Part 31 (1/2)
”I'y of yours on, Billy-boy,” she said ”You'll make a success of it, I know I don't see why you shouldn't make a success of any kind of business
But I didn't think you'd ever tackle business You have such peculiar views about business and business practice”
”I despise the ordinary business ethic,” he returned sharply ”It's a get-soh; it is based on exploiting the other fellow in one for the accepted lines--or any lines I don't have to; there are tooopen to me
I don't care to live fat and make some one else foot the bill But I can exploit the resources of nature And that is my plan If we make money it won't be filched by a complex process from the other fellow's pockets; it won't be wealth created by shearing lambs in the market, by sweatshop labor, or adulterated food, or exorbitant rental of filthy tene with If they undertake to et-rich-quick scheme of it I'll knock the whole business in the head I'et into it with them But it pro till spring”
In the spring! That brief phrase set Hazel to sober thinking With April or May Bill would spread his wings for the North There would be no oose to the reedy nesting grounds could be stayed Well, a summer in the North would not be so bad, she reflected But she hated to think of the isolation It grieved her to conte her beautifully furnished apart cabin in the woods There would be a dreary relapse into monotony after months of association with clever people, the swift succession of brilliant little functions It all delighted her; she responded to her present surroundings as naturally as a grain of wheat responds to the ger influences of war Bill Wagstaff's advent into her life she ht have been denied all this Indeed she felt a trifle resentful that he should prefer the forested solitudes to the pleasant social byways of Granville
Still she had hopes If he plunged into business associations with Jiroup, there was no telling what ht beco, wide-shouldered man, anyway So she continued to playfully ruhts to herself
Bill inforress of his venture
Brooks and Lorimer put him in touch with two others ere ready to chance th of Bill's statements The company was duly incorporated, with an authorized capital of one hundred thousand dollars, five thousand dollars' worth of stock being taken out by each on a cash basis--the re in the company treasury, to be held or sold for developan to shohat the clai
Whitey Lewis set out Bill stuck a -room wall and pointed off each day's journey with a pin Hazel sometimes studied the map, and pitied thehts when the frost thrust its keen-pointed lances into their tired bodies; food cooked with nu of wolves; white frost and clinging icicles upon their beards as they trudged across trackless areas; and over all that aweso silence Gold madness or trail madness, or simply adventurous unrest? She could not say She knew only that a certain type of s, bucked hard trails and plunged headlong into vast solitudes, and perer to turn hied with that madness for unbeaten trails But surely when a man mated, and had a home and all that makes home desirable, he should forsake the old ways? Once when she found hier andto himself, she had a quick catch at her heart--as if hers were already poised to go
And she could not follow hiloried in the prospect But his trail, his wilderness trail, and his trail gait, were not for any wo a job for any woht never co since she and Kitty Brooks had been discussing a certain couple who had separated Vesta Lori
”How could they help but fail in leBill stare at thethe oods, she recalled Vesta Lorimer's characterization of that other pair Surely this le brood
But there, in her ra that he had staked the clairaph Trail to file at Hazleton Bill showed her the e--wired from Station Six
”I wish I could have been in on it--that was some trip,” he said--and there was a trace of discontent in his tone ”I don't fancy so my chestnuts out of the coals for me It was sure a man's job to cross the Klappan in the dead of winter”
The filing co out and whipsawing ti--the five ere on the ground Lewis sent word that thirty feet of snow lay in the gold-bearing branch And that was the last they heard from him
He was a performer, Bill said, not a correspondent
So in Granville the affairs of the Free Gold Mining Co floods should peel off the winter blanket of the North Hazel was fully occupied, and Bill dwelt largely with his books, or sketched and figured on operations at the claims Their domestic affairs moved with the smoothness of a perfectly balanced machine To the very uttermost Hazel enjoyed the well-appointed orderliness of it all, the unruffled placidity of an existence where the unexpected, the disagreeable, the uncouth, holly eliles of her two years beyond the Rockies were altogether absent and iely to hi upon civilization with a kindlier eye
Ulti overspread the eastern provinces And when the snows of winter successively gave way to muddy streets and then to clean paven was lettered across the s of the brokerage office in which Paul Lorimer was housed
FREE GOLD MINING COMPANY
P H Loristaff, Manager
So it ran Bill was commissioned in the army of business at last
CHAPTER XXVII
A BUSINESS JOURNEY
”I have to go to the Klappan,” Bill apprised his wife one evening