As soon as I fell asleep that night another dream came. This time I was out after dark in the booming town of Cobalt long ago. Masses of people were flowing towards a black arena with a curving roof near the lake.
Inside the sound was ear-splitting. On one side I saw the Silver Kings, lining up to defend the town’s pride, and on the other the mighty Montreal Canadiens. The puck was dropped and the action was on. In the stands the fans went wild, drumming on tin washtubs, banging their feet on the wooden floors like thunder, and shouting their players’ names. Suddenly the Cobalt coach looked up into the stands and stared right at me.
“Cyclone!” he shrieked at me. “Cyclone, get down here! We need you!”
That’s when I woke up.
The next morning there was a strange silence at the breakfast table. Finally, my father spoke.
“Frank and Joe came by last night.”
“Yeah?” I muttered, my mind far away, slurping my Lucky Charms.
“They had been over at the library themselves,” said Mom.
Gulp. My mind raced back to the breakfast table like a shot.
“They, uh, hadn’t seen you there.”
“Or Miss Dixon, for that matter,” said Mom.
“Care to take the stand?” asked Dad.
Oh great, I thought, cross-examined by John A. Maples, professional super-lawyer. I frantically thought of excuses, alibis. But first, before I really buried myself, I needed to know just exactly how angry the parental units were. I had been staring down at my cereal. I looked up at Mom first.
She was looking back at me.
“You don’t have to lie about it, Romeo,” she said, and grinned. “She’s a great girl. Doing a little homework together is a wonderful idea.”
“Way to go, champ,” said Dad.
Oh, great.
“Don’t call me champ, Dad.”
“Right. No one calls his kid champ any more. Sorry.”
Well, it could have been worse. I suppose I could put up with their silly smiles about Wyn, as long as it got me another night or two inside old man Larocque’s house. But I wondered how long I could keep fooling them.
We went to the haunted house right after school that day. On the way up the hill we put together a plan: we would start talking about the little wooden box as soon as we sat down in front of the fire, and we’d both say as much as we could about Lyon Brown being guilty of a swindle. Edison Brown, we’d tell him, has a very weak case. Surely that would get the old man back to his story.
But it didn’t. Larocque just wouldn’t bite. It was obvious that there was much more to the story than he was telling us, but he just wasn’t prepared to say anything else. At least not for now. He had other things he wanted to talk about, and before long we had actually forgotten about trying to get him back to his story and were sinking into wonderful old historic Cobalt.
Larocque explained that a silver rush attracts two kinds of people: those who want to get rich and those who already are. The first are adventurers and gamblers, and the others are much more cautious. But the mix always produced something explosive. It was said that Cobalt and Haileybury, by 1910, had not only the most millionaires, but the most saloons, and the most colourful characters per square metre of any place in Canada, maybe in North America. And they were tearing silver out of the ground like nowhere else in the world. This exotic place, this magnet for adventure, was like something from a cowboy movie—and to hear Larocque tell it, twice as entertaining.
Among the richest men to set foot in town were Noah Timmins, after whom a northern town would be named, and Michael John O’Brien, a wealthy southern Ontario gentleman who built railways and who, within a year, had acquired property in Cobalt worth ten million dollars. Timmins and O’Brien fought each other tooth and nail for mining rights. And then they built hockey teams and took their battles to the ice. That was how the Montreal Canadiens, the Ottawa Senators, and Cyclone Taylor made their way to the hard-rock hills of this New Ontario.
Timmins put together a Haileybury club, seven on the ice per side in those days, and O’Brien’s son Ambrose built one in Cobalt. They also put up arenas, modern natural-ice rinks that each held more than three thousand fans and looked like huge, partially buried drainage pipes. A couple of years of a Temiskaming League, one that drew big southern stars up north for key games and caused a great deal of miners’ money to be lost in bets, was not enough. In 1910 they bought their way into the biggest and greatest league in the world, the National Hockey Association, soon to be the NHL.
The first team ever to play the Montreal Canadiens? The red-white-and-blue-clad Cobalt Silver Kings! And Cobalt’s greatest rivals? The maroon-and-white-striped wizards with the huge “H” on their chests, the Haileybury Comets. Two of the Comets’ players—Art Ross and goaltender Paddy Moran—would later make it to the Hall of Fame. Ross, who would become the father of the Boston Bruins, and for whom the NHL scoring champion’s trophy is named, was a northern sensation for one glorious year. But perhaps the greatest hockey, even greater than when the Habs or the Sens appeared, or even the Stanley Cup champion Montreal Wanderers, was played when the Renfrew Creamery Kings, known to the hockey world as “The Millionaires,” arrived in town. Anyone who had come to the Cobalt train station on a right frosty winter day in 1910 would have seen before them perhaps the most remarkable team ever assembled: seven superb “hockeyists,” among them the great Newsy Lalonde, the legendary Lester Patrick, and the immortal Cyclone Taylor.
Theo came early to get a spot on a wooden bench near the ice and watched in wonder as “the Cyclone,” nicknamed by Governor-General Earl Grey, swept around the small ice surface at the speed of a runaway train. The boy had never seen anything like him: a little fire hydrant of a defenceman, wearing a cap to hide his bald head and flashing a look of devilish confidence in his dark, penetrating eyes. He and his swaggering Millionaires took it to Cobalt 12 goals to 7, and then jumped on the trolley train that ran north to Haileybury. Theo made the trip too, and watched as the Millionaires smacked the Comets 11—5. Even Art Ross couldn’t make a difference. For many years after, Theo and his friends would run their hands along the spot in the visitors’ dressing room in Haileybury where the words “Cyclone Taylor” were carved on the wall.
Hockey in the tri-towns in that silver-rush era was unlike any kind ever seen before or since. Pre-game betting could be so heavy that nearly entire mine payrolls were sometimes locked in the Matabanick’s safe. A goaltender once used a washtub to pick up silver coins thrown to the ice by a roaring audience after a stunning comeback victory. Crowds would gather at the Idle Hour Theatre to hear reports of out-of-town games. And yet hockey, even when the game was as romantic and thrilling as that, was only a part of young Theo’s life in those days. All he had to do for excitement was keep his eyes open.
There was “Big Jack” Monroe, a prizefighter who had once fought for the heavyweight championship of the world in San Francisco against James J. Jeffries. He strode along the wide plank sidewalks above the muddy streets like a man larger than life. There was a strange old white-bearded prospector named Sandy McIntyre who would make his fortune in the north and his name legendary—though it wasn’t actually his name at all. He had made it up, so that a Mrs. Oliphant of England, who happened to be his wife, wouldn’t find him or his millions. And then there was Harry Oakes, who claimed his worth reached $260 million and was later killed in an unsolved murder in the Bahamas.
But perhaps the weirdest of all was Grey Owl. Theo had heard tell of him in the early days, living as a hired hand at a Temagami lodge a short distance away. He returned in the 1920s, not long before he became as famous as anyone in the world, at least to young boys and girls.
Walking along Main Street in Haileybury one day, Theo happened to notice him enter the nearby Maple Leaf Hotel, dressed in an Ojibwa leather coat and moccasins, a live beaver in each of his hands. Inside he spoke to the little animals as someone would to his friends. People flocked to the lobby and paid to watch. Ten years later, his books about Canadian wildlife and his experiences living as an Indigenous man in a land increasingly dominated by white people captured imaginations everywhere. Fifty thousand copies sold in England alone in a single year.
“And you know,” smiled Theobald T. Larocque, “he wasn’t an Indian at all. He was an Englishman named Archie Belaney. An Englishman just like me. He fooled the world….” The old man paused. “I couldn’t even fool Lyon Brown.”
At the mention of the enemy’s name Wyn and I snapped back to attention. We had been drifting off into that wonderful place of Theo’s teenage years: of silver and hockey and adventurers. We glanced at each other, both aware that we were still far from our goal.
“Does Lyon Brown have anything to do with that box?” I asked desperately.
The old man fixed me with a glare.
“Never mind this box!” He threw it into a corner, startling us. “It’s time for you two to leave.”
“But what if…?” started Wyn.
“Leave!” he snapped.
We both hoped he would say something else before we left, perhaps tell us to come back tomorrow, or to forgive his bad mood. But he said nothing. He stared into the flames, lost again somewhere, perhaps in that wonderful time so long ago when he could have been so much more than he was ever allowed to be.