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[7............