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For a few paces he dropped behind her, where the overhead spruce boughs left but the space for a single rider between. Then, again, he drew up close beside her. "I was going to tell you about this gold," he said. "It isn't the gold we're going after." He leaned over until his hand rested on her saddle-bow. "Look ahead," he went on, a curious softness in his voice. "Look at MacDonald!"
And so this wilderness has lain since creation, unmarred by the hand of civilized man, clean and unsullied, as God made it. The air, laden with the perfume of spruce and balsam, is pure and wholesome. The water carries no germs from the refuse of man, and one may drink it freely, from river and brook and lake, without fear of contamination.
Without waiting for a reply, Bess Thornton darted out across a treacherous pathway of light cedar and spruce logs that lay, confined by a log-boom, waiting to be sawed into shingle stuff; for the old mill occasionally did that work, also, as well as grinding corn. Many of the logs were not of sufficient size to support even the girl's light weight, but sank beneath her, wetting her bare feet.
Strangely, it not only grew itself, but proved to be a real nurse for the other. The spruce took a fresh start, and they grew vigorously together for a while. Then the pine outstripped its nursling, and threatened to smother it. The spruce was the more valuable; the other was at best little more than a shrub.
On the shore of this fine body of water were several Indian lodges, completely deserted. To Jean they looked cold and forbidding, so very glad was she when Sam led the way to a dense thicket of young fir and spruce trees. Nestling in their midst was the cosiest lodge Jean had ever beheld.
There is another handsome spruce hereabouts, Picea alba, very slender and graceful in habit, drooping at the top like a mountain hemlock. I saw fine specimens a hundred and twenty-five feet high on deep bottom land a few miles below Glenora. The tops of some of them were almost covered with dense clusters of yellow and brown cones.
The ground in the village had been scraped bare of snow; he would leave no tracks. Having thus experimented and arranged, Piskaret drew a long breath, grasped his war-club, and stealthily pushing aside the loose birch-bark door-flap of the nearest lodge, peeped inside. By the ember light he saw that every Iroquois, man and woman, was fast asleep, under furs, on spruce boughs around the fire.
The huge opal dome now known as Mount Baker loomed up through the clouds of dawn and dusk on the southern sky-line. In fair weather the long pink ridge of the Olympics could be seen towards Puget Sound. Inland from Nootka were vast mountain ridges heavily forested to the very clouds with fir trees and spruce of incredible size.
The mountain breezes from the distant summit swept down upon its flimsy structure, shook the great glass windows as with a strong hand, and sent the balm of bay and spruce through every chink and cranny. In the great hall and corridors the carpets billowed with the intruding blast along the floors; there was the murmur of the pines in the passages, and the damp odor of leaves in the dining-room.
What started him on this idea particularly was that, in one train, a grey-bearded propertied-looking man who sat beside him was grumbling to a spruce little man opposite about the increasing number of empty houses. "You can't wonder at it," answered the spruce little man. "When the working classes aren't prospering everybody feels it but the exporters.
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