"An odd man who's spent the most of his life in the woods," said Gordon. "Came in here for his health long ago from I don't know where; grew strong, and has always stuck to the woods. Had to work, like the rest of us, when I knew him. Thirty years ago he began work in this part of the country as a boom rat—so they tell me. It was on a big drive way down the Oswegatchie.
"Before we bought the Bear Mountain and Lost River tracts we were looking for a good cruiser—some one to go through here and estimate the timber for us. Well, Dunmore was recommended for the job, and we hired him. He and I travelled over some thirty thousand acres, camping wherever night overtook us. It did not take me long to discover that he was a gifted man. Many an evening, as we sat by our lonely fire in the woods, I have wept and laughed over his poems."
"Poems!" Master exclaimed.
"That's the only word for it," Gordon went on. "The man is a woods lover and a poet. One night he told me part of his life story. Sile, you remember when the old iron company shut down their works at Tifton. Well, everybody left the place except Tom Muir, the postmaster. He was a widower, and lived with one child—a girl about nineteen years old when the forest village died. Dunmore married that girl. He told me how beautiful she was and how he loved her. Well, they didn't get along together. He was fond of the woods and she was not.
"For five years they lived together in the edge of the wilderness. Then she left him. Well—poor woman!—it was a lonely life, and some tourist fell in love with her, they tell me. I don't know about that. Anyhow, Dunmore was terribly embittered. A little daughter had been born to them. She was then three years of age."
"She's the angel y-you met to-day over by the p-pond," Strong put in, looking at Master.
Gordon lighted his pipe and went on with his story.
"Dunmore said that a relative had left him a little money. I remember we were camping that night on the shore of Buckhorn. Its beauty appealed to him. He said he'd like to buy that section and build him a camp on the pond and spend the rest of his life there.
"'But,' said I, 'you couldn't bring up your daughter in the woods.' Buckhorn was then thirty miles from anywhere.
"'That's just what I wish to do,' he answered. 'The world is so full of d———d spaniels'—I remember that was the phrase he used—and there's so much infamy among men, I'd rather keep her out of it. I want her to be as pure at twenty as she is now. I can teach her all I wish her to know.'