Journey

Journey Read Online Free PDF

Book: Journey Read Online Free PDF
Author: James A. Michener
that it is entirely Canadian. You pay no United States duties on your necessities when you come this way. You are on Canadian terrain all the way.” As with the other route, there were a few facts of which he must have been aware but which in the service of salesmanship he chose to disregard.
    The Canadian office in London was so pleased with the specific data provided by this long cable that steps had already been taken to publish it as an instructive pamphlet with maps and quotations from earlier correspondence, for as the attaché reminded Lord Luton: “You must remember, we’ve known about gold in Canada for the past six years. It’s just that this latest strike has gotten a little out of hand.”
    “Who are these Halverson and Desbordays?” Carpenter asked the attaché, who in turn asked Miss Waterson if she knew of them. When she replied: “I’m from Winnipeg. That’s more than six hundred miles from Edmonton,” the Englishmen caught some sense of the vast distances involved. Young Philip, good at math as well as classics, studied the wall map for some moments, then said: “You know, Uncle Evelyn, Edmonton to Dawson is a long way, a very long way,” but the impact of his discovery was blunted by the attaché, who said enthusiastically: “Evelyn. That’s a fine English name we rarely hear in Canada,” and the conversation turned to other matters.
    —
    It was decided that Lord Luton’s team would be comprised of himself, his cousin Harry Carpenter, his nephew Philip Henslow and an adventurous friend of Philip’s, an Oxford man of twenty-two named Trevor Blythe whose frail build and sensitive manner belied his courage and tenacity. These four would form an admirable team; two older men of mature judgment and great force supported by two younger gentlemen who had done well in school and who promised to do just as well in life. All four were resourceful, educated, and representative of the best that their exalted class could produce. On the night that they met together at Luton’s club for the first time, Luton had said with reserved pleasure: “I say, if any four in this city stand a chance to fight their way to the gold fields, it would be us.” He saw his team as the next group of highly disciplined Englishmen to follow in the steps of the great explorers, who had all had backgrounds like theirs: a distant boarding school at age seven, knocked pillar to post by older boys at Eton or Harrow, rollicking through their university days at Oxford or Cambridge, serving in the army ornavy when required, and on to a gallant life. The four were terribly able but also terribly deceptive; when you saw them move out as a group they might be headed insouciantly either for an afternoon’s punting on the Thames or to a nine-month probe of the headwaters of the Amazon.
    That night Lord Luton started the next installment of the journal he had kept on all his explorations against the day when he might want to write of his adventures:
I doubt I could have put together a more trustworthy foursome: two grizzled veterans like Harry and me, and two stalwart young fellows just beginning to show their mettle, Philip and his friend Blythe. We understand the responsibilities of being Englishmen and I trust we shall conduct ourselves according to the highest traditions of that calling.
    But it was clear both to Luton and Carpenter that a fifth man was needed, someone to do the heavy manual work, and it was fortunate that one of the country places pertaining to the Marquess of Deal was located in Northern Ireland, where Lord Luton had spent many of his summers. During his visits to the area where his father had lived before he inherited the marquisate, and where the old man had developed his distrust of Catholics, Evelyn had come to know rather well a fellow two years younger than himself who displayed a spirit and an ability that anyone would have respected. Timothy Fogarty was the son of poor farmers whose land had been absorbed
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