The Timber Treasure

by Frank Lillie Pollock

He laughed to himself, but with a new thrill of hope. All sorts of possibilities seemed suddenly to be opening out, just when things had looked blackest. He got up and walked back toward the river, thinking hard, more and more fascinated by his scheme. It was wild enough, but almost anything was better than creeping back in humiliation to Toronto. There was pulp-wood on the place too, which he could cut in his spare time. As for the land itself, it did not promise extraordinary fertility. Much of it was rocky, and the stunted growth of the trees indicated poor soil. Just south of the barn ran an immense ridge of gravel lightly overgrown with white birches. But Tom did not at that moment dwell much on the actual details of agriculture.

He went down to the lake shore and brought his dunnage sack up to the old barn. It was a heavy load to carry on his shoulder, and he had no tump-line; but he dropped it at the barn-door at last, aching and played out, so that he had to drop on the hay and rest. He was getting out of training, he told himself.

When he had recovered breath, he began to unpack his belongings. Without having definitely pronounced a decision to stay here, he went on acting as if the decision had been made. To stop a day or two would do no harm anyway, he thought, if he could pick up food enough; and he went into the log barn to see what could be done with it.

It could be turned into a shack that would at least be good enough for the summer, he thought. The chinks between the logs would not matter much, and he could stop the worst of them with moss. Clearing away all the loose hay at the farther end disclosed a pile of loose boards, which would be useful for patching. He might build a partition across one portion of the building. Under the hay were also a long piece of very good rope, a bit of chain and a broken pitchfork, and a number of loose nails. There were plenty of other nails in the fire wreck.

Growing interested, Tom made a huge broom of spruce branches and swept out the litter from the floored portion of the barn and brushed down the walls. There was a hole in the roof just above. He climbed up with a board or two and contrived to cover it in a temporary fashion. In one corner of the old stalls he fitted a rude bunk and filled it with hay. Unpacking his dunnage, he spread the blankets he had used on camping trips before, and hung up his clothing, his aluminum cooking utensils, the few odds and ends he had brought with him.

After this, he tramped over to the burned cabin to look for nails. There were plenty; he quickly filled his pocket, but they were fire-killed and brittle. They would be of some use, however, and he secured the old ax-head also. The broken iron pot struck him as still having possibilities; the lower half at any rate could be used. He came upon an old tin plate that had not been burned. It might have been the dog’s dish, kept outdoors; but he was not too proud to take it; and, laden with this junk, he returned to the barn again.

The glow of the fire and the blowing smoke as he came up, and the litter of his activities gave him a queer thrill of home. In a couple of days more, he promised himself, it would look still more homelike.

He scoured out the rusty pot with sand and water, and cleaned the tin plate in the same way. The ax-head was in bad condition, but with two of the hardest stones he could find he ground laboriously at the edge until some sharpness was restored. The temper was entirely out of the metal, and so he heated it dull-red in the fire and then dropped it into cold water. After this hardening he again ground the edge and reheated it, this time to a brighter red, and again cooled it suddenly. This treatment produced a rough sort of temper. The edge held at any rate, and Tom shaped a crude, straight handle from an ironwood sapling.

Rough as it was, this ax was an immense and immediate help. He chopped up a supply of firewood with very little difficulty and was delighted to find that the edge did not blunt. If anything, he had made the steel too hard; it had chipped a little.

His foraging about the ruin had been so successful that he determined to go back on the morrow and turn over the ashes thoroughly. There might be many more things that would be useful. The most worthless rubbish took on astonishing value in his complete destitution, and he found an extraordinary pleasure in thus salvaging broken junk and making use of it.