“But you say your Uncle Oscar lives out there too?”
“Oh, yes,” assented Carl, “but you know with my Uncle Oscar it is all different.”
Linda called from below, causing her small son to rush clattering down the stairs and leave Hugh alone. He stood long by the window watching the sunset fade and pondering deeply.
“So there can be pirates this far north after all,” he was thinking, “and father was right.”
With the thought came a sudden pang of homesickness, a longing for his father, for the comfortable, ordinary life at home, for everything that was usual and familiar. What would become of him here, he wondered, what could be the end of this venture “on his own”? What a strange place it was to which his journey had led him, what strange people he had met or heard of that day, the clumsy, friendly Swedes, kind-hearted Linda Ingmarsson, that mysterious Jake out on the mountain, that brother Oscar whose road it was that climbed the hill. He ran through the list over and over and found that his mind, with odd insistence, kept coming back to the road that “now went nowhere but some day would go far.”
The announcement that supper was ready interrupted his reflections, after which he received a pressing invitation from Carl to go with him to get the mail. Rudolm knew no such luxury as a postman, it went every night to fetch its letters at the general store where John Benson sold meat and calico and mackinaw coats. The little postmistress who sorted the mail behind her own official counter was an expert at her task, for no one besides herself could make head or tail of some of the Swedish and Finnish scrawls that came from the Old Country or the French-Canadian flourishes on the addresses of the picture postcards. No one else could have remembered that Baptiste Redier liked to have his papers accumulate for six months while he was away at the lumber camp, or that Gus Sorenson must not be trusted with the Malmsteads’ mail if he had been drinking, or that it was a kind act to pretend to look through the pigeonholes when an Indian asked for mail, even though it was well known that none of these Chippewas ever got a letter. “Stamp-stamp,” would go the marking machine behind the window, “stamp”—a long pause and then another brisk “stamp-stamp.” No matter in what a hurry were the patrons of the Rudolm postoffice, they must wait, every man, woman and child of them, until Miss Christina had read all the postals.
The little place was already crowded when Hugh arrived, mostly with men and children, for the women did not often come for the mail, it was their hour for washing dishes. Hugh sat down on a bench in the corner to listen to the talk going on about him in all degrees of broken English. It concerned mostly the lost Edmonds boys, but occasionally drifted back to the universal subject, the war, for this was the time when the American army was gathering in France, when Russia was crumbling, when the first pinch of winter was beginning to be felt abroad and the cry was going up over all the world to America for bread. By and by the general talk died away and all began to listen to some one who was airing a grievance very loudly on the other side of the room. He was a big man with a rough corduroy coat and a rougher voice which he raised very loud in the height of his indignation.
“I tell you there wasn’t a better bale of furs in the whole Green River country. I got some myself, trapping, and bought some from the Indians, and there wasn’t one pelt but was a beauty, but the brown bear skin was the best of all. Five hundred dollars I would ’a’ got for them, just that little bale, not a cent less—and when I come to myself again every hide and hair of them was gone!”
“And you can’t tell who took them?” questioned one of his audience.
“I can’t tell but I could guess right enough. I didn’t see nobody, only a billion or two stars when I was hit over the head in the dark, and that was all. There’s only one man around here who will do that kind of dirty work and he hails from Jasper Peak. That’s the kind of fur trading he likes to do, let some other man go through the snow and the cold, spending his good money, risking his life, tramping along his line of traps or from one Indian camp to another, wheedling the red rascals into selling their furs, and just as a fellow’s nearly home again, dreaming about the profit there’s going to be this time, here comes some one sneaking behind in the dark and the whole thing’s gone!”