Stella eventually went out to take a look around the camp. A hard-beaten
path led off toward where rose the distant sounds of logging work, the
ponderous crash of trees, and the puff of the donkeys. She followed that
a little way and presently came to a knoll some three hundred yards
above the beach. There she paused to look and wonder curiously.
For the crest of this little hillock had been cleared and graded level
and planted to grass over an area four hundred feet square. It was
trimmed like a lawn, and in the center of this vivid green block stood
an unfinished house foundation of gray stone. No stick of timber, no
board or any material for further building lay in sight. The thing stood
as if that were to be all. And it was not a new undertaking temporarily
delayed. There was moss creeping over the thick stone wall, she
discovered when she walked over it. Whoever had laid that foundation had
done it many a moon before. Yet the sward about was kept as if a
gardener had it in charge.
A noble stretch of lake and mountain spread out before her gaze.
Straight across the lake two deep clefts in the eastern range opened on
the water, five miles apart. She could see the white ribbon of foaming
cascades in each. Between lifted a great mountain, and on the lakeward
slope of this stood a terrible scar of a slide, yellow and brown, rising
two thousand feet from the shore. A vaporous wisp of cloud hung along
the top of the slide, and above this aërial banner a snow-capped
pinnacle thrust itself high into the infinite blue.
"What an outlook," she said, barely conscious that she spoke aloud. "Why
do these people build their houses in the bush, when they could live in
the open and have something like this to look at. They would, if they
had any sense of beauty."
"Sure they haven't? Some of them might have, you know, without being
able to gratify it."
She started, to find Jack Fyfe almost at her elbow, the gleam of a
quizzical smile lighting his face.
"I daresay that might be true," she admitted.
Fyfe's gaze turned from her to the huge sweep of lake and mountain
chain. She saw that he was outfitted for fishing, creel on his shoulder,
unjointed rod in one hand. By means of his rubber-soled waders he had
come upon her noiselessly.
"It's truer than you think, maybe," he said at length. "You don't want
to come along and take a lesson in catching rainbows, I suppose?"
"Not this time, thanks," she shook her head.
"I want to get enough for supper, so I'd better be at it," he remarked.
"Sometimes they come pretty slow. If you should want to go up and watch
the boys work, that trail will take you there."
He went off across the grassy level and plunged into the deep timber
that rose like a wall beyond. Stella looked after.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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