Then the cleared land came to a stop against heavy timber.  The car whipped a curve and drove into what the fat man from Calgary facetiously remarked upon as the tall uncut.  Miss Benton sighted up these noble columns to where a breeze droned in the tops, two hundred feet above.  Through a gap in the timber she saw mountains, peaks that stood bold as the Rockies, capped with snow.  For two days she had been groping for a word to define, to sum up the feeling which had grown upon her, had been growing upon her steadily, as the amazing scroll of that four-day journey unrolled.  She found it now, a simple word, one of the simplest in our mother tongue—­bigness.  Bigness in its most ample sense,—­that was the dominant note.  Immensities of distance, vastness of rolling plain, sheer bulk of mountain, rivers that one crossed, and after a day’s journey crossed again, still far from source or confluence.  And now this unending sweep of colossal trees!

At first she had been overpowered with a sense of insignificance utterly foreign to her previous experience.  But now she discovered with an agreeable sensation of surprise she could vibrate to such a keynote.  And while she communed with this pleasant discovery the car sped down a straight stretch and around a corner and stopped short to unload sacks of mail at a weather-beaten yellow edifice, its windows displaying indiscriminately Indian baskets, groceries, and hardware.  Northward opened a broad scope of lake level, girt about with tremendous peaks whose lower slopes were banked with thick forest.

Somewhere distant along that lake shore was to be her home.  As the car rolled over the four hundred yards between store and white-and-green St. Allwoods, she wondered if Charlie would be there to meet her.  She was weary of seeing strange faces, of being directed, of being hustled about.

But he was not there, and she recalled that he never had been notable for punctuality.  Five years is a long time.  She expected to find him changed—­for the better, in certain directions.  He had promised to be there; but, in this respect, time evidently had wrought no appreciable transformation.

She registered, was assigned a room, and ate luncheon to the melancholy accompaniment of a three-man orchestra struggling vainly with Bach in an alcove off the dining room.  After that she began to make inquiries.  Neither clerk nor manager knew aught of Charlie Benton.  They were both in their first season there.  They advised her to ask the storekeeper.

“MacDougal will know,” they were agreed.  “He knows everybody around here, and everything that goes on.”

The storekeeper, a genial, round-bodied Scotchman, had the information she desired.

“Charlie Benton?” said he.  “No, he’ll be at his camp up the lake.  He was in three or four days back.  I mind now, he said he’d be down Thursday; that’s to-day.  But he isn’t here yet, or his boat’d be by the wharf yonder.”