“I like the place, but must be governed entirely by the possibility of being able to pay for it and to get my living from it afterwards.”
“I can’t help feeling a little sad as I sit by this spring of which they drank, look upon that roof that once sheltered them, now all fallen in, and recollect that they came here no doubt building castles in the air as you and I do, and full of hope as we are, thinking what they would do; and then the husband was taken sick and, as the landlord expressed it, died in the struggle for a homestead.”
“The man died,” said James, who had not one bit of sentiment about him, “of a broken heart, and the reason that his heart broke was because he paid his last cent for land, and looked no farther, a thing no man should ever do.”
“Perhaps he liked the place, and his wife liked it, and wanted to live here and nowhere else.”
“I like the place, but I shall not buy it and go on it without a cent.”
James ascertained that the stream in its windings had formed a tongue of alluvial soil equal in extent to all the cleared land on the place, and which was concealed from his view the day before by the forest. It was overflowed and dressed by the spring and fall freshets and bore an abundance of grass, and by cutting a few bushes and removing the rafts of driftwood could be enlarged. This added vastly to the value of the land, particularly to an emigrant, as a stock of cattle could be kept at once, the openings in the woods affording with the browse sufficient pasturage in summer. He also found that the next lot of a hundred and sixty acres was government land, could be bought for two dollars an acre, or one dollar and sixty cents cash, and that on this lot was a mill-site.
“Now, Emily, we have seen all there is to be seen, and talked the matter over, I want to know if you like this place well enough for a home, because when I go to see this woman to know if she will take what I can give, I shall close the bargain. My own mind is made up that for me this is home.”
“My mind is made up; this is my home.”
The next morning, James went to find Mrs. Chadwick. She held the place at nine dollars an acre; said she had held it at ten; that everybody who was a judge of land said that it was worth more than the Ainsworth place, that the proprietors held at ten dollars, and that she must have cash.
James replied that the place had no buildings but a brush camp, only six acres cleared; that he expected to pay cash, but not so much as that.