LITMIR.BIZ

      1. The Land of Romance

      CHAPTER I.

       Table of Contents

      THE LAND OF ROMANCE.

      IF it were not for Peggy I should not write this story at all. Peggy is my niece, and I am very fond of her and she knows it. So when she got the idea in her glossy young head we both knew very well what would happen, although I objected that there was no woman in the story except that other Peggy who, being my sister, did not count, and the klootchman Lucille, who was most certainly not a heroine. But Peggy overrode me grandly by saying she was tired of wilderness heroines who crop up where no white man would think of taking a woman. There was something in that. But I protested further that though I had told the yarn often enough it was quite a different matter to write it.

      "Bosh!" said Peggy. "Write it just the way you tell it."

      So I was up against the iron there, too. I do not know just how to make a proper literary start; but, as with most other work, perhaps the main thing is to get started somehow.

      My name is Robert Cory. I do not remember my mother. My father, who taught history in a college which is not necessary to name, died when I was a little shaver, and when his friends came to dig into his affairs they found that he had very little money and no insurance and only one relative on earth so far as they could ascertain, a brother who lived in the wilderness that fringed the Carcajou. And so my sister Peggy and I, two forlorn little waifs, were packed off to him, and no doubt everybody was glad to be rid of us.

      Now our Uncle Fred, though college bred like my father, had been a rolling stone. But finally he had taken up land on the Carcajou, in the belief that it would some day be valuable, and, of course, as everybody knows now, he was right. But at that time he was land poor. He had several thousand acres of farm and timber lands on which he was hard pressed to make even the small payments required by the government, but often he had not enough money to buy flour.

      He worked a scant thirty acres with the help of one man, a slow-moving, lanky, one-eyed Scandinavian named Gus Swanson. This gave him subsistence. And for more he waited till the march of settlement west and north should strike him; and the slow years never shook his faith, which has since been amply justified.

      Peggy was his favorite, and from the first she could twist him around her finger, just as the other Peggy now twists me, and to me he was more like an elder brother than an uncle.

      And so, you see, as a boy my life was bounded by the Carcajou. I had only faint recollections of anything different. Its waters and bordering forests made up my world, with which I was very, well content. In summer, when old enough, I helped in the garden and fields, and fished and gathered wild berries in season for Peggy to do down against the winter. And in winter I fished through the ice, and set my small line of snares and traps for rabbit and muskrat and mink and fox; and even for the great, silver-gray, soft-footed, tuft-eared lynx.

      And yet it must not be supposed that Peggy and I grew up like young savages. We had our schoolbooks and our regular hours for study, and our uncle taught us, having been no doubt at much pains to brush up his rudiments.

      Close neighbors, in those early days, were few. Here and there a hopeful pioneer had settled and built himself a habitation, but in the main the land lay as in the beginning. We had our supplies from Neepaw, a struggling border outpost three days up the Carcajou by canoe, and twice that by a bad pack-trail. And a hundred miles to the north was Carcajou House, a post of the fur company, to me in the Land of Romance.

      Of Indians we saw plenty, Crees and Ojibways and Chippewyans mostly, who used the river by canoe in summer and by dog and snowshoe in winter. They were dirty, but friendly, and most of them were honest; at any rate, they never stole from us.

      After a while, as settlement spread upward from the south, there were more people passing on the river. Winter and summer they drifted up and down—hard, gaunt men for the most part, with seldom a woman or child—prospectors, trappers, lumberjacks, surveyors—the light foam of humanity that ever tips and heralds the advancing wave of settlement in the new lands.

      Many of them, seeing a house and clearing where nothing but brush and beaver meadow should have been—and

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