“We’re way behind time on this run, but we come through on the down trip at six in the morning, sharp. You-all will be going back with us to-morrow, I reckon.”
“No,” replied Hugh, as he came down from the car step and gathered up his belongings. “No, I’m going to stay.”
“Stay?” repeated the porter. “Oh—a week, I suppose. No one really stays at Rudolm except them that are born there and can’t get away.”
Hugh shook his head.
“I am going to stay all winter,” he said.
“The whole winter! Say, do you know what winter is up here?” the man exclaimed. “For the love of—”
A violent jolt of the train was the engineer’s reminder that friendly converse was not in order when there was time to be made up.
“All right, sah, good-by. I hope you like staying, only remember—we go through every day at six in the morning less’n we’re late. Good-by.”
The train swept away, leaving Hugh to look after it for a moment before he turned to take his first survey of Rudolm and the wide sheet of blue water upon whose shore it stood.
Red Lake, when he and his father had first looked it up on the map, seemed a queer, crooked place, full of harbors and headlands and hidden coves, the wider stretches extending here and there to fifteen, twenty, twenty-five miles of open water, again narrowing to mere winding channels choked with islands. Hugh would have liked to say afterward that he knew even from the map that this was a region promising adventures, that down the lake’s winding tributaries he was going to be carried to strange discoveries, but, as a matter of fact, he had no such foreknowledge.