The inverted pyramid

Item: one boy aged eighteen, name Roderick Norquay; one girl aged fifteen, named Mary Thorn; one gaudy cedar dugout canoe got up in the Siwash style of high-curving bow and ster...

The path Rod walked approached the house by a circuitous route. It turned aside here and there like a leisurely pedestrian to skirt red-trunked arbutus with oily-green leaves an...

Rod had come down a hall that had, like everything about Hawk's Nest, a spacious air. It was high and broad. Dim light filtered into it through stained-glass windows, fell in me...

Rod had come down the path with a club bag in one hand, talking amiably with his father. He had seen his trunk put aboard the _Haida_. Mrs. Wall, Laska, Isabel, Miss Sherburne,...

When the deck hands had dumped a trunk, a bag, a suitcase and sundry bundles on the float and the _Camosun_ had backed into the stream, Rod still stood looking about him, trying...

"When I went away you were talking about going on your own," Rod said. "What kind of a twist have things taken here? You seem to be pretty much the whole works now."

Grove's guests danced, drank, sang, tennised, gossiped and played cards during their waking intervals for forty-eight hours. Then the white yacht fled down the sea lanes to brin...

Time bridges many a gap in the life of a man, periods that have no substance in them, no matter how occupied, how filled with minor incident; stretches of days, months, years fl...

On an afternoon a week later Rod sat in the library nursing a book, a cigarette, and some curiously mixed reflections. A week-end party had come and gone, leaving Laska, her mai...

Rod found work in a logging camp a thing that tried his vigorous young body to the utmost until he hardened somewhat to the task and learned what every manual laborer must learn...

The quality of persistence in the face of difficulties is one that men are variously endowed with. Hope revives in some breasts sooner than in others. To some the spur of a desi...

When summer full-blown came tripping on the heels of spring, Rod left the Valdez camp for good. It had been a wholesome experience. One year in the woods had shown him quite ful...

The day following Rod drew his father into the library and bluntly announced his engagement to Mary Thorn, also that the date of their marriage was set for the first week in Jul...

On the whole Rod considered that he came off very well in the matter of breaking this news to the family. Laska, who was staying awhile at Hawk's Nest, having a clear understand...

Dorothy left for her home in Victoria. Phil's chum and his wife departed. The cousins returned to Montreal. Norquay senior betook himself to town. Rod and Mary had Hawk's Nest l...

From a folding chair on the after deck of the _Haida_ Rod looked back at Hawk's Nest. The cruiser's screw churned up bubbles and foam astern. Dent Island and the gray stone hous...

They sat side by side in the autumn sunshine, reading of places drenched with blood,--Liége, Louvain, Charleroi, Mons, Cambrai, Namur. The battle of the Marne was over. The prol...

When men walk often in the shadow of death they rise superior to its dread aspect, or they become indifferent to it, or they succumb to its ghastly presence and welcome it as a...

At breakfast Rod was introduced to his son, Roderick Thorn Norquay, who lacked a few weeks of being four years old. Born in London, hurried home in 1917 when every unnecessary m...

For a few days Rod went about a little, picking up threads of old acquaintance with places and people. The uneasy consciousness of a heart which might fail him at any moment tro...

Rod followed his father along a strip of thick carpet laid over a floor tiled in precise geometric patterns, looking about him at the dukes and duchesses of the counting room ad...

"Well, that's finished," he said with a return of his old briskness. "I can't say that I like the idea of draining the estate to protect this concern. But it won't take me long...

A northwest gale rattled a loose window in the library at Hawk's Nest. Beyond that the house stood solid to the blasts, as solid as a mountain mass of the granite that formed it...

"I have seen some financial muddles in my time and some manipulation that was on the borderline of pure theft," Charlie Hale said to Rod, "but this is a little the worst mess I...

Across the channel, in the green bank of timber bisected by the path that ran from Oliver Thorn's old house to the Granite Pool, rose white puffs of steam, intermittent, like sp...

Sometimes Rod's heart troubled him so that he would turn in his ascent of a hill to some part of the works and go down again, stamp, stamp, joggling it from that enfeebled flutt...

Late summer of 1920 pricked to utter collapse the prosperity balloon which had been deflating ever since the Armistice. Europe still stewed in the choice juices of local punitiv...

"I keep thinking of Laska," he said to Isabel. "Is she really so soured on things as you declared? Is she deliberately hitting the high spots just for the kick there's in it?"

Through that disastrous autumn of 1920--when the logging camps of B.C. were given over to watchmen and the sawmills were silent storehouses of idle machinery, and the owners of...

As the reaping machines pass over a field of wheat at harvest time mowing swath after swath until there is nothing left but bristling stubble, so the men and machinery under Rod...