“Now, Mr. van Cortlandt,” said Rolf, “will you explain to your mother that we are going on with this so as to travel quickly, and will send back for the rest as we need it?”
A quiet chuckle was now heard from Big Pete. “Good! I wondered how he'd settle it.”
The governor and his lady saw them off; therefore, there was a crowd. The mother never before had noted what a frail and dangerous thing a canoe is. She cautioned her son never to venture out alone, and to be sure that he rubbed his chest with the pectoral balm she had made from such and such a famous receipt, the one that saved the life but not the limb of old Governor Stuyvesant, and come right home if you catch a cold; and wait at the first camp till the other things come, and (in a whisper) keep away from that horrid red Indian with the knife, and never fail to let every one know who you are, and write regularly, and don't forget to take your calomel Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, alternating with Peruvian bark Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, and squills on Sunday, except every other week, when he should devote Tuesdays, Fridays, and Sundays to rhubarb and catnip tea, except in the full moon, when the catnip was to be replaced with graveyard bergamot and the squills with opodeldoc in which an iron nail had been left for a week.
So Henry was embraced, Rolf was hand-shaken, Quonab was nodded at, Skookum was wisely let alone, and the trim canoe swung from the dock. Amid hearty cheers, farewells, and “God speed ye's” it breasted the flood for the North.
And on the dock, with kerchief to her eyes, stood the mother, weeping to think that her boy was going far, far away from his home and friends in dear, cultured, refined Albany, away, away, to that remote and barbarous inaccessible region almost to the shore land of Lake Champlain.
Chapter 58. Back to Indian Lake
Young Van Cortlandt, six feet two in his socks and thirty-four inches around the chest, was, as Rolf long afterward said, “awful good raw material, but awful raw.” Two years out of college, half of which had been spent at the law, had done little but launch him as a physical weakling and a social star. But his mental make-up was more than good; it was of large promise. He lacked neither courage nor sense, and the course he now followed was surely the best for man-making.
Rolf never realized how much a farmer-woodman-canoeman-hunter-camper had to know, until now he met a man who did not know anything, nor dreamed how many wrong ways there were of doing a job, till he saw his new companion try it.
There is no single simple thing that is a more complete measure of one's woodcraft than the lighting of a fire. There are a dozen good ways and a thousand wrong ones. A man who can light thirty fires on thirty successive days with thirty matches or thirty sparks from flint and steel is a graduated woodman, for the feat presupposes experience of many years and the skill that belongs to a winner.