Part 16 (1/2)
She turned to Andrew. ”This is a hard country in winter. I've seen the thermometer stand a week at fifty below.”
”Don't be scared, Mr. Allinson,” laughed the lad, as he closed the door. ”It's not often too fierce, and in a place like the Landing there's generally something going on. Will the frost interfere with your mining?”
”Not underground,” said Andrew. ”I understand that nothing can be done on the surface, but we expect to send off a good lot of ore for experimental reduction in the next week or two. Then we'll have something to base our plans on.”
”Mappin's going to handle the transport, I guess. That man's surely on to a soft thing. I s'pose you know he's making his pile out of the Rain Bluff?”
Mrs. Graham glanced at her son in rebuke.
”I don't think you should talk to Mr. Allinson in that manner, Jim.
He's a good deal older and more experienced than you are.”
”Your ideas are out of date, Mother; we've grown ahead of them. Mr.
Allinson doesn't look as if he minded. Anyway, he doesn't know as much as I do about the Canadian contractor.” He turned to Andrew. ”Do you like it up yonder?”
”Yes,” Andrew answered good-humoredly; ”I like the work better than anything I remember having done.”
”A matter of taste. Now, I can't see much amus.e.m.e.nt in rolling rocks about or standing in wet slickers in a dark pit watching the boys punch the drills.”
”Mr. Allinson is not doing it for amus.e.m.e.nt,” said his mother.
”Well, money isn't often made that way. You don't get rich by knowing how to use the hammer and giant-powder.”
”I believe that's true,” Andrew responded with a smile.
”A sure thing! Money is made by sitting tight in your office and hiring other fellows to do the rough work. They break up the rocks and cut the milling logs; you take the profit. It's business, first and last, for mine!”
”Then it's fortunate there are people with different views,” his sister interposed. ”If n.o.body were willing to live in the logging camps all winter and go prospecting in the bush, you would be badly off.”
”But so long as there are people who like doing that kind of thing, we're glad to let them.”
”This is a favorite pose of his,” the girl explained to Andrew. ”It's the latest fas.h.i.+on among the boys; they're afraid of being thought altruistic.”
”Now that everything is controlled by mergers and they make all we need so dear, one is forced to be practical,” Mrs. Graham remarked feelingly. ”For all that, it jars on me to hear our young people talk as they do.”
”We're realists, with no use for sentiment,” Jim replied. ”We don't let our imagination run away with us. It doesn't pay.”
”You may be wrong in that,” said Andrew, smiling, ”I'm not much of a philosopher, but it seems to me that imagination's now and then a useful thing. I've seen it help a man through tight places. Take your prospectors, for example; they often face risks that couldn't be justified by a return in money. I heard of one fellow crossing a lake in a savage storm in a leaky canoe, to keep the time he'd allowed for his journey, because he wouldn't be beaten; and of another making two hundred miles on snowshoes with very little food, because a party he'd promised to meet was expecting him.”
”That,” said the lad, ”is the kind of thing father would do; he's given to impractical idealism. There's a mine up in the barrens he has talked about as long as I remember; but if he found it I believe he'd be content with that and sell the claim to any one for a few hundred dollars. Getting yourself frozen for an abstract idea isn't good business.”
Graham laughed and changed the subject, and soon afterward Andrew took his leave. He spent the next evening with Frobisher, whom he had now visited several times, and on the following morning set out for the mine, where he worked very hard for a few weeks. They were still using the old adit, though the new one was being driven toward the lower level. Then he and Carnally left the camp in a canoe to hurry forward some stores and, after arranging for their quicker transport, stood on a little promontory, looking down the river, late one gloomy afternoon.
Winter had set in with unusual rigor. The gray sky was barred with leaden cloud; the pines, which looked strangely ragged and somber, stood out with harsh distinctness against the first thin snow; and the river flowed, a dark-colored riband, through a clean-cut channel in the ice. A nipping wind blew down the gorge, and now and then light flakes of snow fell.
”We had better push on,” Carnally suggested. ”It looks as if the messenger hadn't got through, and we'll hardly make the mine before midnight. There's heavy snow coming and we have no provisions or camp outfit.”
”Wait an hour,” said Andrew. ”The smelter people promised to let me know the results they got and the letter was due yesterday. I'm anxious about the thing.”
Carnally agreed. They had sent out a quant.i.ty of ore for reduction, and particulars of the yield in refined metal would throw a useful light on the prospects of the mine. The last a.n.a.lysis of specimens selected to represent the bulk had not been encouraging, but this test was unsatisfactory because the ore was variable.