AMILY!" complained Grouch in slightly thickened accents to the world at large. "What is it?"
The world at large, consisting at the moment of the Rocky Mountains and James Strode, made no answer.
"What is it but an accident, and a nasty one at that sometimes? Who cares a continental these days whether you're descended from William the Conqueror or the last word in sausage kings?"
"You do," said Strode.
Grouch's rhetoric was arrested in full flight. He turned, a dilapidated yet arresting figure, with his tangled grey beard and fine head, and subjected Strode to a quick glance of suspicion.
"What do you know about me?" he demanded.
"Nothing," said Strode.
"Well, then?" muttered Grouch.
Which was, perhaps, a curious conversation for the teamster and loader of a British Columbian shingle mill to indulge in. But after wrestling with knife-edged cedar throughout the day, these two were in the habit of perching themselves on a trellis bridge that spanned a glacial torrent, and there, blessedly immune from mosquitoes, they swung their legs in space and conversed as the spirit moved them.
The spirit—in both senses of the word—was moving Grouch this evening. Strode had never known him so communicative.
"I'd like to know what family's done for me," he mused absently. "Leightham—pronounced Leetham, just to make it more difficult. Silly name! Silly family! What's it done except live for a few centuries in solid English comfort while its poor relations and such riff-raff scratch for a living at the ends of the earth? And why do we do it?"
Grouch's lean shanks and enormous feet beat the air like overweighted pendulums.
"Why don't we drift in with the port some fine evening, and claim the job of gardener or boot boy? Because it's 'not done.' Because our precious people would throw a fit and expire if we did half at home what we do out here. And we humour 'em. Why?"
"I wonder," ventured Strode.
Grouch glared at him unseeingly for a space. "Because we're fools," he jerked out. "Because we're hidebound, hamstrung, everlastingly damned by something—something I can't put a name to."
"Why not call it tradition?" suggested Strode.
"All right, anything you like." Grouch rocked with scorn on the edge of the bridge. "But it's got to be shaken off before a feller will do any good for himself. I'm going to shake it off," he announced firmly.
"You'll find it goes deeper than you think," warned Strode.
"Oh, shall I? Well, let me tell you that the minute I've saved enough to get out of these cursed mountains, I'm going to show my family what it owes me. It'll give 'em a shock, but that's what's coming to them."
Strode saw fit to change the subject.
"What's the matter with the mountains?" he inquired.
"Matter!" Grouch pounced on this new grievance with a vigour that justified the only name he was known by. "Wait till you've had ten years of 'em, my lad. Wait till they're your gaolers."
"Gaolers?"
"Yes, that's what they are, and you'll find it out before you've done. Look at 'em standing there laughing at a poor devil sentenced to hard labour for life under their ugly noses. 'You'll never get out,' that's what they say. 'We're here to stop you!'" He shook a hairy fist at the crimsoning peaks of The Three Sisters, and had recourse to the flask that seldom left him. "But they won't stop me—not when I get going!"
"And when will that be?"
For answer Grouch extracted a wallet from some hidden cranny of his disreputable person and fingered it reflectively.
"Another two hundred," he said at last, "and you won't see me for dust. Two hundred—at the rate of three dollars a day. Oughtn't to take long, eh?"
Strode contrived not to smile, even at the wallet that had taken ten years to reach its present lean proportions.
"Why, no," he encouraged. "You're doing fine."
Grouch raised his eyes to the mountains with new-born defiance.
"Then I'll be able to laugh back," he pointed out. "See those two big fellers with the pass between? Well, that's the way I'm going out of here, just so that I can look 'em in the face and laugh. I'm waiting for that as much as I'm waiting to drift in with the port. … What the devil am I talking about? he added suddenly.
"Nothing much," said Strode. "We'd better be making a move."
Grouch suffered himself to be conducted back to camp, and, after a last glance at his beloved team of Percherons, turned in and slept like a child. Strode was used to him by now. To-morrow he would have forgotten everything he had said on the trellis bridge—which was, perhaps, as well.
