george maltham, wandering out on the point one sunday morning in the early spring-time—he had just come up from chicago to take charge of the duluth end of his father's line of lake steamers and was lonely in that strange place, and was the more disposed to be misanthropic because he had a headache left over from the previous wet night at the club—came promptly to the conclusion that he never had struck a place so god-forsakenly dismal. aside from his own feelings, there was even more than usual to justify this opinion. the day was grey and chill. a strong northeast wind was blowing that covered the lake with white-caps[69] and that sent a heavy surf rolling shoreward. a little ice, left from the spring break-up, still was floating in the harbour. under these conditions the point was at its cheerless worst.
maltham had crossed the canal by the row-boat ferry. having mounted the sodden steps and looked about him for a moment—in which time his conclusion was reached as to the point's god-forsaken dismalness—he was for abandoning his intended explorations and going straight-away back to the mainland. but when he turned to descend the steps the boat had received some waiting passengers—three church-bound swedish women in their sunday clothes—and had just pushed off. that little turn of chance decided him. after all, he said to himself, it did not make much difference. what he wanted was a walk to rid him of his headache; and the point offered him, as the rocky hill-sides of the mainland conspicuously did not, a good long stretch of level land.
before him extended an absurdly wide street—laid out in magnificent expectation of the traffic that never came to it—flanked in far-reaching perspective by the little houses which sprang up in such a hurry when the "boom"[70] was on. in its centre was the tramway, its road-bed laid with wooden planks. the dingy open tram-car, in which the church-bound swedish women had come up to the ferry, started away creakingly while he stood watching it. that was the only sight or sound of life. for some little time, in the stillness, he could hear the driver addressing swedish remarks of an encouraging or abusive nature to his mule.
taking the planked tramway in preference to the rotten wooden sidewalks full of pitfalls, maltham walked on briskly for a mile or so—his headache leaving him in the keen air—until the last of the little houses was passed. there the vast street suddenly dribbled off into a straggling sandy road, which wound through thickets of bushy white birch and a sparse growth of stunted pines. the tramway, along which he continued, went on through the brush in a straight line. the point had narrowed to a couple of hundred yards. through rifts in the tangle about him he could see heaps of storm-piled drift-wood scattered along the lake-side beach—on which the surf was pounding heavily. on the harbour side the beach was broken by inthrusts of sedgy swamp. presently he came to a sandy open space in which, beside[71] a weather-worn little wooden church, was a neglected graveyard that seemed to give the last touch of dreariness to that dismal solitude.
the graveyard was a waste of sand, save where bushy patches of birch had sprung up in it from wind-borne seeds. swept by many storms, the sandy mounds were disappearing. still marking the graves were a few shabby wooden crosses and a dozen or so of slanting or fallen wooden slabs. once these short-lived monuments had been painted white and had borne legends in black lettering. but only a swedish word or a swedish name remained here and there legible—for the sun and the wind and the rain had been doing their erasing work steadily for years. one slab alone stood nearly upright and retained a few partly decipherable lines in english. but even on that maltham could make out only the scattered words: "sacred.... ulrica.... royal house of sweden ... ever beloved ... of major calhoun ashley," and a date that seemed to be 1879.
his headache had gone, but it had left him heavy and dejected. that fragmentary epitaph increased his sombreness. even had he been in a cheerful mood he could not have failed to perceive the pathetic irony of it all. there[72] was more than the ordinary cruelty of death and forgetfulness, he thought, about that grave so desolate of one who had been connected—it did not matter how—with a "royal house," and who was described in those almost illegible lines as "ever beloved." that was human nature down to the hard pan, he thought; and with a half-smile and a half-sigh over the fate of that poor dead ulrica he turned away from the graveyard and walked on. half-whimsically he wondered if he had reached the climax of the melancholy which brooded over that dreary sand spit. as he stated the case to himself, short of finding a man lying murdered among the birch-bushes it was not likely that he would strike anything able to raise that graveyard's hand!
the murdered man did not materialize, and the next out-of-the-way sight that he came across—when he had walked on past the dingy and forgotten-looking little church—was a big ramshackling wooden house of such pretentious absurdity that his first glimpse of it fairly made him laugh. its square centre was a wooden tower of three stories, battlemented, flanked by two battlemented wings. a veranda ran along the lower floor, and above the veranda[73] was a gallery. some of the windows were boarded over; others had scraps of carpet stuck into their glassless gaps—and all had venetian shutters (singularly at odds with the climate of that region) hanging dubiously and with many broken slats. the paint had weathered away, and bricks had fallen from the chimney-tops—a loss which gave to the queer structure, in conjunction with lapses in its wooden battlements, a sadly broken-crested air. as a whole, it suggested a badly done caricature of an old-fashioned southern homestead—of which the essence of the caricature was finding it in that bleak northern land.
