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THE GASPARDS OF PINE CROFT
RALPH CONNOR
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By RALPH CONNOR
The Gaspards of Pine Croft
To Him That Hath
The Sky Pilot in No Man’s Land
The Major
The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail
Corporal Cameron
The Foreigner
Black Rock
The Sky Pilot
The Prospector
The Doctor
The Man from Glengarry
Glengarry School Days
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THE GASPARDS OF PINE CROFT
A ROMANCE OF THE WINDERMERE
by
RALPH CONNOR
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
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COPYRIGHT, 1923,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
THE GASPARDS OF PINE CROFT.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
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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.
The two years spent in building, equipping and stocking operations in
connection with the establishing of the Pine Croft Ranch constituted for
many years the high-water mark for princely expenditure in British
Columbia, which is saying a good deal. For many months the Golden-Crow’s
Nest trail was periodically choked with caravans of pack ponies and
freight wagons piled high with a weird assortment of building material
and equipment and household furnishing, later enlivened with lines of
thoroughbred Holsteins and Percherons. The Windermere Valley was
thrilled with the magnificence of the whole enterprise. The Vancouver
_Free Press_ chronicled the event in laudatory terms:
“The establishing of the Pine Croft Ranch upon such an assured
foundation is at once a testimony to the far-sighted policy of our
enterprising and gifted fellow-citizen, Hugh Gaspard, Esq., and an
evidence that a new era has dawned for our Province. The capitalists of
the homeland have hitherto been blind to the unrivalled agricultural and
ranching possibilities of our wide-sweeping British Columbia valleys.
Mr. Gaspard is very shrewdly anticipating the advent of an almost
limitless market for the products of his ranch by the construction of
another great railroad through the mountains, with lateral colonisation
lines to the main line of the Canadian Pacific Railway. It is also no
small tribute to the engineering genius of Mr. Gaspard that he has
foreseen the vast resources of the Windermere Valley in water power for
mining operations which are sure to follow the railway development of
that part of the Province. Altogether, it is not too much to say that
the establishing of the Pine Croft Ranch inaugurates a new era in the
development of our Province.”
The Pine Croft Ranch was situated about halfway down the Windermere
Valley, between Golden and the Crow’s Nest Pass, in one of the mighty
loops of the Columbia River, and comprised within its bounds mountain
and valley, lake and stream, grass lands and park-like forests, a
wonderland of picturesque and varied beauty.
For the site of his ranch bungalow, Gaspard chose one of the park-like
forest benches of the Columbia, set out with tall red pines with
polished boles running up one hundred and fifty feet to spreading green
tufts. It was built of red pine logs, with low roof and wide verandahs,
and flanked on one side with gardens, riotous with flowers of all kinds
and colours, some gathered from their native wilds near by and others
transplanted from their native haunts in Scottish glens and moors. On
the other side of the bungalow ran a little river, tumbling noisily and
joyously from the upper branches of the Columbia River below. It offered
to the eye a satisfying picture of homely beauty, kindly, cosy,
welcoming. Beyond the riot of flowers a grass paddock of some five acres
reached to the corals and stables.
Within the bungalow everything in furnishing and adornment suggested
comfort and refinement. In the living room the walls of polished pine
logs were hung with old tapestries, the rich red brown of the logs
relieved by the gleam of old silver from diamond-paned cupboards and
bits of old china and Oriental jade, with a rare collection of ancient
pewters disposed here and there. The note of easy comfort in the room
was emphasised by the Persian and Assyrian rugs, with the skins of
grizzly and cinnamon bear upon the floor, together with the solid,
deep-seated chairs and sofas upholstered in leather. Altogether, it was
a wholly livable room, in which everything in the way of furnishing and
adornment spoke of sound and educated taste. Opposite the main door, a
stone built fireplace of generous size gave promise of cheer throughout
long winter evenings. On each side of the fireplace a door led to dining
room and kitchen respectively, while through a curtained archway on the
left a corridor ran, flanked on either side with bedrooms. On the
remaining side of the living room, folding doors opened upon a sunny
room looking toward the north and west, enclosed on three sides with
panelled glass. This room, from its appointments and furnishings,
obviously did double duty as studio and work room.
To this home in the British Columbia wilds, far from the homeland and
friends of the homeland, remote from the great world and its
allurements, he brought as his wife the daughter of a West Country
laird. A young girl she was, fresh from her English school, the first
fine bloom of her girlhood still upon her, the sweet purity of her soul
unspoiled by the defiling touch of our modern society, her high spirit
unbroken, her faith in man and in God as yet unshaken.
The manner of his coming upon her was of a piece with the romantic
passion within which his spirit enshrined her. Upon one of his tramps
along the West Coast he found himself on an evening in a driving fog,
hopelessly lost and with the prospect of a dreary night in some
cheerless wind-swept cave. Out of the mist, sprite-like, she came, her
blue eyes looking in upon his soul from an aureole of misty golden
curls, and led him, her captive on the moment and forever after, to her
home. That evening was the beginning and the end for them both. He
talked and she listened. She sang and he played. Of the Windermere and
its wonders he told her, drawing the very soul out of her till, by the
sweet pain in her heart, she knew that when he said the word she would
follow him to the world’s end. And to the Windermere he brought her,
proud of her beauty and her grace, wondering at her love of him and
praising God for his good fortune.
Ten years they lived there together, ten happy years untouched by grief,
but for the day when they laid up on the hillside under the pines her
little girl, her very replica in exquisiteness of beauty. Then shadows
came. Her strength began to fail and though her high courage kept the
truth from her husband the knowledge of it grew in the hearts of them
both and shadowed their lives with a nameless fear of what might be.