“I don’t know. It has always been called the tote road ever since I can remember, and I have lived about these parts all my life, but I never heard anyone ask before.”
“I know!” cried Sophy, looking up from her work. “A tote road is so called because it is the road along which people ‘tote’ things—that is, carry them. That road leads straight away through the forest to the river miles below Hunt’s Crossing. It is rarely used now, but I have heard some of the old people say that is the way the lumber used to be carried from these parts to be floated down river to Fredericton.”
“Well now, I shouldn’t wonder but what you are right!” exclaimed Mr. Dobson, who was fairly amazed at such a reasonable solution of the mystery.
“What a thing it is to be clever!” cried Pam, and then crossed the room on purpose to give Sophy a little hug, just to show that she had no intention of making fun of her.
“Your grandfather bought that lot cheap about fifteen years ago,” said Luke Dobson, his big finger covering the small red-lined patch on the farther side of the old tote road. “There was a half-breed lived up there, a mighty hunter he was too. But he got caught napping one day and was clawed by a b’ar, died of it, he did too, and his wife—she was a white woman from St. John—she sold the land at what anyone would give her for it, and cleared out sharp. They used to live in a bit of a shack standing on the tote road; I expect it is standing there still, bits of it, but no one has lived there since.”
“I am sure that I have not been in that direction yet, or I should have seen the house,” said Pam, who was studying the map with close attention. It was bewildering to her to get her bearings in the forest, and she had not hitherto understood the significance of the roughly-drawn map.
“You had better take a stroll round there before fixing up with me about lumbering that bit,” Mr. Dobson advised her as he took his leave, and Pam made up her mind that she would go right away.
The tote road ran on the side of her grandfather’s land farthest away from the trail to Hunt’s Crossing. It was thick forest in that direction, and Pam with the dog at her heels had to make her way by a narrow trail that was really an old game path; but presently she emerged on a wide avenue running in a straight line east and west, and looking as if it stretched for miles and miles, as indeed it did. It was fast being choked with rubbish, brambles and so forth, but it would not take much trouble to make it fit for traffic once more, and the ground was solid and level beneath her feet, very different from the mossy, marshy trails which abounded in these parts.
“So this is the old tote road!” she murmured, as she stood surveying it. But it was too cold to stand long, and she was anxious to start her inspection of the lot of black spruce. She had learned all she could about trees and lumber generally since she had been at Ripple, and her education was so far advanced that she could tell black spruce when she saw it, also cedar, ash, maple, birch, and oak. She was wise enough already to understand that it was a really valuable lot of trees that stood in serried rows bordering on the old tote road. Sophy had told her that black spruce was valuable because it was so largely used for pulp for paper-making. All those long lines of trees at which she was gazing were potential newspapers, or novels, or perhaps hymn-books. How strange it was to think that trees could be made into paper, a material that she in her ignorance had always associated with rags and straw! She laughed a little as she thought of all the wonders science had wrought, and the dog at the sound of her voice crept closer to her side, pressing its head against her knee with a whimper of affection.
She stooped to pat the shaggy head, for the love of the creature was really precious to her. Suddenly the dog gave a low, savage growl, then stood with its teeth bared, snarling, while a ridge of hair stood up along its spine, sure sign indeed of something wrong.