The Woods-Rider

by Frank Lillie Pollock

He had ridden over this very spot several times without ever suspecting the presence of that peculiar substratum. He dug down to hard bottom in another place to make sure that the stuff was really rosin. It was rosin indeed, blackish and much mixed with bark and dirt, but real rosin, and he could not guess how it had come to be buried there. Then, as he looked about the open glade, he remembered the old distillery that his grandfather and his great-grandfather had operated in those woods.

As a child Joe had heard it spoken of, but it had been demolished long before that, and he never had known the exact spot where it had stood. In those early days only the spirit of turpentine was considered of any value. The rosin was not worth the cost of shipping it out, and in nearly all the country stills it was run from the retort into a huge pit and allowed to harden there.

An old distillery would thus sometimes accumulate an enormous amount of waste rosin, and Joe remembered having heard of some of these old pits having been dug up with great profit. One rosin-reef in Clarke County had yielded, if he remembered rightly, nearly eight hundred barrels of good rosin, which sold for six dollars a barrel. And rosin was higher now.

All this rushed through Joe’s mind in a sudden flood, and with increasing excitement he began to search the glade for further evidence. Under the gallberry-bushes he discovered a few crumbling bricks moldering in the soil; digging beneath them, he found traces of charred wood. More digging revealed an old, rusted iron bar, more charred wood, and a few pieces of tin, mixed up with scattered lumps of rosin. There could be no doubt that this was the site of the old turpentine distillery.

As the full force of his discovery grew upon him, Joe almost shouted with delight. Here was the way to recover what he stood likely to lose in Burnam’s camp. He marveled that no one had remembered the old still before. It had been run for many years, and its accumulation of rosin might easily yield as much as the reef in Clarke County. At the present prices of rosin, this great bed might be worth several thousand dollars.

With the old iron bar he began to probe the ground in every direction to ascertain exactly the size of the rosin pit. Wherever he struck the hard deposit he drove a little stake; thus he soon ascertained that the bed was more than twenty feet long and about half as wide. Its depth was the most important point, and he had no means of ascertaining this; but he drilled deep with his iron bar without going through it. As a pit had usually been dug in the earth to receive the rosin, he thought it might be ten feet deep. At a low estimate, the “mine” should contain four or five hundred barrels, worth perhaps two thousand dollars. At any rate, it would bring back a great part of what Burnam owed him, if he failed to recover it otherwise.

Then, all at once, the question came to him: Who was the real owner of this deposit? Burnam, it is true, owned the land; but the rosin had belonged to Joe’s grandfather and to his father. Burnam had known nothing of the deposit when he bought the land. Morally, Joe felt that there was no doubt about his right to reclaim the stuff which his family had inadvertently left behind. But the legal side of the matter was more dubious; the uncertainty fell like a wet blanket over his first enthusiasm. At last he rose, pulled out his stakes, hid the iron bar, and kicked pine-needles over the old bricks. He had not yet decided what he would do. Until he came to a decision he was going to keep the valuable secret to himself.

He hunted up Snowball and rode thoughtfully down the road, to look for Sam. The excitement of his discovery had made him for a time forget to be hungry, but he was beginning once more to feel extremely empty, and he was glad when the negro boy hove in sight with a package of food and a tin bucket of coffee, which he reheated quickly over a small fire. The rest of the gang came down a little later, uneasy at first about entering the woods, but, finding no more red strings or chickens’ heads, they presently scattered about their work.

The rosin “mine” weighed heavily on Joe’s mind all that day. The more he thought about it the more certain he felt of his moral right to the waste from his grandfather’s old still, but how the tangled problem would work out in law he could not say. He shrank from the idea of consulting a lawyer; secretly he was afraid that the decision might be against him. Of one thing he felt sure: He would rather let the secret die with him than allow Burnam to mine that rosin, especially if the camp collapsed into bankruptcy.

An instinct led him to keep away from the place of his discovery. The wheelbarrow remained untouched, and as he rode the woods that day he was continually on the lookout for any fresh clue to the gum-stealers. No gum had been taken that night. Whether this was due to his rather careless watch he could not say, but he felt that a guard should be kept the next night as well. He did not himself feel inclined for another night in the woods, and the negroes demurred instantly to the proposal. Even Sam shrank from it, but at last he did get three of them to consent to stand guard, in consideration of a dollar apiece and plenty of coffee.