First of all, with his native shrewdness, Simon took stock of the happiness at Five Fingers. This contentment, the community affection which brought all together like members of one family, was a big asset in the very beginning. The mill itself could be made a sort of family affair, and a boat arranged for twice or three times a year to run up from Duluth or Fort William and carry away the lumber. There was enough fine birch and cedar and spruce right about them to keep going for years, and the mill would bring even greater prosperity than trapping, which was sure to wear out now that the settlements were filling up rapidly along the line of the railroad.
At last he talked over the matter with Pierre, and Pierre called in Dominique, and there was a meeting of all the men-folk of the families at which it was agreed nothing could be finer for Five Fingers than a mill. Simon promised the first thing to be made from its lumber should be a schoolhouse, and they would have to see to it the schoolhouse had a teacher, for if Dominique and Jeremie and Poleon kept up the pace they were going there surely must be teaching at Five Fingers.
This was on Saturday. The next day Father Albanel came, a little, gray-haired, rosy-cheeked man who loved life and all living things, and who had no settled church because he saw in nature a greater God than he had ever been able to find in the Book written by man, a freedom of thought which had been labeled heresy by those who traveled the old and unchangeable paths. But Father Albanel was loved by every man, woman and child who knew him, and while his stricter brethren chanted and prayed in their vaulted cathedrals and little mission houses, his Church was ten thousand square miles of forest land. And on this Sunday Father Albanel prayed that Simon McQuarrie might be able to keep his promises.
So the mill came. There was not much to it, but when on a certain September afternoon a tug and a scow came creeping up the middle inlet every soul in Five Fingers was down to meet them, and every heart was beating with the biggest excitement that had ever come into the lives of Pierre and his people. With the tug came Simon McQuarrie, proud as an admiral in command of a fleet, and with him a Norwegian engineer and his wife, two mill-hands, and a sallow-faced, anemic-looking young man who was to teach Jeremie Poulin's children and Dominique's kindergarten during the winter for fifteen dollars a month and board.