inlet, killing as many coast Indians as they could, taking the loot and the young women back across the mountains. I suppose they had heard of this white man who had lots of goods. So they organized a surprise attack on Hawk's Nest, as it was already called.
"There was quite a scrimmage, by all accounts. The Chilcotins were beaten off. We lost six men in the fight. Those small headstones are for them," Rod indicated a compact row of graves.
"So the following year old Roderick, who had never given up for a moment the idea of making this his permanent home, started the stone house. He built one wing. His son added a wing. Grandfather can tell you how he built the last addition, and another story, and how he put on a roof of tiles in 1860 after the Cariboo gold rush.
"The Chilcotins pulled off another surprise party in 1826, but they got such a hot reception they never tried again. By that time old Roderick had two sons and two daughters. The youngest son was the only man killed on our side. He led a party to destroy the Chilcotin canoes while they were attacking the house. He was killed by an arrow. But they smashed the canoes and only two Chilcotins out of forty got away. In fact, they were spared to go back and tell the rest of the tribe that it was bad medicine to molest the white men who lived at Hawk's Nest.
"They understood that, evidently, because they never came back. Although nearly twenty years later a brother of grandfather's was stuck full of arrows one evening right down where our boat landing is now. That killing was credited to the Chilcotins—in revenge. But it wasn't a fight. It was pure assassination. However, that was the last bloodshed here.
"The first fifty years of holding Hawk's Nest was altogether a pretty lively affair. But they kept right on the job. In '59 gold was found in the Cariboo and people rushed into B.C. by thousands. The Hudson's Bay monopoly was broken. B.C. became a Crown colony. We got title to our land. Grandfather began to operate in timber. Confederation with the Dominion took place in '69 or '70, in my father's time. There have been lots of changes in this country since old Roderick came. But we're still here."
"You can quite truthfully say that you belong to one of the first families, eh, Rod?" Laska bantered.
"Oh, well," he replied carelessly, "that's sheer accident. Nothing to be cocky about. I didn't have any hand in the big doings."
"Still, it's something to live up to, don't you think?" she inquired seriously.
"Perhaps. I don't know that it's on the cards for me to carry on any particular tradition. Neither myself nor Phil. We're superfluous, in a way. Of course we belong to the family, and all that sort of thing. But we're only younger sons, after all."
"I don't quite understand," Laska wrinkled her brows. "What difference does that make?"
"Quite a lot—to us," Rod grinned amiably. "You see, the original Roderick had certain notions about money and property. He laid down as a working principle for his heirs that the estate should never be divided and portioned out to each generation. He said that the bulk of it ought to remain compactly in one inheritance, for the benefit of everybody concerned. He made various suggestions as to how this should be carried out, but the main one is that the home place and the bulk of the holdings shall pass into control of the eldest son. We've proceeded always on that basis. Grandfather, in fact, when it came his turn, converted the estate into a corporation. The control is always vested in the eldest son. He owns the shares and carries on the management. Seventy per cent of the net income goes to him. The other thirty per cent of revenue is equally divided among the rest of the children, whether there's one or a dozen, and is paid to each for life as each attains his majority.
"Grandfather is really the king of the castle. He's eighty now and I don't suppose he can last much longer. The governor is the active manager. When the governor goes out, Grove takes over the whole works. He'll live here. His children will probably be born here, and his oldest son will be expected to carry on in the usual manner. It's a pretty well-established family custom."
"What do the younger sons do?" Laska inquired. "The girls naturally get married and go away with their husbands. But the younger sons?"
"Oh, we generally stick around," Rod said casually. "But once our schooling is completed, we are at liberty to do what we please. There's usually plenty of opportunity in connection with the family affairs. We own a lot of timber and land along the coast. But when a younger son wants to set up his own vine and fig tree he has to do it elsewhere."
"I see," Laska looked thoughtful. "It's something like the old English law of entail."
"Yes, except that it isn't a law. Merely a custom. You might call it a family tradition. Any generation could depart from it, if they wanted to."
They stood for a minute looking at the dull red of the tile roof showing through the trees.
"Shall we walk around a bit?" Rod asked. "Or shall we go and have a game of tennis before dinner?"
"Let's walk. I hate tennis when it's hot," she said frankly.
They closed the iron gate behind them and lounged along under the trees.
"What became of theHermes?" Laska asked suddenly.
"Went to the boneyard long ago," Rod replied. "Next time you're up in the library look in that big glass case by the east wall. You'll see old Roderick's charts and navigating instruments, sextant, chronometers, so on. The binnacle and compass is on theHaida—some of the old metal fittings, too. The oldHermeswas all oak, brass, copper and bronze. Her figurehead stands in a corner of the hall. You noticed it?"
"The wooden figure of a battered Neptune? I didn't know what it was," Laska confessed.
Across the lawn as they strolled, there came presently a man in flannels. When he came up to them it turned out to be Phil.
"The governor wants you, Rod," he said. "They're making medicine in the library. I'll look out for Miss Wall."
"You'd better look out for yourself," Rod answered with brotherly impudence.
If he had dreamed how close he came to the mark with this youthful attempt at repartee, Rod would assuredly have kept silence. If there were any one of his blood for whom Rod had a genuine unselfish affection, it was this tall brother who stood smiling down at Laska Wall. In the very nature of things Rod could not know that he had just placed in Laska's hands a weapon to be used—however unconsciously—against his brother, that anything he could say or do should conceivably tilt the uncertain scales of a woman's decision. So he grinned at his own sally and strode away toward the house, whistling "Hey, Johnny Cope" and wondering carelessly why "they" were making medicine and what his father could want of him so urgent that Phil had been sent to command his attendance. So far as Rod was concerned, his father's intentions and commands were usually conveyed in the most casual manner. In the Norquay establishment the authority of the head of the house was such that it never needed to be peremptory.
The wide porch facing seaward was deserted when he came there. He passed into a roomy hall, panelled in weathered oak to a ceiling crossed with massive beams. He took the broad stairway two steps at a bound, and turned more sedately into a big, low-ceilinged room where every inch of wall space was given over to loaded bookshelves.
When he saw what councillors composed Phil's cryptic "they," Rod felt for the first time a shadow of trouble in the offing.
His tutor, Mr. Arthur Spence, occupied one chair. Near him sat Grove, the eldest son of the house, a true Norquay in physique, long-limbed, wide-shouldered, with a more mature, slightly less engaging countenance than his brothers, although he had the same fresh coloring, the same reddish-brown hair and clear bluish-gray eyes. Norquay senior sat with his legs crossed, a bulky, well-preserved man. His years rode him lightly. He looked at his youngest son in silence. No one but Rod, perhaps, would have felt critical disapproval in that impersonal glance. None of the three understood how impressionable to a look, a tone, the nuances of personal atmosphere, an eighteen-year-old boy could be. Rod himself did not realize the lightning-like quality of his own perceptions where people were concerned. He had what he called "hunches." That they invariably proved correct never aroused in him more than a passing wonder.
"Sit down, Rod," his father indicated a chair.
The tutor and Grove arose, left the room. The fancy flitted across Rod's mind that they constituted a jury which had deliberated and given a verdict and now withdrew to permit the august judge to pronounce sentence. He racked his brain for a misdemeanor, a possible offence which merited paternal condemnation. He could recall none. Yet there was an air of suspended judgment in the slow puffing of his father's cigar, the judicial immobility of his manner, in the very silence of that pleasant room with its massive furniture and burdened shelves.
"I've decided it will be as well for you to enter McGill in the fall semester," he said dispassionately, fixing his eyes on his son with a slight obliquity of his brows. "Spence assures me you can easily qualify for entrance. You will go down to Vancouver day after to-morrow, get what clothes you need, then proceed to Montreal and stay with your Aunt Maida until the University opens. Give you a chance to meet a few people and get your bearings."
"Day after to-morrow!" Rod echoed.
"Yes," Norquay senior methodically deposited the ash from his cigar in a brass tray. "And in the meantime—" his even, mellow tone took on a slight acidity—"no more of this harebrained rapid-running with that Thorn girl in that gaudy barge of yours. It may amuse you, but it's hardly fair to the girl."
"Amuse me—well, it is good fun," Rod manifested a trace of bewilderment. He had never been attacked from such an angle. "But I don't see—unfair to Mary Thorn? D' you mean dangerous? We both swim like fish, and you can't sink a dugout. I know enough about swirly water not to run the rapids when it isn't safe."
"I wasn't thinking about the specific danger of drowning."
"What then?" Rod asked.
His father regarded him with a mild impatience.
"You're almost a man," he said impersonally. "It's time your taste in feminine associations rose a little above the half-wild daughter of a dreamy-eyed incompetent. Especially when it begins to attract attention. You seem to have forgotten, the last two or three days, that we have guests here."
"Oh, I see," Rod muttered. A flush crept up into his cheeks, as the implication of his father's words and attitude drove home. He was sophisticated enough to understand—and to resent—and to keep both understanding and resentment to himself. But he could not wholly conceal the small tempest that began to stir in him. He was dealing with a man accustomed to dealing with men, with personalities, and gauging them correctly for his own purposes. The boy's quick color, the momentary flash in his eyes, brought an amused smile to the elder Norquay's face.
"That's all," he said. "Most youngsters seem to find it necessary to makes asses of themselves about some sort of female sometime early in their careers. Don't be a common ass, Rod."
"I'll try not to, sir," Rod answered with as near an approach to sarcasm as he dared, "for the sake of the family."
With that he left the room, conscious of a quickly gathered frown on his father's face at this tonal shadow of irony. The Norquay characteristic, as Mr. Kipling once mentioned of colonials, was one of straight-flung words and few. This was not the first time Rod had manifested a variation from family type in his mode of expressing himself.
And as Rod strode down the hall to his own room he muttered to himself: "That's Grove. The governor never would have thought of such a rotten thing himself. Well, I may be an ass—but I'm not a damned cad."
He snicked the lock on his own door, flung himself moodily into a chair by the window. He felt a queer mixture of boyish anger and a touch of forlornness,—as a colt that has had the run of wide pastures must feel when it is first haltered and thrust into a stall.
Rod had come down a hall that had, like everything about Hawk's Nest, a spacious air. It was high and broad. Dim light filtered into it through stained-glass windows, fell in mellow patches on carpet so thick and soft that he moved silent as an ancestral phantom,—which, however, was no part of the Norquay tradition. Active, resourceful men, and beautiful, gracious women had lived and moved and had their being there. Those comfortable homelike rooms had seen their joys and minor tragedies, births and deaths, quarrels and affections. Some of them had left various monuments to their credit, chiefly in the upbuilding and sustaining of the Norquay fortunes. But none, the remembered and the forgotten, had ever returned in the spirit. It was as if having lived their span they were content to let their descendants have undisturbed possession.
Probably Rod was the only Norquay under that roof who had so clear a vision of all that had preceded him, and so faint a comprehension of his future. The normal youngster of that age is eagerly forward-looking. He has no retrospect. He is full of impatient hopes, dreams, desires, whenever he lifts his eyes beyond the absorbing present. Rod deliberately refrained from lifting the curtain of the future. When he went beyond the engrossing moment, he looked backward over the history of his country and his family which were so closely knit,—and he saw all the great adventures, the exciting struggles, the foundation-laying and the slow purposeful upbuilding, as something which had become a finished process before he was born. He would spend hours mooning over his great-great-grandfather's journal and feel a pang of regret that he had not lived in those quickening days. They were gone. The land was tamed. The Chilcotins would never again come raiding. The sea otters were vanished along with the men who hunted them. The trading vessel, square-rigged or fore-and-after, had given way to the steam tramp. From Land's End to the Strait of Juan de Fuca was a twenty-day voyage instead of thirty weeks. Law, order, custom molded men now. The frontiers were charted and surveyed. What was the use of being born with a spirit that chafed against the dull certainties of a world in which everything was known, defined, reduced to a formula? The world that Rod knew was like the Norquay family,—static! So he summed it up. All the great deeds done, or at any rate the necessity, the spur of doing removed beyond him. Those silent shores to which Roderick Sylvester Norquay sailed with Vancouver in 1792 were cluttered with grubby towns, marked off into private areas for individual exploitation. Those inland seas which they had explored and charted were speckled with vessels in the lumber trade, the coal trade, coastal transport, fisheries. The forests were falling under the axes of ten thousand loggers. There was only the adventure, the struggle, the arid business of making money. And no Norquay had a vital need of doing that. Their forefathers had attended shrewdly to the acquisition of land and timber when it could be had for the taking. The Norquays did not need to make money. They had it. It came rolling in to them. They could sit still or play; it was all one. Static! That was the term Rod used.
That a capacity for thinking about such things in such fashion was scarcely the normal intellectual equipment of an eighteen-year-old youth did not occur to Rod. He had the singularly unboyish quality of hoarding his thoughts, of living very much in a reflective world of his own, which he shared with no one; which indeed he sedulously masked from every one he knew, unless it was Mary Thorn. Even to Mary he permitted only shy, stray glimpses of what sometimes crowded his brain, as a concession to her confident belief in him, her conviction that the most fanciful thing he could utter was at least worth consideration merely because he saw fit to give it utterance. Whereas any groping effort to encase an abstraction in words served only to bring an amused look to the collective faces of his own people. His father would lift heavy eyebrows in polite surprise. Grove would laugh coarsely. Even Phil would look a little puzzled, a little bored. Rod knew. He seldom made such experiments in self-expression. But his mind would concentrate with burning eagerness on a great variety of things. And sometimes his conclusions saddened him without his knowing why.
This decree of banishment from Hawk's Nest in mid-summer provoked him to sullen pondering in the quiet of his own room. He recognized authority. Obedience was an observed tradition in that house. It was not the fact of his being bundled off to a university that troubled Rod. He had looked forward to that as a necessary and perhaps delightful experience. It was the snap judgment which hastened the date of this mental discipline—as if it were a penalty inflicted on him for an offence—as if he were a small child caught with his fingers in the jam pot.
So Rod, sitting with his elbows on the window sill looking out on the tiderace streaming full flood between Valdez and Big Dent, seeing the glassy green incline and the white flash of foam, wondered irritably why his father saw fit to penalize him, to warn him in that offensive, suggestive manner about Mary Thorn. There was no ground for that. Rod knew his father as a fair-minded man, not much given to moralizing, nor arbitrarily instructing his sons in ethical problems. He wouldn't have issued a fiat like that without some one stirring him up. Rod scowled. He could guess pretty well who had done the stirring; who, being not too nice in surreptitious amours himself, was inordinately jealous how the family dignity, the family honor fared in his brothers' hands. Which was a very precise summary of one phase of Mr. Grosvenor Sylvester Norquay. It wasn't a flattering estimate of character and Rod kept it strictly to himself. When he was small he had disliked Grove's high-handed style, his tendency to domineer, an occasional outcrop of a brutal streak. As Rod grew older that dislike became contempt, deep and abiding. A queer feeling to exist between brothers. Yet not so rare.
A warning bell brought Rod out of his absorption. He dressed and joined the others in the dining room.
It was a leisurely meal, unobtrusively ceremonial, after the conventional fashion of those who have gained the privilege of partaking of food as a pleasure, and not as a mere necessity. There was nothing lacking. To dine at Hawk's Nest was the equivalent of dining in the home of any cultivated person in New York, Paris, London,—black broadcloth and planished shirt front, corsage that revealed gleaming shoulders; snowy linen, polished silver, cut flowers; conversation as an art; good food, wine, perfect service. A black-coated man hovered discreetly behind the chairs, silently anticipating every want.
Rod's eyes swept the table and came to rest on his grandfather. A lean old patriarch with a thatch of hair white as the table cover, a mustache waxed to spiky points, a thin curved nose between deep-set, faded blue eyes. He was past eighty. He could still relish a glass of port, find pleasure in sitting beside a pretty woman,—upon whom he would bestow a blend of compliment and reminiscence. For now the old man lived almost wholly in the past. When he walked slowly about the grounds, leaning on his stick, he never spoke of what was to be, only of what had been. Rod looked at him and wondered if he would live as long and see so many changes. He was sitting beside Mrs. Wall, a plump well-groomed woman of forty-five. Above the murmur about the table Rod could hear him telling her of the gold rush to the Cariboo in '58. He had a crisp incisive manner of speech. He had been the first Norquay to attend McGill. He was an educated man, almost a scholarly one, in spite of an active life. He had builded well and widely on the fur-trading foundation.
"He was the last of the constructive period," Rod mused. "The governor has merely stood pat. Grove will likely go backward. We're a rum lot."
He had to give over these inturning reflections and be polite. He was seated between Isabel Wall and a Miss Sherburne, a darkly handsome creature whose fascinations were too precious to waste on a mere youth. Miss Sherburne's profile slanted eagerly to the left, toward Phil. But Isabel had no such reservations. Rod was nearest her own age. He was fair game. He proceeded casually to divulge to Isabel such information as she sought about running the rapids in a canoe, about Mary Thorn. She appeared to have a considerable curiosity about Mary. Presently Rod began to wish her deaf and dumb. Outwardly he remained patiently courteous. It was a relief when coffee and cigarettes ended the meal.
It took him some time to escape from Isabel. Normally he would not have minded her chatter nor her appropriation of himself. But just now his mind held tenaciously to something which had been nagging him ever since that interview in the library. When he saw Phil give over a palpable attempt to segregate Laska and saunter off toward the float landing, he excused himself and followed.
They walked down the slope together, out on the slip, seated themselves on a bench.
"Give me a cigarette," Rod demanded abruptly, as his first utterance.
Phil handed over his case. Rod lit one.
"Getting real devilish," Phil bantered.
"Was Grove aboard theHaidawhen you came through the rapids this afternoon? I didn't see him."
"Down below, I suppose," Phil replied. "I didn't notice. But he was with us. Why?"
"I thought so. What a skunk he is. Yet in this family he's the little tin god on wheels. He thinks everybody is as rotten as himself, too."
"You shouldn't talk like that," Phil remonstrated mildly.
"It's true. You know it is."
For a second Phil said nothing to this.
"One can't go about shouting unpleasant truths," he observed then. "What's wrong, anyhow?"
"I'm to be packed off to McGill day after to-morrow."
"But the term doesn't begin for weeks yet."
"Oh, I'm to visit Aunt Maida and explore the historic city which has justified its existence by containing the seat of learning where my forefathers absorbed the knowledge and culture which has enabled them to lead such eminently successful and praiseworthy lives," Rod drawled.
"Well, that's no great grief," Phil replied. "Nothing to get fussed up over."
"It was generally understood I was to begin next year. I'm being packed off as a punishment. It seems the family dignity is being compromised by my running rapids in a dugout with a girl."
"Well?" Phil waited patiently.
"Grove put a bug in the governor's ear," Rod dropped allusion for plain facts. "The governor wouldn't have thought of disciplining me. Grove's a damned snob. He has his gang here. He thinks I ought to spend my time entertaining them. He imagines it is a reflection on him that I prefer to play with Mary Thorn. Out of his own messy mind he takes it for granted—the governor would never of his own accord have suggested that I was—that I might—oh, damn! I don't like Grove's filthy insinuations, Phil. And I couldn't talk back to the governor. If it weren't for all these people here, I'd beat Grove up for his pains."
"You're hardly up to that yet," Phil smiled indulgently.
"Don't you fool yourself," Rod declared hotly. "I weigh a hundred and fifty-five stripped. I'm as hard as a rock—and he's mush. You know it, Philip. He's lapped up too much hard liquor, and dallied too much with that woman he keeps in the Bute Street flat to—to stand the gaff very long."
"Good Lord; nothing gets by you," Phil grunted. "How do you know these things?"
"I have eyes and ears," Rod answered. "And I'm not asleep when I'm in town. He had a little blonde in his harem last year. The latest, I understand, is a voluptuous brunette. He has more light loves than some people have servants. By jove, he's the last one that ought to hint to the pater thatIneed looking after."
"Maybe it was old Spence," Phil observed thoughtfully. "The three of them were confabbing when the governor asked me to find you. Old Spence is rather strait-laced, and you're his especial charge, you know."
"No, Spence is only an echo," Rod said scornfully, "An echo of other men's thoughts, books, history, languages. Old Spence is decent, and he considers me so. Besides, he wouldn't talk himself out of a job any sooner than he had to. There are no more Norquay children for him to cram with predigested mental fodder."
Phil laughed.
"You certainly have a piquant way of expressing yourself, kid," he smiled. "I don't think old Spence would let his job interfere with his sense of duty if it were aroused. I imagine, too, that he is slated for a pension after tutoring the three of us. I guess it was our beloved brother who put you in bad. Does it matter so much?"
"I suppose not," Rod said reflectively. "Still, it does make me sore to have him meddle like that. He's too fond of butting in and it's always his own ax that wants grinding. Or else just pure cussedness. I could run the rapids on every tide, and seduce a settler's daughter every six months for all he personally cares. He doesn't care a hoot what I do until some of his guests, I suppose, remark on my paddling around in a canoe with a girl who isn't anybody and who wears shabby clothes. Then he's all for class distinctions and a high degree of personal purity. Huh!"
Rod's snort was eloquent, and Phil grinned in sympathy. His grin faded with a suddenness that caused Rod to look up, curious as to what had brought that swift change and sobering fixity of gaze to his brother. Grove and Laska Wall had walked down to the top of the bank. They stood thirty feet above tidewater, sixty yards distant, the slanting sunbeams casting their shadows far across the grass. Grove had one hand thrust in his trousers pocket. With the other he gestured largely.
"Behold—these—my possessions," Rod interpreted sardonically. "Go up and cut him out, Phil. She's too nice a girl to—"
"I wonder why they fall for him the way they do?" Phil muttered under his breath; but Rod's keen ears heard.
"They don't know him, and we do," he said cynically. "He's there with the smooth talk, and the pleasing manner, and the good looks—and don't forget the possessions. That counts a heap with most of the girls we know."
"Oh, shut up. You don't know what you're talking about," Phil said roughly. And when Rod turned in surprise at this outburst, Phil rose to his feet and stalked away up the gravel walk into the grounds.
Rod followed at a more leisurely gait. He bore no ill-will. His dignity was touchy enough in respect of any affront from Grove. Phil was privileged to be as brusque as he liked. There was never any malice in what he said or did. Rod always gave Phil the benefit of the doubt. He was only a little puzzled as he gained the house and noiselessly made his way upstairs, to look over his fishing tackle and then read himself into drowsiness.
Rod's forenoons had been given over to study under Mr. Spence, M.A., B.Sc. He found himself, in view of his near departure for academic pastures, excused from this. He did not feel any particular gratitude for the exemption. Mr. Spence, in spite of certain classical prejudices, an insular sense of superiority to mere colonials which twenty-odd years' residence under the Norquay ægis had but slightly vitiated, had a faculty of making dry facts palatable and interesting matters completely absorbing. Rod had a mind like a sponge; Mr. Spence had supplied it rather deftly with choice liquids. So Rod had none of the schoolboy's exultation at seeing the last of his teacher. He merely wondered at a greater liberty bestowed upon him when the family seemed unduly exercised lest he plunge into mischief.
Thus having the whole day before him where he had counted only on the afternoon, he swallowed his breakfast—which was a go-as-you-please meal that kept the cook and butler busy from eight to ten-thirty—took his fishing kit and paddled the lurid dugout into the channel.
He glanced back at a piercing whistle from ashore. The distance was too great for words to carry, but not for Rod to make out the signaller as Grove. He waved a paddle and kept on.
"Probably wants to wish somebody on me to go fishing," Rod grunted. "He knows I'd much rather go alone. No chance, old cockatoo. This is my party."
He bounded light-footed as a cougar up the steps to a porch floor pricked full of innumerable tiny holes from the sharp calks of logging boots, walked without ceremony into a rather bare front room, and when he found no one there to answer his casual "hello," passed on to the kitchen. Mary and her mother were cleaning up the breakfast things.
"I'm headed for the Granite Pool," he announced. "Can Mary come along, Mrs. Thorn?"
"I expect she can," the girl's mother answered placidly, "if she wants to."
But Mary shook her head. "You're too early. Lots of work to do yet."
"You can work when you can't do anything else," Rod said. "Come on. Don't be a piker. You're only in Mrs. Thorn's way. Isn't she, Mrs. Thorn? Isn't a girl a nuisance around a house? I'm sure you'd much rather have a boy."
"I don't know about that," Mrs. Thorn smiled gently. "Mary's about as good at most things as a boy. Isn't she?"
"Oh, sure—that's why I want her to go fishing," Rod grinned. "Come along, Mary."
"If you want to go, child, never mind the work," Mrs. Thorn encouraged in her soft, even voice. "There isn't enough to bother any one."
"Perhaps Mr. Thorn will go, too."
Rod dropped his creel and vanished out the back door in search of the head of the house.
Mrs. Thorn looked down on her daughter's brown head. She was a tall woman, with more than a vestige of good looks, a certain grace of carriage. Her skin was fresh, unwrinkled. Her voice had a pleasant, throaty tone. An odd expression flitted across her face now, and Mary, glancing up, caught it; a wordless, sympathetic understanding. She rose on tiptoe to kiss her mother's cheek.
"Run on. Vacation will end soon enough. I don't suppose your father will go," Mrs. Thorn said. "Better put up a lunch. The chances are Rod didn't think of that."
"I thought of it," Rod came back in time to overhear, "but there was no time. I had to make a get-away."
"Playing hooky?" Mrs. Thorn teased.
"Yes. From our honored guests. They can't do anything without being personally conducted. And as it isn't my show, I'd rather let some one else do the conducting."
In ten minutes they were swinging uphill from the narrows, on a path that rose steeply through heavy timber, turning aside here and there for great trees. They moved silently, saving their breath for the climb. High overhead rifts of blue sky showed through interlocked branches. Dew still clung to the bordering thickets. They walked in cool shadow, on ground the sun never touched except in narrow shafts because of that canopy of leaf and bough. They bore on up until they came out on a height of land bare of timber, where only moss carpeted the granite ridge. On their right Little Dent and Big Dent and the twin Gillards lay like dusky green blobs in the shining race of the tide. The red roof of Hawk's Nest was a flaming dot against paler green. The channel below was a still paler shade. The mainland receded to height after height, mountain after mountain, the farther peaks faint blue cones on a ragged horizon.
"What a look. Air's clear as crystal this morning."
Mary nodded. They walked a hundred yards along the open backbone. To the left blue-black water mirroring the shore trees, the distant hills, walled on three sides with bold, ravine-split cliffs, gleamed in a deep hollow. They plunged downward through dense thickets. The patch discovered itself anew to their hurrying feet. In ten minutes, panting a little with the speed of their descent, they stood on a rock shelf thrusting into the Granite Pool, a little lake hidden in the Valdez hills. There was neither inlet nor outlet. It was half a mile broad, mysteriously fed by hidden springs, full of cutthroat trout rarely disturbed in their aqueous heaven.
In the Granite Pool Rod Norquay and Mary Thorn had a special, proprietary interest, quite apart from the fact that one side of Oliver Thorn's land touched its shore, and elsewhere its cliffy borders were ringed about by the Norquay holdings. Their interest was not one of physical ownership. They had discovered it for themselves. They were the first, so far as they knew, to cast a line in those deep, still waters. They had given it a fitting name. Even the trail, cleverly blinded, had been the work of their hands, assisted by Mary's father. Except Indians and timber cruisers, a ubiquitous and taciturn clan, few people knew that such a lake nestled in the hills so close to the Euclataw. These two, who had haunted it through the summers of four years, kept their knowledge to themselves. The Granite Pool was their own; the way thereto and the angler's joy therein a secret they refused to share. Oliver Thorn humored them in this; it pleased him that two children should have such a sanctuary. Rod evaded divulging the source of the baskets of trout he carried home,—justifying himself by the sure knowledge that if all Hawk's Nest knew, vandal parties under Grove's leadership would invade trail and lake, make fish hogs of themselves in the Granite Pool, profaning its beautiful solitude in the name of sport.
A raft was moored to the shelving rock. They got aboard and cast loose, jointing up their rods as the raft drifted down on a patch of lily pads among which faint splashes sounded intermittently, followed by concentric ripples that spread away till they were lost on the surface of the dark water.
"They're still feeding, thank goodness," Rod observed.
Mary nodded, busy with her gear. She rose, flicked a Royal Coachman forty feet on her third cast and struck a twelve-inch trout. Whereupon they both became galvanized by that curious suppressed excitement which is a heritage from remote periods when man secured his daily food with his own hands, or went hungry.
At four in the afternoon they had taken their leave of the Pool, climbed to the ridge, and were sitting on a down tree trunk, looking from that vantage at a steam tug far below with a great boom of logs trailing astern. She passed through the lower rapids in the brief slack. Rod's creel lay at his feet, heavy with their catch. He watched the raft of logs move slowly up the channel. Then his eyes turned to the girl, rested upon her with definite appraisal.
Rod had been looking at Mary Thorn more or less casually ever since he was a leggy boy in knickers and she a slim elf in abbreviated gingham dresses. But he had never been so conscious of her as now. So late as yesterday he had regarded her without personal awareness of sex. How was it, he wondered, that a few words from his father, a cryptic hint or two, could make everything different? Nothing had happened. Yet he knew that a different quality had entered their companionship. A boy and a girl could play together without thinking of themselves as male and female. A man and a woman couldn't. His father had warned him that he was a man and should comport himself accordingly. As if a man's natural instinct was to run amuck! Perhaps that was the truth. Rod smiled uneasily at the notion. He was not precisely an unsophisticated youth, but he could scarcely comprehend that there is only a shadowy border between the frank, sexless affections of childhood and the uneasy glow of maturing passion. He had never nursed a libidinous thought about Mary Thorn. And yet—
His eyes rested on her with a new sort of gauge. She sat staring down Cardero Channel, her hands in her lap, not so much intent on some distant object as deep in one of those long, thoughtful silences into which she now and then retired,—a characteristic that Rod liked because it was something he himself often did. Her hair was a brown smoothness about her head, tied back with a narrow ribbon. She was very pretty, Rod decided critically, prettier than any girl he knew. But something more than superficial prettiness attracted him. He didn't know what. It eluded him. She had a woman's bosom and neck. Her body was made up of harmonious contours. Her expression, absent, reflective, gave him the feeling that he looked at maturity and wisdom. It surprised him to think that such an aspect of her had never struck him before.
Looking at her, he suddenly felt a queer, constricted feeling in his breast. He desired all at once to touch her, to rest his fingers lightly on that delicately tinted skin. She would laugh at him. He wondered if she would. He wondered what she thought about, locked up in herself like that. What went on in her mind that brought tiny puckers of concentration in her forehead? Was she as suddenly acutely conscious of him, in a disturbing physical sense, as he was of her? And he wondered futilely why he should be troubled by such unaccustomed thoughts and sensations now, when so late as yesterday they two had sprawled together on the mossy benches of Little Dent, laughing and chattering like two boys bent on innocent adventure in the world of boyish action.