At Stanstead a party of three gentlemen came into the car; and their
talk presently found its way through Northwick's revery, at first as an
interruption, an annoyance, and afterwards as a matter of intensifying
personal interest to him. They were in very good spirits, and they made
themselves at home in the car; there were only a few other passengers.
They were going to Montreal, as he easily gathered, and some friends
were to join them at the next junction, and go on with them. They talked
freely of an enterprise which they wished to promote in Montreal; and
they were very confident of it if they could get the capital. One of
them said, It was a thing that would have been done long ago, if the
Yankees had been in it. "Well, we may strike a rich defaulter, in
Montreal," another said, and they all laughed. Their laughter shocked
Northwick; it seemed immoral; he remembered that though he might seem a
defaulter, he was a man with a sacred trust, and a high purpose. But he
listened eagerly; if their enterprise were one that approved itself to
his judgment, the chance of their discussing it before him might be a
leading of Providence which he would be culpable to refuse. Providence
had answered his prayer in permitting him to pass the American frontier
safely, and Northwick must not be derelict in fulfilling his part of the
agreement. The Canadians borrowed the brakeman's lantern, and began to
study a map which they spread out on their knees. The one who seemed
first among them put his finger on a place in the map, and said that was
the spot. It was in the region just back of Chicoutimi. Gold had always
been found there, but not in paying quantity. It cost more to mine it
than it was worth; but with the application of his new process of
working up the tailings, there was no doubt of the result. It was simply
wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.
Northwick had heard that song before; and he fell back in his seat, with
a smile which was perhaps too cynical for a partner of Providence, but
which was natural in a man of his experience. He knew something about
processes to utilize the tailings of gold mines which would not
otherwise pay for working; he had paid enough for his knowledge: so much
that if he still had the purchase-money he need not be going into exile
now, and beginning life under a false name, in a strange land.
By and by he found himself listening again, and he heard the Canadian
saying, "And there's timber enough on the tract to pay twice over what
it will cost, even if the mine wasn't worth a penny."
"Well, we might go down and see the timber, any way," said one of the
party who had not yet spoken much. "And then we could take a look at
Markham's soap-mine, too. Unless," he added, "you had to tunnel under a
hundred feet of snow to get at it. A good deal like diggin' the north
pole up by the roots, wouldn't it be?"
"Oh, no! Oh, no!" said he who seemed to be Markham, with the optimism of
an enthusiast. "There's no trouble about it. We've got some shanties
that we put up about the mouth of the hole in the ground we made in the
autumn, and you can see the hole without digging at all. Or at least you
could in the early part of January, when I was down there."
"The hole hadn't run away?"
"No. It was just where we left it."
"Well, that's encouragin'. But I say, Markham, how do you get down there
in the winter?"
"Oh! very easily. Simplest thing in the world. Lots of fellows in the
lumber trade do it all winter long. Do it by sleigh from St. Anne's,
about twenty miles below Quebec--from Quebec you have your choice of
train or sleigh. But I prefer to make a clean thing of it, and do it all
by sleigh. I take it by easy stages, and so I take the long route: there
is a short cut, but the stops are far between. You make your twenty
miles to St. Anne from Quebec one day; eighteen to St. Joachim, the
next; thirty-nine to Baie St. Paul, the next; twenty to Malbaie, the
next; then forty to Tadoussac; then eighteen to Rivière Marguerite. You
can do something every day at that rate, even in the new snow; but on
the ice of the Saguenay, to Haha Bay, there's a pull of sixty miles;
you're at Chicoutimi, eleven miles farther, before you know it. Good
feed, and good beds, all along. You wrap up, and you don't mind. Of
course," Markham concluded, "it isn't the climate of Stanstead," as if
the climate of Stanstead were something like that of St. Augustine.
"Well, it sounds a mere bagatelle," said the more talkative of the other
two, "but it takes a week of steady travel."
"What is a week on the way to Golconda, if Golconda's yours when you get
there?" said Markham. "Why, Watkins, the young spruce and poplar alone
on that tract are worth twice the price I ask for the whole. A
pulp-mill, which you could knock together for a few shillings, on one of
those magnificent water-powers, would make you all millionnaires, in a
single summer."
"And what would it do in the winter when your magnificent water-power
was restin'?"
"Work harder than ever, my dear boy, and set an example of industry to
all the lazy _habitans_ in the country. You could get your fuel for the
cost of cutting, and you could feed your spruce and poplar in under your
furnace, and have it come out paper pulp at the other end of the mill."
Watkins and the other listener laughed with loud haw-haws at Markham's
drolling, and Watkins said, "I say, Markham, weren't you born on the
other side of the line?"
"No. But my father was; and I wish he'd stayed there till I came. Then
I'd be going round with all the capitalists of Wall Street fighting for
a chance to put their money into my mine, instead of wearing out the
knees of my trousers before you Canucks, begging you not to slap your
everlasting fortune in the face."
They now all roared together again, and at Sherbrooke they changed cars.
Northwick had to change too, but he did not try to get into the same car
with them. He wanted to think, to elaborate in his own mind the
suggestion for his immediate and remoter future which he had got from
their talk; and he dreaded the confusion, and possibly he dreaded the
misgiving, that might come from hearing more of their talk. He thought
he knew, now, just what he wanted to do, and he did not wish to be
swerved from it.
He felt eager to get on, but he was not impatient. He bore very well the
long waits that he had to make both at Sherbrooke and Richmond; but when
the train left the Junction for Quebec at last, he settled himself in
his seat with a solider content than he had felt before, and gave
himself up to the pleasure of shaping the future, that was so obediently
plastic in his fancy. The brakeman plied the fierce stove at the end of
the car with fuel, and Northwick did not suffer from the cold that
strengthened and deepened with the passing night outside, though he was
not overcoated and booted for any such temperature as his
fellow-travellers seemed prepared for. They were all Canadians, and they
talked now and then in their broad-vowelled French, but their voices
were low, and they came and went quietly at the country stations. The
car was old and worn, and badly hung; but in spite of all, Northwick
drowsed in the fervor of the glowing stove, and towards morning he fell
into a long and dreamless sleep.
He woke from it with a vigor and freshness that surprised him, and found
the train pulling into the station at Pointe Levis. The sun burned like
a soft lamp through the thick frost on the car-window; when he emerged,
he found it a cloudless splendor on a world of snow. The vast landscape,
which he had seen in summer all green from the edge of the mighty rivers
to the hilltops losing themselves in the blue distance, showed rounded
and diminished in the immeasurable drifts that filled it, and that hid
the streams in depths almost as great above their ice as those of the
currents below. The villages of the _habitans_ sparkled from tinned roof
and spire, and the city before him rose from shore and cliff with a
thousand plumes of silvery smoke. In and out among the frozen shipping
swarmed an active life that turned the rivers into highroads, and
speckled the expanse of glistening white with single figures and groups
of men and horses.
It was all gay and bizarre, and it gave Northwick a thrill of boyish
delight. He wondered for a moment why he had never come to Quebec in
winter before, and brought his children. He beckoned to the walnut-faced
driver of one of the carrioles which waited outside the station to take
the passengers across the river, and tossed his bag into the bottom of
the little sledge. He gave the name of a hotel in the Upper Town, and
the driver whipped his tough, long-fetlocked pony over the space of ice
which was kept clear of snow by diligent sweeping with fir-tree tops,
and then up the steep incline of Mountain Hill. The streets were
roadways from house-front to house-front, smooth, elastic levels of
thickly-bedded, triply-frozen snow; and the foot passengers, muffled to
the eyes against the morning cold, came and went among the vehicles in
the middle of the street, or crept along close to the house-walls, to
keep out of the light avalanches of an overnight snow that slipped here
and there from the steep tin roofs.
Northwick's unreasoned gladness grew with each impression of the beauty
and novelty. It quickened associations of his earliest days, and of the
winter among his native hills. He felt that life could be very pleasant
in this latitude; he relinquished the notion he had cherished at times
of going to South America with his family in case he should finally fail
to arrange with the company for his safe return home; he forecast a
future in Quebec where he could build a new home for his children, among
scenes that need not be all so alien. This did not move him from his
fixed intention to retrieve himself, though it gave him the courage of
indefinitely expanded possibilities. He was bent upon the scheme he had
in mind, and as soon as he finished his breakfast he went out to prepare
for it.