Lucius Davoren

This Book is Inscribed
TO
VISCOUNT MILTON, M.P. F.R.G.S.
ETC.
IN ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF THE AID DERIVED FROM HIS
ADMIRABLE BOOK OF TRAVELS,
‘THE NORTH-WEST PASSAGE OVERLAND,’
TO WHICH THE AUTHOR IS INDEBTED FOR THE
SCENERY IN THE PROLOGUE.

[Pg vii]

CONTENTS OF VOL. I.

[Pg 1]

Prologue:—In the Far West.

CHAPTER I. ‘WHERE THE SUN IS SILENT.’

Winter round them: not a winter in city streets, lamplit and glowing, or on a fair English countryside, dotted with cottage-roofs, humble village homes, sending up their incense of blue-gray smoke to the hearth goddess; not the winter of civilisation, with all means and appliances at hand to loosen the grip of the frost-fiend: but winter in its bleakest aspect, amid trackless forests, where the trapper walks alone; winter in a solitude so drear that the sound of a human voice seems more strange and awful than the prevailing silence; winter in a pine-forest in British North America, westward of the Rocky Mountains.[Pg 2] It is December, the bleakest, dreariest month in the long winter; for spring is still far off.

Three men sit crouching over the wood-fire in a roughly-built log-hut in the middle of a forest, which seems to stretch away indefinitely into infinite space. The men have trodden that silent region for many a day, and have found no outlet on either side, only here and there a frozen lake, to whose margin, ere the waters were changed to ice, the forest denizens came down to gorge themselves with the small fish that abound there. They are travellers who have penetrated this dismal region for pleasure; yet each moved by a different desire. The first, Lucius Davoren, surgeon, has been impelled by that deep-rooted thirst of knowledge which in some minds is a passion. He wants to know what this strange wild territory is like—this unfamiliar land between Fort Garry and Victoria, across the Rocky Mountains—and if there lies not here a fair road for the English emigrant. He has even cherished the hope of some day pushing his way to the northward, up to the ice-bound shores of the polar sea. He looks upon this trapper-expedition as a mere experimental business, an education for grander things, the explorer’s preparatory school.

So much for Lucius Davoren, surgeon without a[Pg 3] practice. Mark him as he sits in his dusky corner by the fire. The hut boasts a couple of windows, but they are only of elk-skin, through which the winter light steals dimly. Mark the strongly-defined profile, the broad forehead, the clear gray eyes. The well-cut mouth and resolute chin are hidden by that bushy untrimmed beard, which stiffens with his frozen breath when he ventures outside the hut; but the broad square forehead, the Saxon type of brow, and clear penetrating eyes, are in themselves all-sufficient indications of the man’s character. Here are firmness and patience, or, in one word, the noblest attribute of the human mind—constancy.

On the opposite side of that rude hearth sits Geoffrey Hossack, three years ago an undergraduate at Balliol, great at hammer-throwing and the long jump, doubtful as to divinity exam., and with vague ideas trending towards travel and adventure in the Far West as the easiest solution of that difficulty. Young, handsome, ardent, fickle, strong as a lion, gentle as a sucking dove, Geoffrey has been the delight and glory of the band in its sunnier days; he is the one spot of sunlight in the picture now, when the horizon has darkened to so deep a gloom.

The last of the trio is Absalom Schanck, a native of Hamburg, small and plump, with a perennial[Pg 4] plumpness which has not suffered even from a diet of mouldy pemmican, and rare meals of buffalo or moose flesh, which has survived intervals of semi-starvation, blank dismal days when there was absolutely nothing for these explorers to eat.

At such trying periods Absalom is wont to wax plaintive, but it is not of turtle or venison he dreams; no vision of callipash or callipee, no mocking simulacrum of a lordly Aberdeen salmon or an aldermanic turbot, no mirage picture of sirloin or Christmas turkey, torments his soul; but his feverish mouth waters for the putrid cabbage and rancid pork of his fatherland; and the sharpest torture which fancy can create for him is the tempting suggestion of a certain boiled sausage which his soul loveth.

He has joined the expedition with half-defined ideas upon the subject of a new company of dealers in skins, to be established beyond the precincts of Hudson’s Bay; and not a little influenced by a genuine love of exploration, and a lurking notion that he has in him the stuff that makes a Van Diemen.

From first to last it is, and has been, essentially an amateur expedition. No contribution from the government of any nation has aided these wanderers. They have come, as Geoffrey Hossack forcibly expresses[Pg 5] the fact, ‘on their own hook.’ Geoffrey suggests that they should found a city, by and by, after the manner of classical adventurers: whence should arise in remote future ages some new Empire of the West.

‘Hossack’s Gate would be rather a good name for it,’ he says, between two puffs of his meerschaum; ‘and our descendants would doubtless be known as the Hossackides, and the Davorenides, and do their very best to annihilate one another, you know, Lucius.’