Indeed, it was his father who observed that the lake looked like a proper haunt for pirates and Hugh who reminded him that pirates were not ever to be found so far north. All the books he had seen, pictured them as burying treasure on warm, sunny, sandy beaches, or flying in pursuit of their prey on the wings of the South Sea winds. Pirates in the wooded regions to the north of the Mississippi Valley, pirates where the snow lay so deep and the lake was frozen for nearly half the year, where only through a short summer could the waters be plied by “a low, raking, black hulk” such as all pirates sail—it was not to be thought of! Even now, when Hugh stood on the station platform and caught his first glimpse of the real Red Lake, saw the wide blue waters flecked with sunny whitecaps, the hundred pine-covered islands and the long miles of wooded shore, even then he had no thought of how different he was to find this place from any other he had ever seen. Both lake and town seemed to him to promise little.
For Rudolm, set in its narrow valley between the Minnesota hills, looked as though it had been dropped from some child’s box of toys, so small and square were the houses and so hit-or-miss was the order in which they stood along the one wide, crooked street. There were no trees growing beside the rough wooden sidewalks, the street was dusty and the sun, even although it was October, seemed to him to shine with a pitiless glare. He walked slowly along the platform, wondering why Dick Edmonds had not come to meet him, thinking that Rudolm seemed the dullest and most uninteresting town in America and trying to stifle the rising wish that he had never come.
A soft pad, pad on the boards behind him made him turn his head as a man walked swiftly past. Hugh saw that his shapeless black hat had a speckled feather stuck into the band and that he wore, instead of shoes, soft rounded moccasins edged with a gay embroidery of beads. Plainly the man was an Indian. At the thought the boy’s heart beat a little faster. He had not known there would be Indians!
His own being in Rudolm was simple enough, although somewhat unexpected. Hugh’s father was a doctor, enrolled in the Medical Reserve since the beginning of the war but not until this month ordered away to France. The problem of where Hugh should live during his absence was a difficult one since Hugh had no mother and there were no immediate relatives to whom he could go. He had finished school but had been judged rather too young for college, and, so his father maintained in spite of frantic pleading, much too young to enlist.
“I’m sixteen,” was the boy’s insistent argument, but—
“Wait until you have been sixteen more than two days,” was his father’s answer.
“I could go with the medical unit, I know enough from helping you to be some use as a hospital orderly,” Hugh begged, “I would do anything just to go to France.”
“They need men in France, not boys just on the edge of being men,” Dr. Arnold replied, “when you have had one or two years’ worth of experience and judgment, then you will be some help to them over there. But not now.”
“The war will be over by then,” wailed Hugh.
“Don’t fear,” his father observed grimly, “there is going to be enough of it for all of us to have our share.”