So Bill had gone away into the mountains. The mountains, those glorious, snow-capped mountains! Florence, as she bent over her work in their large garden, had watched him start. And as she saw him disappear, she had, for the moment, envied him.
Often and often, in the sweet cool of the evening, she and Mary had talked about how, in some breathing spell, they would borrow a horse and go packing away into those mountains. The breathing spell had never come. And now, the brief autumn was here. Winter was just around the corner. Florence had no regrets. Never before had she felt so happy and secure.
Bill had been gone six weeks. The clearing and building crew had arrived while he was away. There was dead and down timber at the back of Bill’s lot that would have made a fine, secure cabin, had Bill been there to point it out. He was not there. So the cabin was built of green logs. Already you could see daylight through the cracks, and Bill’s mother, who had moved in with what to Florence seemed an unnecessary amount of furniture and equipment, was complaining bitterly about “the way the government has treated us poor folks.”
Bill had returned at last. Sore-footed and ragged, his food gone, his high-priced rifle red with rust, he had returned triumphant. He had found gold. In the spring he would begin operations in a big way. Proudly he displayed six tiny nuggets, none of them bigger than a pea.
“Seeds,” old John McQueen had called them. “Golden seeds of discontent.” But to Bill they were marvelous. For him they hid the cracks in their cabin, his unplowed field, his uncut woodpile. And, because she doted on her son, they hid all these things from his mother’s eyes as well—at least, for a time.
“Poor Bill!” Florence sighed, as she snuggled down beneath the blankets. “He’s such a dreamer. He—”
There was that strange sound again, like a speedboat motor. She laughed at the thought of a speedboat on their tiny lake. But now, as before, it faded away.
Yes, with her help, the Hughes family had won. Their summer had been a complete success. How they had worked, morning to night. Mosquitoes and flies, tough sod and weeds, they had battled them all. And how they had been rewarded! Never had plants grown and flourished as theirs did. Mark’s tomatoes were a complete success. Twice, it was true, the mercury dropped to a point perilously near freezing and their heads rested on uneasy pillows. But the Alaskan weather man had been kind. Their bright red harvest, “bushels and bushels of tomatoes,” had come and had been sold at unbelievable prices. All along the Alaskan railroad, people had gone wild about their marvelous tomatoes.
“And now,” the girl heaved another happy sigh. Now their little sodded-in cellar was packed full of potatoes, beets, turnips, and carrots; their shelves were lined with home-canned wild fruit, raspberries, blueberries, high bush cranberries, and their storeroom crowded with groceries, all paid for. What was more, a horse! “Old Nig,” bought from a discouraged settler, was in their small log barn. It was marvelous, truly marvelous! And yet, in this wild land full of possible exciting events, they had known no adventure.
“Duty first,” John McQueen had said to her once. “And when duty is done, let adventure come as it may. And it will come.”