Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) THE GASPARDS OF PINE CROFT RALPH CONNOR ------------------------------------------------------------------------ By RALPH CONNOR The Gaspards of Pine Croft To Him That Hath The Sky Pilot in No Man’s Land The Major The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail Corporal Cameron The Foreigner Black Rock The Sky Pilot The Prospector The Doctor The Man from Glengarry Glengarry School Days ------------------------------------------------------------------------ THE GASPARDS OF PINE CROFT A ROMANCE OF THE WINDERMERE by RALPH CONNOR NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY ------------------------------------------------------------------------ COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY THE GASPARDS OF PINE CROFT. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA ------------------------------------------------------------------------ THE GASPARDS OF PINE CROFT CHAPTER I Of all British Columbia valleys none has a finer sweep than the spacious Windermere. The valley rolls itself on both sides of the Columbia River in wide stretches of grass lands, varied with great reaches of red pine forest, here of open park-like appearance, there thick with underbrush of spruce and cedar. The valley lies between the two ranges of the Selkirks, which in places crowd hard upon the river and again lie up against a far horizon across a stretch of tumbling foothills. With the autumn sun on its rich and varied wealth of color, the valley lies like one great genial smile across the face of British Columbia from Golden Pass to the Crow’s Nest, warm, kindly, restful. It was upon a glorious autumn day that Hugh Gaspard’s eyes first rested upon the valley, and from that first impression he could never escape. For, though by training and profession Gaspard was an engineer, and with a mastery of his craft, by native gifts of imagination and temperament and sense of colour, that rarest of Heaven’s bestowments, drawn from his mingled Highland Scot and Gallic blood strain, he was an artist.