Mr. Dobson stated the price he was prepared to give and the sum for which Wrack Peveril had stood out, a matter of only a few dollars in reality. He was sufficiently straightforward to say that black spruce was going up in price, and he was willing to make a small advance on his first offer, if Pam was able to do business with him.
“Oh, I am quite willing to do business,” replied Pam in an airy tone. Then she dropped suddenly into graver speech, while lines of care showed on her face. “The trouble is to know what power I have to sell anything belonging to my grandfather. Supposing I took your offer, and when you had cut the lumber he came back and objected to the transaction, it would be out of your power, or mine either, to put the trees back on their stumps again; and what would be my position?”
Mr. Dobson shook his head and looked dubious, hesitated a minute, then said rather uneasily:
“I take it that you are here to do your best for the old man, or if he is dead, for your mother, who is his natural heir. You can leave that lot of trees standing another year if you would prefer it. But if your grandfather comes home, and the police get hold of him for the part he is supposed to have had in the death of Sam Buckle, there will be the expense of his defence, and all the other things that arise out of an action at law, and you will be hard put to it perhaps to find ready money when you most need it. If, on the other hand, he is dead, or is never heard of again, your mother would agree that you had acted for the best in selling, and your trees would be hard cash, and safe from any danger of being destroyed in a forest fire.”
Pam shivered. She was thinking of that awfully desolate region that spread over so many acres of forest near to where Mrs. Buckle lived. Her grandfather’s black spruce would not be worth the trouble of lumbering if a forest fire happened along that way. But she had a cautious streak in her character, and she knew how dreadfully ignorant she was, so she said frankly: “I should like to take your offer straight away, but I think I ought just to ask the advice of someone outside. Dr. Grierson will be round this way to-day or to-morrow; do you mind letting it stand over until then?”
“That will suit me very well indeed, and I will wish you good morning,” said Mr. Dobson, getting to his feet in a great hurry. But Pam had a question to ask before he went—one that she had been wanting to ask all the while Luke Dobson had been talking.
“Do you mind telling me where that twenty acres of black spruce is?” she asked nervously. Of course she ought to know every bit of her grandfather’s land by this time, and as a matter of fact she had supposed that she did know it, but puzzle her head as she would she could not remember any plantation of trees which would be twenty acres in extent. What a lot of trees there would be on twenty acres of land—a piece that was twice as big as the cleared field at the back of the house! Don Grierson had told her that was ten acres—the ten-acre lot he called it.
“Ah! you would have gone the round of the quarter-section boundary posts,” said Luke Dobson slowly, and then he turned to a roughly-drawn map that was nailed to the wall opposite the window and called Pam’s attention to it. “You see this map, Miss Walsh? Well, this red line is your grandfather’s boundary.” His broad finger was travelling slowly round the red line for her benefit, but he paused where a thick black line crossed the red. “This black line here shows the old tote road.”
“What is a tote road?” demanded Pam.
Luke Dobson rubbed his head in a rueful fashion.