There had been no need for Mrs. Buckle to practise her lock-picking skill on the desk in Wrack Peveril’s sleeping-chamber. When Pam’s heavy luggage was brought from Hunt’s Crossing she discovered that the key of her writing-desk served also to open the desk which the old man had used. This when opened had not been found to contain much. Some money there was, but only a little. There was a small heap of letters well worn with much reading. They were letters from Pam’s mother, and Pam cried over them more bitterly than she had ever cried before, for they revealed a side of her home life that she had only faintly guessed at. Mrs. Walsh had not found her marriage a happy one, and she had poured out her bitter disappointment and grief to the old man, her father, whom she had set at naught and run away from in her desperate eagerness to get her own way.
Those letters did not appear to have been answered. Indeed, almost every one of them began with a reproach because the old man had not written. Some of them begged for money to meet some pressing need. The babies had come so fast, and the needs had been so great.
Pam wondered why the old man had not asked his daughter to come home again after the death of her husband. But he had not. He had never even hinted that he would like to see her again. It made Pam shiver to think of it. She could not imagine being parted for years from her mother without her mother wanting to see her again. But she was too just to condemn the old man. Of course there was another side to the question, her mother’s side. Without doubt Pam gained a greater insight to the natural laws, the ethics of give and take between parent and child, in that reading of the letters in her grandfather’s desk, than she would have done from any other source.
Her grandfather must be found somehow; then, when she had found him, it must be her work to bring about a reconciliation between him and her mother. Then her mother must come home. Without doubt the place of Mrs. Walsh was at Ripple. The children would love the wild free life of the forest. The boys would grow into strong men here, and if the effort to get an education was greater, the chances were that they would prize it more.
It was this planning for the good of her family that kept Pam’s heart warm in those shortening days of the fall. The mornings grew colder and colder; the pond behind the barn which drained into the creek was fringed with ice, and she had to use a long pole to keep a space of open water for the animals. Later on that would not be possible, and she would have to melt snow for them in the boiler that was built into the out-shed which stood between the house and the barn. There was no snow as yet, but it might come any day now. There would be an end to all search for the old man when once the land was covered in its winter mantle, so Pam took advantage of every day when she could spare the time to take long tramps across the forest in every direction. Don Grierson had brought her a pocket compass, and armed with this she found her way back, however hopelessly she might get confused in trying to strike a trail.
There came a day in early November when the dawn seemed as if it could not penetrate through the cloud masses that brooded so closely down over the forest trees. A grey, dreary day, which made Pam more home-sick than ever, though apparently in the wildest of spirits. She rushed about between the house and the barn, doing the morning “chores“, and as she hurried to and fro she sang at the top of her voice, the sound of her singing having a weird effect on that drear, cold morning.
Luke Dobson, from Hunt’s Crossing, came along about ten o’clock, and wanted to know what was to be done about the lumber-felling. Her grandfather had arranged for twenty acres of black spruce to be cut this fall, and Luke Dobson wanted to know if the work was to be carried through, or what was to be done in the matter.
“You say that Grandfather had settled price and everything?” asked Pam, who was so terribly in the dark about business matters that she had to rely on other people. It was a great comfort to her that this man looked honest and respectable, and Sophy had told her that he did most of the lumbering in the district this side of the Ridge.
“No. If the price had been settled and the contract signed there would have been nothing for me to do but warn you of the transaction, and cut the lumber at my own convenience,” said Mr. Dobson, who had rather a bothered air. He did not like having to do business with women, for, privately, he considered them lacking in common sense; and this one was only a girl—a girl, moreover, with a skittish look, just for all the world like a young colt, so he told himself, in severe disapproval of Pam’s radiant good spirits and smiling face.
“How much did Grandfather want, and how much were you prepared to give?” asked Pam, who had her own theories on the way to do business.