So there the discussion ended and the question of what Hugh was to do came up for settlement. There was a distant cousin of his father’s in New York—but this suggestion was never allowed to get very far. Hugh had never met the cousin and did not relish the idea of going to live with him, “sight unseen” as he put it, on such short notice. It was his own plan to go to Rudolm where lived the two Edmonds brothers, John, cashier of the bank there and a great friend of his father’s, and Dick, a boy four years older than himself, whom he had met but once yet knew that he liked immensely. Several times John Edmonds had written to Dr. Arnold—
“If Hugh ever wants to spend any time ‘on his own’ we could find him a job here in Rudolm, I know. It is a queer little place, just a mining and lumbering town full of Swedes, but he might like the hunting and the country and find it interesting for a while.”
It was the idea of spending the time “on his own” that made Hugh feel that thus the period of his father’s absence might chance to seem a little shorter and the soreness of missing him might grow a little less. John Edmonds had answered their letters most cordially and had said that all could be arranged and Hugh need only telegraph the day of his arrival. The final preparations had been hastened by the coming of Dr. Arnold’s sailing orders; the two had bidden each other good-by and good luck with resolute cheerfulness and Hugh had set forth on his long journey northward. He had never seen the Great Lakes nor the busy inland shipping ports with their giant freighters lying at the docks, nor the rising hills of the Iron Range through which his way must lead, but he noticed them very little. His thoughts were very far away and fixed on other things. Even now, as he walked slowly up Rudolm’s one street he was not dwelling so much on his forlorn wonder why he did not see his friends, but was thinking of a great transport that must, almost at that hour, be nosing her way out of “an Atlantic port,” of the swift destroyers gathering to convoy her, of the salt sea breezes blowing across her deck, blowing sharp from the east, from over the sea—from France. For he was certain, from all that he could gather, that his father was sailing to-day and was launching upon his new venture at almost the same time that Hugh was entering upon his own.