Black Rock | Page 4

follow them. With these pages Ralph Conner enables our eyes and our minds to follow, too; nor do I think there is any one who shall read this book and not find also that his conscience is quickened. There is a warfare appointed unto man upon earth, and its struggles are nowhere more intense, nor the victories of the strong, nor the succors brought to the fallen, more heroic, than on the fields described in this volume.
GEORGE ADAM SMITH.

BLACK ROCK
The story of the book is true, and chief of the failures in the making of the book is this, that it is not all the truth. The light is not bright enough, the shadow is not black enough to give a true picture of that bit of Western life of which the writer was some small part. The men of the book are still there in the mines and lumber camps of the mountains, fighting out that eternal fight for manhood, strong, clean, God-conquered. And, when the west winds blow, to the open ear the sounds of battle come, telling the fortunes of the fight.
Because a man's life is all he has, and because the only hope of the brave young West lies in its men, this story is told. It may be that the tragic pity of a broken life may move some to pray, and that that divine power there is in a single brave heart to summon forth hope and courage may move some to fight. If so, the tale is not told in vain.
C.W.G.

CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
CHRISTMAS EVE IN A LUMBER CAMP
CHAPTER II
THE BLACK ROCK CHRISTMAS
CHAPTER III
WATERLOO. OUR FIGHT--HIS VICTORY
CHAPTER IV
MRS. MAVOR'S STORY
CHAPTER V
THE MAKING OF THE LEAGUE
CHAPTER VI
BLACK ROCK RELIGION
CHAPTER VII
THE FIRST BLACK ROCK COMMUNION
CHAPTER VIII
THE BREAKING OF THE LEAGUE
CHAPTER IX
THE LEAGUE'S REVENGE
CHAPTER X
WHAT CAME TO SLAVIN
CHAPTER XI
THE TWO CALLS
CHAPTER XII
LOVE IS NOT ALL
CHAPTER XIII
HOW NELSON CAME HOME
CHAPTER XIV
GRAEME'S NEW BIRTH
CHAPTER XV
COMING TO THEIR OWN
CHAPTER I
CHRISTMAS EVE IN A LUMBER CAMP
It was due to a mysterious dispensation of Providence, and a good deal to Leslie Graeme, that I found myself in the heart of the Selkirks for my Christmas Eve as the year 1882 was dying. It had been my plan to spend my Christmas far away in Toronto, with such Bohemian and boon companions as could be found in that cosmopolitan and kindly city. But Leslie Graeme changed all that, for, discovering me in the village of Black Rock, with my traps all packed, waiting for the stage to start for the Landing, thirty miles away, he bore down upon me with resistless force, and I found myself recovering from my surprise only after we had gone in his lumber sleigh some six miles on our way to his camp up in the mountains. I was surprised and much delighted, though I would not allow him to think so, to find that his old-time power over me was still there. He could always in the old 'Varsity days--dear, wild days--make me do what he liked. He was so handsome and so reckless, brilliant in his class-work, and the prince of half-backs on the Rugby field, and with such power of fascination, as would 'extract the heart out of a wheelbarrow,' as Barney Lundy used to say. And thus it was that I found myself just three weeks later--I was to have spent two or three days,--on the afternoon of the 24th of December, standing in Graeme's Lumber Camp No. 2, wondering at myself. But I did not regret my changed plans, for in those three weeks I had raided a cinnamon bear's den and had wakened up a grizzly-- But I shall let the grizzly finish the tale; he probably sees more humour in it than I.
The camp stood in a little clearing, and consisted of a group of three long, low shanties with smaller shacks near them, all built of heavy, unhewn logs, with door and window in each. The grub camp, with cook-shed attached, stood in the middle of the clearing; at a little distance was the sleeping-camp with the office built against it, and about a hundred yards away on the other side of the clearing stood the stables, and near them the smiddy. The mountains rose grandly on every side, throwing up their great peaks into the sky. The clearing in which the camp stood was hewn out of a dense pine forest that filled the valley and climbed half way up the mountain-sides, and then frayed out in scattered and stunted trees.
It was one of those wonderful Canadian winter days, bright, and with a touch of sharpness in the air that did not chill, but warmed the blood like draughts of wine. The men were up in the woods, and the shrill scream of the blue jay flashing across the open,