THE GASPARDS OF PINE CROFT
CHAPTER I
Of all British Columbia valleys none has a finer sweep than the spacious Windermere. The valley rolls itself on both sides of the Columbia River in wide stretches of grass lands, varied with great reaches of red pine forest, here of open park-like appearance, there thick with underbrush of spruce and cedar. The valley lies between the two ranges of the Selkirks, which in places crowd hard upon the river and again lie up against a far horizon across a stretch of tumbling foothills. With the autumn sun on its rich and varied wealth of color, the valley lies like one great genial smile across the face of British Columbia from Golden Pass to the Crow’s Nest, warm, kindly, restful.
It was upon a glorious autumn day that Hugh Gaspard’s eyes first rested upon the valley, and from that first impression he could never escape. For, though by training and profession Gaspard was an engineer, and with a mastery of his craft, by native gifts of imagination and temperament and sense of colour, that rarest of Heaven’s bestowments, drawn from his mingled Highland Scot and Gallic blood strain, he was an artist.
Gaspard was enormously proud of this mingled blood of his. He was never quite sure which strain brought him greater pride. It depended entirely upon his environment. In Glasgow, where his father’s engineering works were situated and where he spent his boyhood, he was never tired vaunting the “Gaspard” in his blood. In Paris, where in early youth he spent his holidays and where later his hard-headed and practical father declared he “wasted two valuable years of his life fiddlin’ wi’ pents and idle loons and lassies,” he was vehemently Highland, a cousin, indeed, to the Lochiel himself. From both strains he drew his fiery, passionate, imaginative temperament, his incapacity, too, for the hard grind in life.
After graduating from the Glasgow University as an engineer, his father reluctantly granted him a period of travel, upon condition that he should visit Canada and study the engineering achievements in the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway through the Rocky Mountains. His experiences in the construction of that great continental railroad, together with his holiday excursions among the mountains and valleys of British Columbia, determined for him his course in life. The prospect of life in an office in Glasgow, no matter how high the position, nor how rich in financial possibilities, became for him utterly impossible.
“Let me work among the machines and the men—I’ve learned to handle men a bit in Canada—and I’ll make a stab at it,” he had said to his father. But his father was at the end of his forbearance with him.
“Ye’ve ta’en ye’re ain gait,” the old autocrat had flung at him, dropping into wrathful Doric, “these many years. Now ye’ll go whaur ye’re bid in my business or ye’ll go oot.”
So “oot” the young man had gone, and in the Construction Department of the Canadian Pacific Railway had found a billet at once remunerative and promising of distinction in his profession. After a couple of years of really strenuous work, for he had found himself brigaded with a group of keen youngsters ambitious of distinction and voracious of hard work, with whom his pride would not suffer him to break step, he returned home, loaded down with trophies of his hunting trips and with his portfolio full of incomplete sketches of marvellous mountain scenery. But he had with him also equally marvellous photographic reproductions of the achievements of the Canadian Pacific Engineers, and a bank book showing a very creditable balance in the Vancouver Branch of the Bank of Montreal. The really fine display of heads of Rocky Mountain sheep and goats and the quite creditable productions of his sketch book had but the slightest influence with his father; but the photographs, in themselves wonderful examples of artistic work, the engineering triumphs they pictured, and, it must be confessed, the showing of the bank book most of all, produced a profound impression upon the shrewd old Scot.
The glories of the Windermere Valley, its vast agricultural and grazing resources, its immense water powers, its unknown mineral resources, its unequalled climate, and the unique opportunity offering at the very moment for the purchase of a five thousand acre tract of land from the Government at a quite ridiculous price, lost nothing in their setting forth by the descriptive powers of his son, backed up as they were by gorgeously coloured literature issued by the Immigration Department of British Columbia. Only one result could follow. His father, swept completely beyond the moorings of his life-long shrewd and calculating “canniness” by his son’s glowing presentation of the opportunity not only of winning for himself a very substantial fortune but also of becoming that thing dear to every British heart, a great landed proprietor, frankly surrendered, and, having surrendered, proceeded to follow up his surrender in a thoroughgoing business-like manner. If a ranch were to be started in British Columbia, let it be started in such style as to insure success. None knew better than the old Scot how easily possible it is to kill a thoroughly sound enterprise by early starvation. Hence, there was placed in the Bank of Montreal, Vancouver, a sufficient sum, not only to purchase the land, but also to adequately, even generously, equip and stock the ranch.