So far as technology is concerned, the hills are a backward place. There is no electricity, no gas, no mail service, no telephones. The Trading Post has a sub-postoffice and a telephone, and for this reason, as well as for the groceries and the other items carried on its shelves, it is a sort of central hub for the summer visitors. If you were going to stay for any length of time, you had your mail forwarded, and if you needed a telephone, the Trading Post had the nearest one. It was inconvenient, of course, but few of the visitors minded, for the greater part of them came into the hills to hide away momentarily from the outside world. Most of them came from only a few hundred miles away, but there were some who lived as far away as the East Coast. These visitors flew into Chicago, as a rule, and boarded the Galloping Goose to fly to Pine Bend, about thirty miles from the hills, renting cars to travel the rest of the way. The Galloping Goose was the Northlands Airline, a regional company that served the smaller cities in a four-state area. Despite its ancient equipment, it did a creditable job, usually getting in on time, and with one of the finest safety records of any airline in existence. There was one hazard; if the weather was bad at a certain landing field, the pilot didn’t even try to land, but skipped that particular stop. The fields had no lights and there were no towers, and when there was a storm or a field socked in by fog, the pilots took no chances—which may help to explain the excellent safety record. There were many friendly jokes attached to the Galloping Goose, most of them with no basis of truth whatever. For example, it was untrue that at Pine Bend someone had to go out and drive the deer off the runway before a plane could land. Personally, over the years, I developed a very friendly, almost possessive feeling toward the Galloping Goose—not because I used it, for I never did, but because its planes flew on their regular schedules over our cabin. Out fishing, I’d hear one of them approaching and I would stand and watch it pass over, and after a time I found myself sort of anticipating a flight—the way one would watch a clock.
I see that I am wandering. I really started out to tell about the Lodge.
The Lodge was called the Lodge because of all the summer places in the hills it was the largest and the only one that was pretentious in the least.
Also, as it turned out, it had been the first. Humphrey Highmore, not Dora, had been the one who told me the most about the Lodge. Humphrey was a ponderous old man who prided himself on being the unofficial historian of Woodman County. He scrabbled out a living of sorts by painting and hanging wallpaper, but he was first and foremost a historian. He pestered Neville every chance he got and was considerably put out because Neville never was able to generate much interest in purely local history.
The Lodge had been built, Humphrey told me, somewhat more than forty years before, long before anyone else had evinced an interest in the hills as a vacation area. All the old-time residents, at the time, thought that whoever was building it was out of his right mind. There was nothing back in those hills but a few trout streams and, in good years, some grouse shooting, although there were years when there weren’t many grouse. It was a long way from any proper place, and the land, of course, was worthless. It was too rough to farm, and the timber was so heavy it was no good for pasture, and the land was too rough to harvest timber. Most of it was tax-forfeited land.
And here came this madman, whoever he might be, and spent a lot of money not only to erect the Lodge, but to build five miles of road through the nightmare hills to reach it. Humphrey, who had told me the story on several occasions, always indicated at this point a further source of irritation that perhaps would have been felt most keenly by a devoted historian—no one had ever really learned who this madman was. So far as anyone knew, he had never appeared upon the scene during the time the Lodge and road were being built. All the work had been done by contractors, with the contracts let by letter through a legal firm. Humphrey thought the firm was based in Chicago, but he wasn’t sure. Whether the builder ever actually visited the Lodge after it was built was not known, either. People did come to stay in it occasionally, but no one ever saw them come or leave. They never came down to the Trading Post to make any purchases or to pick up mail or make a phone call. The buying that was done or other chores that needed to be performed were done by Stefan, who seemed to be the caretaker, although not even that was certain. Stefan, no last name. Stefan, period. «Like he was trying to hide something,» Humphrey told me. «He never talked, and if you asked him anything, he managed not to answer. You’d think a man would tell you his last name if you should ask him. But not Stefan.» On his infrequent trips out from the Lodge, Stefan always drove a Cadillac. Most men usually are willing to talk about their cars, said Humphrey, and a Cadillac was seen seldom enough in these parts that there were a lot of people who would have liked to talk about it, to ask questions about it. But Stefan wouldn’t talk about the Cadillac. To Dora and Humphrey he was an irritating man.
It had taken several months, Humphrey said, to get the road into the Lodge built. He explained that at the time he had been off in another part of the county and had not paid much attention to the Lodge, but in later years he had talked with the son of the man who had the contract to build the road. The road as it first was built was good enough for trucks to haul in the material to build the Lodge, but once it had been built the track was fairly well torn up by truck traffic, so there had been a second contract let to bring the road back to first-class condition. «I suppose a good road was needed for the Cadillac,» Humphrey said. «Even from the first it was a Cadillac. Not the same Cadillac, of course, although I’m not sure how many.»
Humphrey always had plenty of stories to tell; he bubbled with them. He had a pathological need to communicate, and he was not bothered too much by repetition. He had two favorite topics. One, of course, was the mystery of the Lodge—if it really was a mystery. Humphrey thought it was. His other favorite was the lost mine. If there was a lost mine, it would have had to have been a lead mine. There were lead deposits all through the area.
Humphrey never admitted it was a lead mine; he made it sound as if it might be gold.
As I gathered it, the lost-mine story had been floating around for a long time before Humphrey fastened hold of it. That there was such a story was no great surprise—there are few areas that do not possess at least one legendary lost mine or buried treasure. Such stories are harmless local myths and at times even pleasant ones, but at least subconsciously they are recognized for what they are, and it is seldom that anyone pays much attention to them. Humphrey did, however, pay attention to the story; he ran it down relentlessly, chasing after clues, reporting breathlessly to anyone who would listen to him his latest scrap of information or imagined information.