Over the Hills
So the old man and the young man made the round of the Bines
properties. The former nursed a forlorn little hope of exciting an
interest in the concerns most vital to him; to the latter the leisurely
tour in the private car was a sportive prelude to the serious business
of life, as it should be lived, in the East. Considering it as such he
endured it amiably, and indeed the long August days and the sharply
cool nights were not without real enjoyment for him.
To feel impartially a multitude of strong, fresh wants--the imperative
need to live life in all its fulness, this of itself makes the heart to
sing. And, above the full complement of wants, to have been dowered by
Heaven with a stanch disbelief in the unattainable,--this is a fortune
rather to be chosen than a good name or great riches; since the name
and riches and all things desired must come to the call of it.
Our Western-born youth of twenty-five had the wants and the sense of
power inherited from a line of men eager of initiative, the product of
an environment where only such could survive. Doubtless in him was the
soul and body hunger of his grandfather, cramping and denying through
hardship year after year, yet sustained by dreaming in the hardest
times of the soft material luxuries that should some day be his.
Doubtless marked in his character, too, was the slightly relaxed
tension of his father; the disposition to feast as well as the capacity
to fast; to take all, feel all, do all, with an avidity greater by
reason of the grinding abstinence and the later indulgence of his
forbears. A sage versed in the lore of heredity as modified by
environment may some day trace for us the progress across this
continent of an austere Puritan, showing how the strain emerges from
the wilderness at the Western ocean with a character so widely
differing from the one with which he began the adventurous
journey,--regarding, especially, a tolerance of the so-called good and
many of the bad things of life. Until this is done we may, perhaps,
consider the change to be without valid cause.
Young Bines, at all events, was the flower of a pioneer stock, and him
the gods of life cherished, so that all the forces of the young land
about him were as his own. Yet, though his pulses rhymed to theirs he
did not perceive his relation to them: neither he nor the land was yet
become introspective. So informed was he with the impetuous spirit of
youth that the least manifestation of life found its answering thrill
in him. And it was sufficient to feel this. There was no time barren
enough of sensation to reason about it. Uncle Peter's plan for an
inspection of the Bines properties had at first won him by touching his
sense of duty. He anticipated no interest or pleasure in the trip. Yet
from the beginning he enjoyed it to the full. Being what he was, the
constant movement pleased him, the out-of-doors life, the occasional
sorties from the railroad by horse to some remote mining camp, or to a
stock ranch or lumber-camp. He had been away for six years, and it
pleased him to note that he was treated by the people he met with a
genuine respect and liking as the son of his father. In the East he had
been accustomed to a certain deference from very uncertain people
because he was the son of a rich man. Here he had prestige because he
was the son of Daniel Bines, organiser and man of affairs. He felt
sometimes that the men at mine, mill, or ranch looked him over with
misgiving, and had their cautious liking compelled only by the
assurance that he was indeed the son of Daniel. They left him at these
times with the suspicion that this bare fact meant enough with them to
carry a man of infelicitous exterior.
He was pleased, moreover, to feel a new respect for Uncle Peter. He
observed that men of all degrees looked up to him, sought and relied
upon his judgment; the investing capitalist whom they met not less than
the mine foreman; the made man and the labourer. In the drawing-room at
home he had felt so agreeably superior to the old man; now he felt his
own inferiority in a new element, and began to view him with more
respect. He saw him to be the shrewd man of affairs, with a thorough
grasp of detail in every branch of their interests; and a deep man, as
well; a little narrow, perhaps, from his manner of life, but of
unfailing kindness, and with rather a young man's radicalism than an
old man's conservatism; one who, in an emergency, might be relied upon
to take the unexpected but effective course.
For his own part, old Peter Bines learned in the course of the trip to
understand and like his grandson better. At bottom he decided the young
man to be sound after all, and he began to make allowance for his
geographical heresies. The boy had been sent to an Eastern college;
that was clearly a mistake, putting him out of sympathy with the West;
and he had never been made to work, which was another and a graver
mistake, "but he'd do more'n his father ever did if 'twa'n't fur his
father's money," the old man concluded. For he saw in their talks that
the very Eastern experience which he derided had given the young fellow
a poise and a certain readiness to grasp details in the large that his
father had been a lifetime in acquiring.
For a month they loitered over the surrounding territory in the private
car, gliding through fertile valleys, over bleak passes, steaming up
narrow little canyons along the down-rushing streams with their cool
shallow murmurs.
They would learn one day that a cross-cut was to be started on the Last
Chance, or that the concentrates of the True Grit would thereafter be
shipped to the Careless Creek smelter. Next they would learn that a new
herd of Galloways had done finely last season on the Bitter Root ranch;
that a big lot of ore was sacked at the Irish Boy, that an
eighteen-inch vein had been struck in the Old Crow; that a concentrator
was needed at Hellandgone, and that rich gold-bearing copper and sand
bearing free gold had been found over on Horseback Ridge.
Another day they would drive far into a forest of spruce and hemlock to
a camp where thousands of ties were being cut and floated down to the
line of the new railway.
Sometimes they spent a night in one of the smaller mining camps off the
railroad, whereof facetious notes would appear in the nearest weekly
paper, such as:
"The Hon. Peter Bines and his grandson, who is a chip of the old block,
spent Tuesday night at Rock Rip. Young Bines played the deal from soda
card to hock at Lem Tully's Turf Exchange, and showed Lem's dealer good
and plenty that there's no piker strain in him."
Or, it might be:
"Poker stacks continue to have a downward tendency. They were sold last
week as low as eighty chips for a dollar; It is sad to see this noble
game dragging along in the lower levels of prosperity, and we take as a
favourable omen the appearance of Uncle Peter Bines and his grandson
the other night. The prices went to par in a minute. Young Bines gave
signs of becoming as delicately intuitional in the matter of concealed
values as his father, the lamented Daniel J."
Again it was:
"Uncle Peter Bines reports from over Kettle Creek way that the
sagebrush whiskey they take a man's two bits for there would gnaw holes
in limestone. Peter is likelier to find a ledge of dollar bills than he
is good whiskey this far off the main trail. The late Daniel J. could
have told him as much, and Daniel J.'s boy, who accompanies Uncle
Peter, will know it hereafter."
The young man felt wholesomely insignificant at these and other signs
that he was taken on sufferance as a son and a grandson.
He was content that it should be so. Indeed there was little wherewith
he was not content. That he was habitually preoccupied, even when there
was most movement about them, early became apparent to Uncle Peter.
That he was constantly cheerful proved the matter of his musings to be
pleasant. That he was proner than most youths to serious meditation
Uncle Peter did not believe. Therefore he attributed the moods of
abstraction to some matter probably connected with his project of
removing the family East. It was not permitted Uncle Peter to know, nor
was his own youth recent enough for him to suspect, the truth. And the
mystery stayed inviolate until a day came and went that laid it bare
even to the old man's eyes.
They awoke one morning to find the car on a siding at the One Girl
mine. Coupled to it was another car from an Eastern road that their
train had taken on sometime in the night. Percival noted the car with
interest as he paced beside the track in the cool clear air before
breakfast. The curtains were drawn, and the only signs of life to be
observed were at the kitchen end, where the white-clad cook could be
seen astir. Grant, porter on the Bines car, told him the other car had
been taken on at Kaslo Junction, and that it belonged to Rulon Shepler,
the New York financier, who was aboard with a party of friends.
As Percival and Uncle Peter left their car for the shaft-house after
breakfast, the occupants of the other car were bestirring themselves.
From one of the open windows a low but impassioned voice was exhausting
the current idioms of damnation in sweeping dispraise of all land-areas
north and west of Fifty-ninth Street, New York.
Uncle Peter smiled grimly. Percival flushed, for the hidden protestant
had uttered what were his own sentiments a month before.
Reaching the shaft-house they chatted with Pangburn, the
superintendent, and then went to the store-room to don blouses and
overalls for a descent into the mine.
For an hour they stayed underground, traversing the various levels and
drifts, while Pangburn explained the later developments of the vein and
showed them where the new stoping had been begun.