Alice Deringham laughed, though she was not conscious of much amusement just then, and pointed to the bookcase close by her.

“It is really not his fault, if that is where he gets his fancies from,” she said.

“No,” said Deringham, nodding.  “We grow out of them at sixteen in the old country.  Of course, Tennyson, Kingsley, Scott.  Now I wonder if he would find Elaine a more common type than Vivienne if he went home to Carnaby.  Still, if you look a little more closely, there is literature which might throw a slightly different light upon the man’s character.  I notice a bulky volume on soft-wooded trees, somebody on trigonometry, geology in relation to mining, and what I recognize as a standard work on finance and banking.”

Alice Deringham smiled.  “Do you know I fancy that Alton of Somasco would with a little training make his mark at home,” she said.  “Has he mentioned any intention of returning with you?”

Deringham’s face grew a trifle sombre.  “He has not.  We will talk of something else,” he said.

Alton and Seaforth sat up late that night, but what their conversation was did not appear until they walked into a room at the rear of Horton’s store just as supper was being cleared away on the Saturday evening.  The nights were already growing cold, and a pile of pinewood crackled in the stove, while the light of two big lamps fell upon the bronzed faces of grave jean-clad men, all turned expectantly towards Alton.  He sat down at the head of the table, with Seaforth beside him, and Horton, got up in a frayed-out white shirt from which his bony wrists and red neck protruded grotesquely, at the foot.  The rest sat on the table and sundry boxes and barrels smoking tranquilly.  They were, for the most part, silent men who waged a grim and ceaseless warfare with the forest, and disdained any indication of curiosity.  Nobody asked a question, but the steady eyes which watched the convener of the meeting were mildly inquiring when he rose up.

“I sent for you, boys, because it seemed the fairest thing,” he said.  “Now somebody has got to take hold with a tight grip if the dollars that are coming into it are to go to the men who have done the work in this valley.  You have seen what has happened down Washington and Oregon way, and we don’t any of us want it here in Canada.  When the good time came was it the man who’d put in his twelve hours daily with the axe and crosscut who got the dollars, or the one who lived soft in the cities?”

There was a little growl from several among the assembly, for most of those who sat there realized that it was usually the mortgage broker and speculator who reaped where the toilers with axe and saw had sown.

“There’ll have to be laws made to hold them fellows’ grip off the poor man.” said somebody.

Alton laughed a little.  “Well,” he said dryly, “it seems to me that the poor man should do a little of the holding off himself.  Now I want you to listen carefully.  Within twelve months you’ll see a new wagon-road cut south towards the big river, and inside two years the surveyors running the line for a new railroad into the Somasco valley.”