CHAPTER III
GEOFFREY'S FIRST CONTRACT
It was springtime among the mountains which, glistening coldly white with mantles of eternal snow, towered above the deep-sunk valley, when, one morning, Geoffrey Thurston limped painfully out of a redwood forest of British Columbia. The boom of a hidden river set the pine sprays quivering. A blue grouse was drumming deliriously on the top of a stately fir, and the morning sun drew clean, healing odors from balsam and cedar.
The scene was characteristic of what is now the grandest and wildest, as it will some day be the richest, province of the Canadian Dominion. The serene majesty of snow-clad heights and the grandeur of vast shadowy aisles, with groined roofs of red branches and mighty colonnades of living trunks, were partly lost upon the traveler who, most of the preceding night, had trudged wearily over rough railroad ballast. He had acquired Colonial experience of the hardest kind by working through the winter in an Ontario logging camp, which is a rough school.
An hour earlier the man, to visit whom Thurston had undertaken an eight-league journey, had laughed in his face when he offered to drain a lake which flooded his ranch. Saying nothing, but looking grimmer than ever, Geoffrey had continued his weary journey in search of sustenance. He frowned as he flung himself down beneath a fir, for, shimmering like polished steel between the giant trees, the glint of water caught his eye, and the blue wood smoke curling over the house on a distant slope suggested the usual plentiful Colonial breakfast.
Although Geoffrey's male forbears had been reckless men, his mother had transmitted him a strain of north-country canniness. The remnant of his poor possessions, converted into currency, lay in a Canadian bank to provide working capital and, finding no scope for his mental abilities, he had wandered here and there endeavoring to sell the strength of his body for daily bread. Sometimes he had been successful, more often he had failed, but always, when he would accept it, the kindly bush settlers gave him freely of their best. As he basked in the warmth and brightness, he took from his pocket a few cents' worth of crackers. When he had eaten, his face relaxed, for the love of wild nature was born in him, and the glorious freshness of the spring was free to the poorest as well as to the richest. He stooped to drink at a glacier-fed rill, and then producing a corn-cob pipe, sighed on finding that only the tin label remained of his cake of tobacco.
Through the shadow of the firs two young women watched him with curiosity. The man looked worn and weary, his jean jacket was old and torn, and an essential portion of one boot was missing. The stranger's face had been almost blackened by the snow-reflected glare of the clear winter sun, and yet both girls decided that he was hardly a representative specimen of the wandering fraternity of tramps.
Helen Savine was slender, tall, and dark. Though arrayed in a plain dress of light fabric, she carried herself with a dignity befitting the daughter of the famous engineering contractor, Julius Savine, and a descendant, through her mother, from Seigneurs of ancient French descent who had ruled in patriarchal fashion in old-world Quebec. Jean Graham, whose father owned the ranch on the slope behind them, was ruddy in face, with a solidity of frame that betokened Caledonian extraction, and true trans-Atlantic directness of speech.
"He must be hungry," whispered Jean. "Quite good-looking, too, and it's queer he sits there munching those crackers, instead of walking straight up and striking us for a meal. I don't like to see a good-looking man hungry," she added, reflectively.
"We will go down and speak to him," said Helen, and the suggestion that she should interview a wandering vagrant did not seem out of place in that country where men from many different walks of life turned their often ill-fitted hands to the rudest labor that promised them a livelihood. In any case, Helen possessed a somewhat imperious will, which was supplemented by a grace of manner which made whatever she did appear right.