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THE PIRATE OF JASPER PEAK


------------------------------------------------------------------------

                         THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
                  NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS
                        ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO

                        MACMILLAN & CO., Limited
                       LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
                               MELBOURNE

                   THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
                                TORONTO

------------------------------------------------------------------------


[Illustration: Close to the hearth a big chair had been drawn and in
this some one was sitting.]

------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE PIRATE OF JASPER PEAK

by

ADAIR ALDON

Author of “The Island of Appledore,” etc.

With Frontispiece






New York
The Macmillan Company
1918
All rights reserved

Copyright, 1918
By the Macmillan Company

Set up and electrotyped.
Published, September, 1918

------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                CONTENTS

               I. A Stranger in a Strange Land
              II. The Brown Bear’s Skin
             III. Laughing Mary
              IV. The Heart of the Forest
               V. Oscar Dansk
              VI. The Promised Land
             VII. Whither Away?
            VIII. A Night’s Lodging
              IX. Peril at the Bridge
               X. First Blood to the Pirate
              XI. The White Flag
             XII. A Highway through the Hills

------------------------------------------------------------------------

                       THE PIRATE OF JASPER PEAK




                               CHAPTER I

                      A STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND


The long Pullman train, an hour late and greatly begrudging the time for
a special stop, came sliding into the tiny station of Rudolm and
deposited a solitary passenger upon the platform. The porter set Hugh
Arnold’s suitcase on the ground and accepted his proffered coin, all in
one expert gesture, and said genially:

“We’re way behind time on this run, but we come through on the down trip
at six in the morning, sharp. You-all will be going back with us
to-morrow, I reckon.”

“No,” replied Hugh, as he came down from the car step and gathered up
his belongings. “No, I’m going to stay.”

“Stay?” repeated the porter. “Oh—a week, I suppose. No one really stays
at Rudolm except them that are born there and can’t get away.”

Hugh shook his head.

“I am going to stay all winter,” he said.

“The whole winter! Say, do you know what winter _is_ up here?” the man
exclaimed. “For the love of—”

A violent jolt of the train was the engineer’s reminder that friendly
converse was not in order when there was time to be made up.

“All right, sah, good-by. I hope you like staying, only remember—we go
through every day at six in the morning less’n we’re late. _Good_-by.”

The train swept away, leaving Hugh to look after it for a moment before
he turned to take his first survey of Rudolm and the wide sheet of blue
water upon whose shore it stood.

Red Lake, when he and his father had first looked it up on the map,
seemed a queer, crooked place, full of harbors and headlands and hidden
coves, the wider stretches extending here and there to fifteen, twenty,
twenty-five miles of open water, again narrowing to mere winding
channels choked with islands. Hugh would have liked to say afterward
that he knew even from the map that this was a region promising
adventures, that down the lake’s winding tributaries he was going to be
carried to strange discoveries, but, as a matter of fact, he had no such
foreknowledge.

Indeed, it was his father who observed that the lake looked like a
proper haunt for pirates and Hugh who reminded him that pirates were not
ever to be found so far north. All the books he had seen, pictured them
as burying treasure on warm, sunny, sandy beaches, or flying in pursuit
of their prey on the wings of the South Sea winds. Pirates in the wooded
regions to the north of the Mississippi Valley, pirates where the snow
lay so deep and the lake was frozen for nearly half the year, where only
through a short summer could the waters be plied by “a low, raking,
black hulk” such as all pirates sail—it was not to be thought of! Even
now, when Hugh stood on the station