The Gaspards of Pine Croft: A Romance of the Windermere

by Ralph Connor

“De beeg chief, he good man to Tom,” said the Indian in a husky voice, his face set in an unmistakable mould of grief.

The emotion manifested by the stoical and simple-hearted savage released the flood of grief and loneliness that, without his knowledge, had been gathering within Paul’s heart ever since he had turned in at the Pine Croft drive. He threw himself into a chair, put his face in his hands, while great sobs shook his body. On the floor beside him the Indian sat, silent, his face rigid, immovable, as if cut in stone, his eyes unseeing, staring straight into space. Thus they sat, master and man, separated far as the poles asunder by race, breeding and convention, but finding a meeting point in the great and profound emotions of love and sorrow, in which all men, red, black, brown and white, are one.

After supper Tom took Paul to a special store-room where were piled up the family boxes and trunks, each labelled as to its contents in the Colonel’s neat hand-writing: “House linen,” “Silver,” “Books,” “Private papers,” etc. From a cupboard in the kitchen Tom took a ring of keys and indicated without the slightest hesitation the key for each trunk and box. Indian Tom had been faithful to the trust imposed by the Colonel’s “woman,” for the sake of the old chief who had saved his life many years ago.

“We will open this one, Tom,” said Paul, pointing to the box labelled “Private papers,” “and then you can go to bed. I shall be busy for a couple of hours.”

But the grey dawn was coming over the mountains before Paul had gone through the papers found in the box. The work was greatly facilitated by the exactitude with which his father had tabulated and classified his papers. The early letters from his wife before marriage, letters from her during his absences from home, business documents, correspondence with old friends of art school days, all were in their proper bundles, rubber banded, dated and annotated in the neat lettering characteristic of draughtsmen trained in the offices of the homeland. Nothing in the way of private papers of date later than that of his wife’s death had been preserved. It was as if his life in things of the heart and soul had been buried in that grave which held all that was dearest in life to him.

The private letters Paul left untouched. Some day he might be able to slip off those bands and peruse the words that would be like windows into the inmost shrine of his mother’s heart. But not today. He had a business on hand for which he would need a cool head and a cool heart, and a business for which he must prepare himself by an exhaustive study of his father’s affairs. His knowledge of business matters was that of a child. Business methods, business terminology, business principles, were to him as English to a Chippewayan. The matter to which he addressed himself was to discover the extent of his father’s indebtedness to Sleeman. But after hours spent in figuring and comparing statements of various dates he found himself compelled to acknowledge that he had come to no assured opinion on the matter in hand.

A red leather-bound note book contained a record of receipts and expenditures, but the record could not be made, by any arithmetical process of which Paul was master, to square with the papers in the trunk. Certain things appeared to be clear, however. There was a mortgage on the ranch for fifteen thousand dollars, of the proceeds of which ten thousand had been paid to the bank in Vancouver. To this entry was attached the note, “This squares the bank, and Sleeman too, outside of the mortgage, thank Heaven! Would to God I could square other accounts as well. Those, alas! I must commit to the mercy of Almighty God and to the love of those I love dearer than life itself.” Long Paul pondered this note, but without clear understanding. A list of entries of sums of money, following the mysterious letters, “I.O.U.,” with dates and Gaspard’s signature, was found on one page and on the opposite page a list of sales of Holsteins and Percherons, but the sums did not correspond, nor did the entries marked I.O.U. correspond to a neatly labelled bundle of slips of paper, duly dated and signed, similarly marked with the letters I.O.U. and figures representing certain sums of money. Finally Paul threw up the struggle and resolved that he would get the truth from Sleeman himself. He had little knowledge and less experience of business matters, but he had an instinctive knowledge of men. Indeed he knew himself to be possessed of a strange power of reading the hearts of men. No man had ever been able to lie successfully to him.

Filled as he was with a settled and deadly rage toward Sleeman, he knew that though he could kill him with his bare hands and though some such vengeance was the man’s due for the killing of his father, yet from such an act of vengeance he was prevented by the conscience within him and by his solemn word to both his father and his Indian stepmother. No, he must not and would not execute vengeance upon his enemy. Upon that he was resolved. But he was equally resolved that he would find a method by which he would extract the truth from Sleeman’s soul. With this resolve arrived at, he fell into sleep as the dawn was breaking, from which he was roused by Indian Tom only when the forenoon was half gone.

He found that his mind had carried over from the previous night the bitter hate toward Sleeman which had been with him during his six years’ absence from home, and in an intensified degree. Before setting out on his visit to Sleeman he walked up the hill at the back of the house, to the little enclosed piece of ground where were the graves of his father and mother. The poplars and birches about were bare and gaunt, but the balsams and spruce clustered in a kindly way near the little plot, and overhead the tall pines waved their feathery tops and sighed softly in the wind. To Paul the place was as a temple of God, but as he looked upon his father’s grave and remembered how it was that he came to be lying there, into his heart there came a prayer that justice should be done on him who had wrought this evil, and with the prayer a solemn vow that the execution of that act of justice should not be by his hand. For to him it came clear and certain that this matter lay in other hands than his and that he should hold himself in readiness to act only as he should be clearly guided. That he would be guided was to him a settled conviction that left him with mind undisturbed and will resolved to follow the path that should be made clear to him. In this mind he set forth on his journey.

He took the old mountain trail to the Sleeman ranch. Every turn in the trail was familiar to him, every turn associated with some incident in his boyhood days. But he was in no mood to linger. Swiftly he rode and came to the door of Sleeman’s new house, which stood on a site a little removed from that which had been fired by his father’s Indian wife. The door of the living room was open and standing within was Sleeman, lighting his pipe. Without knocking Paul entered the room and walking slowly toward Sleeman spoke in tones that cut like cold steel, “I am Paul Gaspard. I have business with you.”