the long pullman train, an hour late and greatly begrudging the time for a special stop, came sliding into the tiny station of rudolm and deposited a solitary passenger upon the platform. the porter set hugh arnold’s suitcase on the ground and accepted his proffered coin, all in one expert gesture, and said genially:
“we’re way behind time on this run, but we come through on the down trip at six in the morning, sharp. you-all will be going back with us to-morrow, i reckon.”
“no,” replied hugh, as he came down from the car step and gathered up his belongings. “no, i’m going to stay.”
“stay?” repeated the porter. “oh—a week, i suppose. no one really stays at rudolm except them that are born there and can’t get away.”
hugh shook his head.
“i am going to stay all winter,” he said.
“the whole winter! say, do you know what winter is up here?” the man exclaimed. “for the love of—”
a violent jolt of the train was the engineer’s reminder that friendly converse was not in order when there was time to be made up.
“all right, sah, good-by. i hope you like staying, only remember—we go through every day at six in the morning less’n we’re late. good-by.”
the train swept away, leaving hugh to look after it for a moment before he turned to take his first survey of rudolm and the wide sheet of blue water upon whose shore it stood.
red lake, when he and his father had first looked it up on the map, seemed a queer, crooked place, full of harbors and headlands and hidden coves, the wider stretches extending here and there to fifteen, twenty, twenty-five miles of open water, again narrowing to mere winding channels choked with islands. hugh would have liked to say afterward that he knew even from the map that this was a region promising adventures, that down the lake’s winding tributaries he was going to be carried to strange discoveries, but, as a matter of fact, he had no such foreknowledge.
indeed, it was his father who observed that the lake looked like a proper haunt for pirates and hugh who reminded him that pirates were not ever to be found so far north. all the books he had seen, pictured them as burying treasure on warm, sunny, sandy beaches, or flying in pursuit of their prey on the wings of the south sea winds. pirates in the wooded regions to the north of the mississippi valley, pirates where the snow lay so deep and the lake was frozen for nearly half the year, where only through a short summer could the waters be plied by “a low, raking, black hulk” such as all pirates sail—it was not to be thought of! even now, when hugh stood on the station platform and caught his first glimpse of the real red lake, saw the wide blue waters flecked with sunny whitecaps, the hundred pine-covered islands and the long miles of wooded shore, even then he had no thought of how different he was to find this place from any other he had ever seen. both lake and town seemed to him to promise little.
for rudolm, set in its narrow valley between the minnesota hills, looked as though it had been dropped from some child’s box of toys, so small and square were the houses and so hit-or-miss was the order in which they stood along the one wide, crooked street. there were no trees growing beside the rough wooden sidewalks, the street was dusty and the sun, even although it was october, seemed to him to shine with a pitiless glare. he walked slowly along the platform, wondering why dick edmonds had not come to meet him, thinking that rudolm seemed the dullest and most uninteresting town in america and trying to stifle the rising wish that he had never come.
a soft pad, pad on the boards behind him made him turn his head as a man walked swiftly past. hugh saw that his shapeless black hat had a speckled feather stuck into the band and that he wore, instead of shoes, soft rounded moccasins edged with a gay embroidery of beads. plainly the man was an indian. at the thought the boy’s heart beat a little faster. he had not known there would be indians!
his own being in rudolm was simple enough, although somewhat unexpected. hugh’s father was a doctor, enrolled in the medical reserve since the beginning of the war but not until this month ordered away to france. the problem of where hugh should live during his absence was a difficult one since hugh had no mother and there were no immediate relatives to whom he could go. he had finished school but had been judged rather too young for college, and, so his father maintained in spite of frantic pleading, much too young to enlist.
“i’m sixteen,” was the boy’s insistent argument, but—
“wait until you have been sixteen more than two days,” was his father’s answer.
“i could go with the medical unit, i know enough from helping you to be some use as a hospital orderly,” hugh begged, “i would do anything just to go to france.”
“they need men in france, not boys just on the edge of being men,” dr. arnold replied, “when you have had one or two years’ worth of experience and judgment, then you will be some help to them over there. but not now.”
“the war will be over by then,” wailed hugh.
“don’t fear,” his father observed grimly, “there is going to be enough of it for all of us to have our share.”
so there the discussion ended and the question of what hugh was to do came up for settlement. there was a distant cousin of his father’s in new york—but this suggestion was never allowed to get very far. hugh had never met the cousin and did not relish the idea of going to live with him, “sight unseen” as he put it, on such short notice. it was his own plan to go to rudolm where lived the two edmonds brothers, john, cashier of the bank there and a great friend of his father’s, and dick, a boy four years older than himself, whom he had met but once yet knew that he liked immensely. several times john edmonds had written to dr. arnold—
“if hugh ever wants to spend any time ‘on his own’ we could find him a job here in rudolm, i know. it is a queer little place, just a mining and lumbering town full of swedes, but he might like the hunting and the country and find it interesting for a while.”
it was the idea of spending the time “on his own” that made hugh feel that thus the period of his father’s absence might chance to seem a little shorter and the soreness of missing him might grow a little less. john edmonds had answered their letters most cordially and had said that all could be arranged and hugh need only telegraph the day of his arrival. the final preparations had been hastened by the coming of dr. arnold’s sailing orders; the two had bidden each other good-by and good luck with resolute cheerfulness and hugh had set forth on his long journey northward. he had never seen the great lakes nor the busy inland shipping ports with their giant freighters lying at the docks, nor the rising hills of the iron range through which his way must lead, but he noticed them very little. his thoughts were very far away and fixed on other things. even now, as he walked slowly up rudolm’s one street he was not dwelling so much on his forlorn wonder why he did not see his friends, but was thinking of a great transport that must, almost at that hour, be nosing her way out of “an atlantic port,” of the swift destroyers gathering to convoy her, of the salt sea breezes blowing across her deck, blowing sharp from the east, from over the sea—from france. for he was certain, from all that he could gather, that his father was sailing to-day and was launching upon his new venture at almost the same time that hugh was entering upon his own.
somewhat disconsolately the boy trudged on up the hot empty highway, seeing ahead of him the big, ramshackle building that must be the hotel and beyond that, at the end of the road, the shining blue of the lake. he was vaguely conscious that, at every cottage window, white-headed children of all sizes and ages bobbed up to stare at him and ducked shyly out of sight again when they caught his eye. between two houses he looked down to a sunny field where a woman with a three-cornered yellow kerchief on her head was helping some men at work. she did not look like an american woman at all, hugh thought as he stopped to watch her, but walked on abashed when even she paused to look at him, leaning on her rake and shading her eyes with her hand. he rather liked her looks, somehow, even at that distance, she seemed so strong, in spite of her slenderness and she handled her rake with such vigorous sunburned arms.
he raised his eyes to the circle of hills that hemmed in the little town rising steeply from beyond the last row of houses and the irregular patchwork of little fields. they were oddly shaped hills, rolling range beyond range, higher and higher until, far in the distance there loomed the jagged mass of one big enough to be called a mountain. the nearer slopes were covered with heavy woods of pine and birch, the dense trees broken here and there by great masses of rock, black, gray or, more often, strange clear shades of red.
“red lake derives its name,” so the atlas had stated in its matter-of-fact fashion, “from the peculiar color of the jasper rock that appears in such quantity along its shores.”
hugh had never seen anything quite like that clear vermilion shade that glowed dully against the black-green of the pines. across the slope of the nearest hill, showing clear like a clean-cut scar, there stretched a steep white road that wound sharply up to the summit and disappeared. he began to feel vaguely that although the town attracted him little, the road might lead to something of greater promise.
there were some men lounging before the door of the hotel when he reached it, miners or lumberjacks wearing high boots and mackinaw coats. they were talking in low tones and eyeing hugh with open curiosity. just as he came to the steps, two figures shuffled silently past him, one, the indian he had seen at the station, the other, a broad-shouldered, broad-waisted woman stooping under the heavy burden she carried on her back. the man, erect and unimpeded, strode quickly forward, but she stopped a moment to readjust the deerskin strap which passed over her forehead and supported the heavy weight of her pack. she turned her swarthy face toward hugh and greeted him with a broad, friendly smile, then bowed her head once more and trudged on after her master. the boy, not used to the ways of indian husbands and their wives, stood staring after the two in shocked astonishment.
“that’s kaniska, the best guide around here, and his squaw,” he heard one of the men say to another. “she’s the only indian hereabouts the only one i ever heard of, really, that smiles at every one she meets. they are all of them queer ducks; no matter how well you know them you never can tell what they are thinking about. i believe she is the very queerest of them all. the swedes here call her laughing mary.”
the two dark figures slipped out of sight around a corner and hugh went up the steps into the hotel. the big, untidy room was apparently empty except for a bluebottle fly buzzing against the window. a faint snore, however, made hugh aware that he was not alone and drew his attention to the office clerk, sitting behind the high desk, his head back, his heels up, sound asleep. the men outside had ceased talking, the entire village was so quiet that hugh could actually hear a katydid singing its last summer song loudly and manfully down in the field.
“i never saw such a town before,” he thought bitterly, “the whole place is either dead or asleep!”
he rapped sharply on the desk to arouse the clerk and was delighted to see him awake with a guilty jump.
“can you tell me where i can find—” he began, but a voice at his elbow interrupted him.
turning, he saw that the woman he had noticed in the field had left her work to come hurrying after him, and now stood, a little breathless, at his side. she had very kindly blue eyes, he observed, and a rather heavy swedish face that lit up wonderfully when she smiled.
“you are hugh arnold, is it not so?” she said. “john edmonds has told me that you would be here.”
“oh, yes,” cried hugh with relief, “i was just asking for him. can you tell me where he is?”
the clerk, a sandy-haired, freckled youth, leaned over the desk and spoke eagerly.
“why, haven’t you heard—?” he said, but the woman cut him short.
“i will tell the boy of that,” she announced with decision, then added to hugh, “the two edmonds are not here now, and it is best that you should come to stay at my house until they come again. this hotel is no fit place for you.”
to this last frank statement the clerk agreed with surprising warmth.
“we have some queer customers here at times,” he admitted, “and i won’t deny there’s a sight of them is ugly ones. there’s that fellow from jasper peak blew in last evening and kept me up all night. when he and his friends are here there’s always something doing.”
“do not begin to talk of them, jethro brown,” the woman said a little impatiently, “or you will keep us here all day, and this boy is wanting his dinner, i make no doubt.”
the clerk laughed a little, although without much merriment.
“i guess you are right, linda,” he replied, “and talk of that gang is only words wasted. you’d better go along home with mrs. ingmarsson, sonny, you couldn’t be in better hands.”
much nettled at being called “sonny” by this person so little older than himself, hugh merely nodded stiffly, took up his suitcase and followed linda ingmarsson to the door. jethro, however, stopped them before they could get outside.
“how about your baggage,” he inquired, “got a trunk or anything at the station?”
hugh was not certain whether his trunk had arrived with him or not, so the clerk volunteered to telephone and find out. while he was doing so, hugh stood waiting in the doorway, looking idly down the street and at the hills beyond. he noticed again the line of white highway that fascinated him curiously as it slanted upward through the dense woods. he turned to his companion who stood so silent beside him and ventured a question.
“what is that road, please?” he asked; “where does it go?”
linda ingmarsson looked up quickly toward the hill, while her face took on a new expression, wistful, sad, but somehow proud as well.
“that is my young brother oscar’s road,” she said; “now it goes nowhere but some day—some day it will go far.”
hugh could not make very much out of this answer, but did not have time to ponder it long. jethro announced that all was well with the baggage, so hugh and linda went out together. it was a relief to him to think that he was with a person who knew at least who he was and why he had come.
“you are very good,” he began shyly as they came out on the steps; “you should not—” but the rest of his sentence was never spoken.
the hot sleepy silence was broken suddenly by a shrill steam whistle, followed by another and another. a strident siren joined them; then came a deep blast from some steamer on the lake; then a loud clanging of bells added their voices to the tumult. for full five minutes the deafening noise continued until hugh’s ears beat with it and his head rang. the street had become alive with people, women with aprons over their heads, men in overalls, scores of children, as though each of the little houses had sent forth a dozen inhabitants. down at a far corner hugh saw the two indians come into view again, the man with his head up, listening, like a deer, the woman with a pleading hand laid upon his arm. he brushed her aside roughly, and disappeared beyond the turn, she following meekly after. no one noticed them except himself, hugh felt certain, since every face was turned northward to the wooded rocky hill that overhung the town. puffs of white steam rose here and there among the trees, showing the mine buildings or the lumber mills from which the whistling came.
this was no ordinary blowing of signals to mark the noon hour: the excitement, the anxious faces, the hideous insistence of the noise all told him that. just at the instant that he felt he could not endure the tumult longer, silence fell.
“what is it, what is it?” he gasped his inquiry, and one of the men standing by the steps, the one who had spoken of laughing mary, began to explain.
“you see—about four days ago—” the words were cut off by a new outbreak of the clamor. it rose higher this time and lasted longer, it rolled back from the hills and seemed to echo from the ground itself. twice it fell and twice broke out once more, a long fifteen minutes of unendurable bedlam. the man, undismayed, called his explanations into hugh’s ear, sometimes drowned out by the uproar, sometimes left shouting alone in a moment of throbbing silence. what hugh caught came in broken fragments.
“two fellows—hunting—gone four days now—lost some way—these hills—blowing all the whistles at once—hoped—might hear—”
the screaming and clanging finally died away, leaving one long-drawn siren to drop alone, while hugh’s informant also lowered his voice to ordinary speech.
“we do that hereabouts when people get lost. every whistle in three counties is blowing right now, so if they don’t hear one and follow it, they may another. sometimes it brings them back, more often it doesn’t. it’s an ugly thing to get lost in these hills.”
“how long did you say they had been gone?” asked hugh.
“three—four—no, by george, it’s five days. there’s their pile of mail that’s been collecting on the window ledge, and those first letters are five days old.”
the man glanced at a pile of envelopes that lay just inside the window. the upper one was yellow and caught hugh’s involuntary attention as he stood by the door. the people were dispersing and the excitement evidently was over.
the telegraph envelope was one of those transparent-faced ones, showing the name and address inside. half unconsciously hugh read, “john edmonds, rudolm, minnesota.” he turned with a gasp and looked closer. a little of the typewritten line was visible below, “thanks for letter, will arrive—”
it was his own message that had never been received. his two friends, his only two friends within a thousand miles, were the men who had vanished into the forest.
