I'd got so far in thinking my morals needed repairs, when a new thing happened, pointing out the way. O'Flynn rode over burning the trail from the Hundred. My wife is there! Although we may not meet, her love has brought her from England to be near me.
O'Flynn has seen my son, he has spoken with Father Jared, he has come with Kate from England, and he left her nursing at Bolt Taylor's bedside. She is sending Surly Brown from Soda Creek with a cable, to build a new scow, and start the ferry again. Ransome Pollock's to manage the Trevor ranch. Iron's to reopen the Sky-line while she makes his peace with the owners—O'Flynn wants to run the packing. She is finding a doctor to take McGee's practise. Tearful George is to buy an imported stallion, and drift him with a bunch of East Oregon mares to stock my empty pastures. The dead settlement is to live again as though there had been no Polly to rob, ruin, and murder among our pioneers. And then my wife will send young Englishmen to school with me for training.
Stroke by stroke this Mr. O'Flynn comes lashing home the news into my hide, as though I were being flogged. He says he hated me always, but never despised me before as he does now. My wife and I should change clothes, only I'd be too useless for a woman. Iron says the same, and in a most unchristian way I thrashed the pair, knocking their heads together, for putting me too much in the wrong while I wanted my breakfast. They think there's something in my argument.
The news is better for being discussed, and best of all I reckon this man Eure who is to side-track Polly, building a town at the foot of the Hundred Mile Falls. The pines on the high land, too small a trash for lumber, are good enough for pulp to feed a mill, while paper is the plate from which we eat our knowledge. I see the black bush turning into books, the lands in oats or pasture till they're warmed for wheat, and when we come to the rocks there's marble to build colleges for our sons, gold to endow them. The land too poor for any other crop, is best for raising men.
It's only because I'm happy I write nonsense, feeling this night as though I were being cured of all my blindness. I have a sense that though I sit in darkness, my wife is with me, and if my eyes were opened, I should see her. Is it our weakness which gives such strength to love?
CHAPTER IV
AT HUNDRED MILE HOUSE
Kate's Narrative
Mr. Eure inspected the woods and water-power, then departed for the coast, secretly to buy timber limits, avowedly to find a nurse and a doctor.