So there the discussion ended and the question of what Hugh was to do came up for settlement. There was a distant cousin of his father’s in New York—but this suggestion was never allowed to get very far. Hugh had never met the cousin and did not relish the idea of going to live with him, “sight unseen” as he put it, on such short notice. It was his own plan to go to Rudolm where lived the two Edmonds brothers, John, cashier of the bank there and a great friend of his father’s, and Dick, a boy four years older than himself, whom he had met but once yet knew that he liked immensely. Several times John Edmonds had written to Dr. Arnold—
“If Hugh ever wants to spend any time ‘on his own’ we could find him a job here in Rudolm, I know. It is a queer little place, just a mining and lumbering town full of Swedes, but he might like the hunting and the country and find it interesting for a while.”
It was the idea of spending the time “on his own” that made Hugh feel that thus the period of his father’s absence might chance to seem a little shorter and the soreness of missing him might grow a little less. John Edmonds had answered their letters most cordially and had said that all could be arranged and Hugh need only telegraph the day of his arrival. The final preparations had been hastened by the coming of Dr. Arnold’s sailing orders; the two had bidden each other good-by and good luck with resolute cheerfulness and Hugh had set forth on his long journey northward. He had never seen the Great Lakes nor the busy inland shipping ports with their giant freighters lying at the docks, nor the rising hills of the Iron Range through which his way must lead, but he noticed them very little. His thoughts were very far away and fixed on other things. Even now, as he walked slowly up Rudolm’s one street he was not dwelling so much on his forlorn wonder why he did not see his friends, but was thinking of a great transport that must, almost at that hour, be nosing her way out of “an Atlantic port,” of the swift destroyers gathering to convoy her, of the salt sea breezes blowing across her deck, blowing sharp from the east, from over the sea—from France. For he was certain, from all that he could gather, that his father was sailing to-day and was launching upon his new venture at almost the same time that Hugh was entering upon his own.
Somewhat disconsolately the boy trudged on up the hot empty highway, seeing ahead of him the big, ramshackle building that must be the hotel and beyond that, at the end of the road, the shining blue of the lake. He was vaguely conscious that, at every cottage window, white-headed children of all sizes and ages bobbed up to stare at him and ducked shyly out of sight again when they caught his eye. Between two houses he looked down to a sunny field where a woman with a three-cornered yellow kerchief on her head was helping some men at work. She did not look like an American woman at all, Hugh thought as he stopped to watch her, but walked on abashed when even she paused to look at him, leaning on her rake and shading her eyes with her hand. He rather liked her looks, somehow, even at that distance, she seemed so strong, in spite of her slenderness and she handled her rake with such vigorous sunburned arms.
He raised his eyes to the circle of hills that hemmed in the little town rising steeply from beyond the last row of houses and the irregular patchwork of little fields. They were oddly shaped hills, rolling range beyond range, higher and higher until, far in the distance there loomed the jagged mass of one big enough to be called a mountain. The nearer slopes were covered with heavy woods of pine and birch, the dense trees broken here and there by great masses of rock, black, gray or, more often, strange clear shades of red.
“Red Lake derives its name,” so the atlas had stated in its matter-of-fact fashion, “from the peculiar color of the jasper rock that appears in such quantity along its shores.”
Hugh had never seen anything quite like that clear vermilion shade that glowed dully against the black-green of the pines. Across the slope of the nearest hill, showing clear like a clean-cut scar, there stretched a steep white road that wound sharply up to the summit and disappeared. He began to feel vaguely that although the town attracted him little, the road might lead to something of greater promise.
There were some men lounging before the door of the hotel when he reached it, miners or lumberjacks wearing high boots and mackinaw coats. They were talking in low tones and eyeing Hugh with open curiosity. Just as he came to the steps, two figures shuffled silently past him, one, the Indian he had seen at the station, the other, a broad-shouldered, broad-waisted woman stooping under the heavy burden she carried on her back. The man, erect and unimpeded, strode quickly forward, but she stopped a moment to readjust the deerskin strap which passed over her forehead and supported the heavy weight of her pack. She turned her swarthy face toward Hugh and greeted him with a broad, friendly smile, then bowed her head once more and trudged on after her master. The boy, not used to the ways of Indian husbands and their wives, stood staring after the two in shocked astonishment.
“That’s Kaniska, the best guide around here, and his squaw,” he heard one of the men say to another. “She’s the only Indian hereabouts the only one I ever heard of, really, that smiles at every one she meets. They are all of them queer ducks; no matter how well you know them you never can tell what they are thinking about. I believe she is the very queerest of them all. The Swedes here call her Laughing Mary.”
The two dark figures slipped out of sight around a corner and Hugh went up the steps into the hotel. The big, untidy room was apparently empty except for a bluebottle fly buzzing against the window. A faint snore, however, made Hugh aware that he was not alone and drew his attention to the office clerk, sitting behind the high desk, his head back, his heels up, sound asleep. The men outside had ceased talking, the entire village was so quiet that Hugh could actually hear a katydid singing its last summer song loudly and manfully down in the field.