"I surely will. Only, as I said, I've no cast-iron plan. If you want to make money, why not try finance? Á la Grove. That seems to be gorgeously productive."
"Finance. Huh!" Phil snorted. "I'd rather play poker. I don't want so much to get something as to do something."
"Andy Hall said to me once that the fundamental principle of modern business is to do everybody and do 'em first," Rod drawled. "That ought to give you scope enough."
They laughed. It was a quaint notion. As such it amused them.
Rod's expressed intention of resuming their honeymoon was based on an impulse with which, when he defined it, he found Mary in complete accord. She was no echo. So that with her interest assured he proceeded to act.
A week later they debarked from a coastwise steamer on a float landing before a logging camp halfway up Bute Inlet. They had doubled on their course and come back to a point within thirty miles of Hawk's Nest to go on a voyage of exploration and discovery, as Rod whimsically defined their object. It was indeed a whim, based soundly on appreciation of natural beauty, of dusky still forests, of the sound of running water, the indefinable charm of wooded loveliness in which they could move untrammeled together, that had brought them here with a sturdy rowboat, a tent and bedding, fishing tackle and a supply of food. Camp fires and wood smoke at twilight amid these cathedral stillnesses that filled the untouched forest. This was what they desired, for the time.
A fisherman's motor boat carried them across the inlet for a sum, towing their loaded skiff astern.
"That's the place," Rod pointed. "Let us off here."
The fisherman chugged away. They sat in the boat, oars in hand, gazing up at cliffy slopes where the forest opened about mossy knolls, where ledges of bare rock barred the hillside, rising up and up from a short reach of gravelly shore where tiny wavelets broke at spaced intervals. The inlet ran northwest, curved away among high mountains. Far above and on either side of this great arm of the sea low hills rose to cliffs, cliffs ran up to precipices, and a jumble of cliff, gorge, precipice and virgin forest lifted far above to high, aloof peaks, domed with snow and studded with glaciers. The afternoon wind was but a sigh. All that sweep of sea and mountain range brooded in the sun as voiceless and changeless as when the first Norquay sailed the Hermes to Dent Island more than a century before.
"This is something like, eh?" Rod murmured.