The House of Cariboo, and Other Tales from Arcadia

by A. Paul Gardiner

There are in Glengarry County, as you might reasonably suppose, many families whose direct ancestors, if you cared to trace them, would lead you at once to the lochs, lowlands or mountain passes of the Scottish Isle. The Clans of the McDonalds, the Camerons and the MacPhersons, have each sent a goodly representation to sustain in the new land of the Canadas the glory of their families in the Scottish hills of their fathers.

There were in the beginning, at The Front in Glengarry, one Andy Cameron, and his two brothers, called “Andy’s Dan,” and “Laughing Donald Cameron.” Many another family of Camerons lived in Glengarry, but there was no mistaking these three brothers. Dan, who made his home with Andy Cameron and his wife, never left the premises of the little farm on the “Nole” unless Andy and his wife went along too, and this becoming the understood thing among the neighbors at The Front and the storekeepers at the county town of Glengarry, Dan Cameron came to be known as Andy’s Dan. The distinction was understood, his pedigree was recorded in the minds of the people of the neighborhood, and he was forever out of danger of being confused with the other Dan Camerons of his neighborhood. Simple Dan, kind-hearted Dan, and most of all Andy’s Dan.

Laughing Donald had taken up a small farm from the government when he and his timid, frail wife first came to Glengarry, and poor Donald never seemed to be any more successful in getting clear from the taxes levied each year upon him than he was in clearing the few acres he possessed of the tree stumps, that were the bane of his life during seed-time and harvesting.

A few years of land holding by Laughing Donald in Glengarry had been an added expense to Andy, who loaned from his own little store of savings each year to keep his brother from the long-reaching clutch of the county tax gatherer; but always laughingly indifferent when he knew his crop yield was miserably poor, Donald became known to the country people, and at the village where he and his sickly wife went to trade their dried apples and carpet-rags for groceries, as Laughing Donald Cameron. He laughed if he was greeted kindly, and he also laughed with the same apparent degree of happiness if a hard-hearted merchant told him his produce was not worth the buying. So Laughing Donald filled a niche, whose personality was all his own, and neither was he ever confounded with others of his name in the County Glengarry.

Tilling the ground on his small farm on The Front seemed very hard work to Donald Cameron. His gentle wife, since their coming to the new land of the Canadas, had pined for the associations of her Scottish hills; her health had failed with the broken spirit till she was now pronounced an invalid. For her, the delicacies of life could not be provided, and sickness and misfortune speedily came to their humble home. Soon two of the children of Laughing Donald were buried in the churchyard at The Front and the illness of his wife continued.

Andy Cameron had noted with increasing solicitude the inroads being made by sickness and death into the home of his brother. Unpaid bills were accumulating and the hand of misfortune was close upon the head of the luckless Donald. Andy had seen his lawyer friend up at the county village, then consulting his wife Barbara, a mortgage was first made on his own farm at the “Nole,” and Donald’s obligations were paid in full. But then the doctor’s bill came next to Donald, for weeks and months of medical attendance upon his invalid wife, and, still laughing in his childish way, he brought it, as if amused at the impossible amount, and handed it to Andy.

“Go back home, Donald,” was Andy’s reply. “Take good care of your poor wife. The doctor must be paid.” And then Andy made another trip up to the village. At the lawyer’s he arranged for the money and then for the mortgage which was this time to be placed upon Donald’s little farm.

That night, as Andy journeyed homeward from the town, he recalled how he and his wife and Dan, his simple-minded brother, had struggled to clear their little farm of debt; how they had stumped the land and builded barns and stables, and fenced in the meadows for their cattle; how happy they had been when they had paid off the last of the tax debt; and how proudly he walked up the church aisle upon a Sunday, and sat in the end of the pew at the head of his little family and afterwards greeted his neighbors around the church door, as they stood gossiping after service. But now to think what he had been compelled to do. Donald was his brother, though, and was not poor Donald in trouble? And his invalid wife—Andy well knew that if a few of the luxuries of life and the tender care which her timid, shrinking nature cried out for, could only be given to her in ever so slight a degree, she would no longer be a suffering invalid.

“Two years,” Andy remarked to himself, “was the time set before the lawyer could foreclose on his own homestead, and the same time was set for his brother, Laughing Donald.” Andy recalled as he rode slowly homeward, that the storekeeper hesitated as he gave him the pound of tea to be charged as before, and when he had asked for a dollar’s worth of brown sugar, he had only been given half that amount. It was to be charged also.