CHAPTER I
"Do you mean to tell me that Hickley said he wouldn't send over that lot of logs I ordered last week?"
"That is what he said, Mr. Larson. He is short himself, and said he told you he thought he couldn't spare them. Not a drive has come down the river for three weeks."
"I know that, Bradford." John Larson, the owner of the Enterprise Lumber Mill, rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "It's hard luck. I guess I'll have to shut down after all. And I was calculating to keep you all working."
The face of Dale Bradford became as serious as that of his employer. "How soon will you close up the mill?" he asked after a pause.
"As soon as those logs over yonder are cut up." The owner of the sawmill kicked a block of wood out of his way rather savagely. "It's a shame not to get logs, with so much timber cut ready to use."
"The pulp mill is what's done it," replied Dale. "They have a big contract to fill, so I was told over in Oldtown, and so they are willing to pay big prices for any sort of stuff."
"You're right, Bradford. They'll buy little sticks that we couldn't afford to handle."
"What we've got on hand won't keep us going longer than Saturday," continued Dale, gazing around at the small pile of logs resting partly in and partly out of the stream upon which the sawmill was situated.
"Just about Saturday."
"And there's no telling when we'll be able to start up again, I suppose."
"Just as soon as I can get hold of the stuff to go ahead with. I don't like to have the mill idle any more than you or the others like to be out of work."
"I'll have to get something to do pretty quick," said Dale earnestly. "I can't live on nothing."
"You ought to have something saved."
"A fellow can't save much out of six dollars a week, Mr. Larson. Besides, I've been paying off that little debt my father left when he died."
"I see, I see," interposed the mill owner hastily. "You're a good sort of a lad, Dale—as good a lad as your father was a man. If we shut down on Saturday perhaps I can keep you on a week longer—cleaning up around the mill and along the river, and doing other odd jobs. That will give you more time in which to look for another opening."
The head sawyer of the mill now came up to question John Larson concerning the cutting up of certain large logs, and Dale moved away to resume his regular work, that of piling up the boards in the little yard adjoining the steamboat landing.
It was hard work, especially in this summer, noon-day sun, but Dale was used to it and did not complain. And this was a good thing, as nobody would have listened to his complaint, for all around that mill worked just as hard as he did. John Larson was a just man, but a strict one, and he required every man he employed to earn his salary.
Dale Bradford was an orphan, eighteen years of age, tall, muscular, healthy, and as sunburnt as outdoor life could make him. He was the only son of Joel Bradford, who in years gone by had owned a good-sized lumber tract on the west branch of the Penobscot River, in Maine, where this story opens.
When a small boy Dale had had two sisters, and his home with his parents, on the shore of Chesuncook Lake, had been a happy one. But the death of the two sisters and the mother had caused great grief to the father and the son, and it can truthfully be said that after these loved ones were laid away in the little cemetery among the pines, Joel Bradford was never the same. He lost interest in his lumber camp and in the spot that had been his home for so many years, and at the first opportunity he sold out and moved down to Bangor.
It was at Bangor that he fell in with several men who were interested in the gold and silver mines of the great West. One of these men induced him to invest nearly all his money in a mine said to be located in Oregon. The ground was purchased by Joel Bradford, and preparations were made to begin mining on a small scale, when word came that no gold or silver was to be found in that locality, and the scheme fell through, and the man who had induced Mr. Bradford to invest disappeared.
The money lost in this transaction amounted to six thousand dollars—nearly the whole of Joel Bradford's capital—and the former lumberman felt the blow keenly. He grew reckless and speculated in lumber in and around Bangor, and soon found himself in debt to the sum of five hundred dollars. This he paid all but a hundred dollars, when, during unusually severe weather on the river, he contracted pneumonia, from which he never recovered.
Dale was not yet seventeen years of age when he found himself utterly alone in the world, for this branch of the Bradford family had never been large and the grandparents had come to Maine from Connecticut years before. Dale had a fair common-school education, but most of his life had been spent at the lumber camps and along the river and the lakes with his father. He could fell a tree almost as well as a regular lumberman, and had followed more than one drive down the stream to the boom or the sawmill.
"I've got to buckle in and make a man of myself," was what he told himself after the first great grief over the loss of his father was over. "I can't afford to sit down and do nothing. I've got to support myself, and pay off that debt father left behind him."
He had been doing odd jobs for a lumber firm owning an interest in yards at Bangor and at Oldtown, twelve miles further up the Penobscot. But these did not pay very well, and he looked further, until he struck Larson's Run, a small settlement located on a tributary of the big river. Larson had known Joel Bradford well for years, and had purchased many a cut of logs from him.
"So your father is dead and you want a job," John Larson had said. "Well, I'll give you the best that I have open"; and then and there he had engaged Dale at a salary of four dollars per week, a sum which was afterwards raised to six dollars.
Dale secured board with a mill hand living near by, and as soon as he was settled he began a systematic reduction of the debt his father had left unpaid. He felt that this was a duty he owed to the memory of his parent and to the honor of the family at large.
"They shan't say that he swindled anybody," was the way he put it to himself. "I'll pay every dollar of it before I buy a thing for myself that isn't actually necessary."
In the bottom of his trunk at the boarding house Dale had the deed to the land in Oregon which his father had purchased—that unfortunate transaction that had practically beggared them. The young lumberman often read the papers over carefully. They showed that his father had been the sole owner of many acres of territory located in the heart of the great West. Of this great tract of land Dale was now the sole owner.
"And to think that the tract is only a rocky mountain side, good for nothing at all," he would say with a sigh. "Now, if it were only a stretch of farm land, I might go out and try my luck at farming some day. I guess it's only fit for a stone quarry,—same as the rocky lands here,—but nobody wants a quarry out there, a hundred miles or more from nowhere at all."
So far Dale had managed to pay up all but thirty dollars of the debt left behind by his parent. He might have paid this, but a log had rolled on his foot, causing him a bruise that had kept him from work for two weeks and given him a doctor's bill to pay in addition.
The thirty dollars was owing to a riverman named Hen McNair. The fellow was a Scotchman and exceedingly close-fisted, and he had bothered Dale a good deal, hoping to have his claim paid at once.
"You can pay up if you want to," said McNair in his Scotch accent. "If you've not the money sell off some of your things."
"I've sold off all I can spare," had been Dale's reply. "You'll have to wait. From next Saturday on I'll pay you two dollars a week."
"Hoot! 'Twill be fifteen weeks—nigh four months—before we come to the end."
"It's the very best I can do."
"Can't you pay me five or ten dollars now?"
"No. The most I can give you is two dollars."
"Then give me that. And see you keep your word about the balance." And stuffing the bill Dale handed him into his pocket, Hen McNair had gone off grumbling something about the want of honor in a lad who wouldn't pull himself together and pay his father's honest debts.
The sawmill owned by John Larson was run both by water power and by steam—the latter helping out the former when the flow of the stream was not at its best. Rain had been wanting for several weeks, and this had delayed a drive of logs the mill owner had counted on, and had also made it necessary to depend entirely on steam as a motive power. The plant employed twenty-four hands, and this and another mill on the opposite shore were the main industries of the Run.
"How did you make out about those logs, Dale?" questioned a fellow worker in the yard, as the young lumberman resumed his labors.
"Didn't get them," was the laconic answer.
"Didn't think you would," went on Philip Sommers. "Hickley is in with the pulp mill. If he can't get logs, what is the old man going to do?"
"He'll have to shut down."
"Phew! That's bad!"
"Yes, and the worst of it is there is no telling when we'll start up again."
"In that case I'm going to pack up and go up to the West Branch. A friend of mine is going to open up on a claim there about the first of October."
"That is a good while yet. I can't afford to be idle that long."
"What will you do?"
"I don't know yet—perhaps try the other mills."
"Better try the pulp mill—they've got the business just now. Folks must have paper even if they don't get boards," and Philip Sommers gave a short laugh.
"I don't think I'd care to work in a pulp mill," answered Dale. "I like a sawmill or else being out in a lumber camp. But I'd rather work in a pulp mill than be idle."
"The pulp mill over——Hullo, there goes the noon whistle!" Philip Sommers dropped the board he was carrying. "Aint got time to talk any more," he cried. "Going home for something to eat." And picking up his jacket from a lumber pile, he walked away, leaving Dale alone.