“Do you know,” asked Tom, “how this place started?”
“Well?” said Mr. Percival, who was always pleased to have his boy thorough in looking up the history of a place.
“An Englishman named Richard Dunsmuir, was riding horseback along a trail back on the mountain. The horse stumbled, and when Dunsmuir came to look at the log or stone, it was coal. He started a big mine, with two partners who put in about five thousand dollars apiece. A few years later one of them sold out to Dunsmuir for two hundred and fifty thousand, and afterward the second one sold for seven hundred and fifty thousand.”
“Whew!” whistled Randolph. “I say, Tom, let’s give up Latin and go into the coal-mining business.”
“All right,” says Tom cheerfully. “You buy a horse and gallop through the woods till you both tumble down. Then I’ll pick you up, point out the coal—if it doesn’t turn out to be a stump—and we’ll go halves. Or I’ll sell out now for ten dollars and fifteen cents!”
Just as the steamer cast off her fasts and started her paddles, Selborne announced that the bright sky had, as usual, cajoled them into keeping late hours, for it was now nearly eleven, and in four hours it would be daylight again. Whereupon the deck party broke up.
Next morning they found themselves at Victoria, where they stopped long enough to complete their purchases of miniature totem poles and other Indian curiosities, which were displayed for sale upon the wharf.
All through that bright day the Queen ploughed her way southward through a blue, sunlit sea. It was Puget Sound, said Tom, the cartographer of the occasion. They touched at Port Townsend and at Seattle. At the latter port the ship left half her passengers, as the Excursion was too large to be quartered at one hotel. The rest, including the individuals in whom we are specially interested, kept on to Tacoma. Here they said good-by to the Queen—now as homelike as the “Kamloops”—and took up their abode in a large hotel which they found to be delightfully situated on high ground, with a broad, cool veranda overlooking the Sound.
Immediately after supper Tom rushed out to have his kodak refilled. He had already taken nearly a hundred pictures, and reveled in anticipation of showing them, especially the instantaneous and surreptitious views of his unconscious relatives and friends, together with many captive bears, to an admiring circle during the coming winter.
The following day was spent in riding about the city, the planked streets and sidewalks of which struck them as very odd, and in visiting the Indian reservation at Puyallup, a few miles distant. The country was very dry, and forest fires were smouldering all along the road.