With great care and consultation they got together an outfit that was slim for housekeeping or elaborate for camping, as one might choose to regard it. Alice selected blankets, pillows, cooking utensils, and tableware. Bob packed his fishing tackle and his rifle, a good 38.55 caliber repeater, with plenty of cartridges. They took two hams and a side of bacon from their own homecured stock, beans, two bags of potatoes, flour, sugar, and other groceries, together with several large loaves of fresh bread that Alice baked herself. Another package had to be made of gardening implements; a hoe, a rake, and a spade, and an abundance of different seeds. If she was going back to the land, Alice said, she was going to do it thoroughly.
An ax was needed, too, and a sharp hatchet, a saw and hammer and assorted nails. In fact, there seemed to be no end to the things to be taken—necessaries, all of them. One thing after another was forgotten and remembered at the last minute—lamps and a washboard, soap, books, a looking-glass, a pepper-box. In the end, they had three huge packing-cases, and several small packages. Alice had cherished a dim hope of being able to take a crate of her favorite White Leghorn hens to supply them with fresh eggs, but she was forced to give that plan up.
They took the tools from the home apiary, but the dozen hives of bees they left where they stood. On the last day Alice equalized them in strength and put top stories of empty combs on all of them, so that they could be left to themselves in comparative safety.
Carl then left for Morton, taking with him a small trunk containing a supply of cooked food, an ax, a hammer, his shot-gun and his fishing rod. Alice and Bob gave him forty-eight hours’ start, and then shipped their freight and took the train for the North.
At leaving, they both felt a flood of homesick regret and misgiving. Harman’s Corners was the only home they had ever known, and Alice’s lips quivered, when she looked back from the buggy as they drove to the station. Bob himself felt a sudden doubt as to whether he had been right in proposing and urging the speculation. A bad season, a little hard luck, and they would be utterly stranded and penniless.
It was not without a secret feeling of misgiving that Alice and Bob bade farewell to Harman’s Corners
But these forebodings gradually evaporated as the train went northward, skirting Lake Simcoe, crossing the Muskoka country, running hourly deeper into the rocky wilds. It was a slow local train and took more than half a day to make the journey, so that it was late in the afternoon when they at last stepped out upon the board platform of the little Morton station.
A sharp chill in the air reminded them that they had come a hundred miles due north. Morton had once been a flourishing lumber town, operating four sawmills, but the pine had long since been cut away, and the place had greatly declined, like Harman’s Corners. It seemed to consist of only a couple of dozen houses, two or three stores, and a frame hotel. The dark evergreen forest apparently came close up to the town in every direction, but Bob informed his sister that a few determined farmers tried to get a living out of the rocky soil, and several French half-breed families lived near the village, contriving to support existence on a little lumbering, a little trapping, and a little guiding. In November the district woke to temporary life, with the influx of deer hunters from farther south.
It was much too late in the day for Bob and Alice to think of driving to the apiary, so they went to the little hotel, where, at this season, they were the only guests. After engaging their rooms, they proceeded to look up Mr. David Farr, who held the mortgage on the bees.