"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."