However, there was little profit in bemoaning a state of things he could not remedy. It was certain that Blair would carry out his threat, if Steele left his place without permission, so there was nothing for it but to sit tight.
With a deep sigh the young man pulled himself together, drew toward him a sheet of paper and wrote a letter that proved to be more important than its wording would have led a casual reader to suspect.
CHAPTER V—A FAVOURITE OF FORTUNE
DUGALD STEELE cordially hated his neighbours, and evinced little hesitation in telling them so, whenever opportunity offered. He lived apparently in the depths of extreme poverty, occupying a dilapidated wooden, unpainted house at the northern outskirts of the village of Stumpville, Michigan. He kept no servant, but cooked his own meals, and if any trespassers dared to set foot on his property, he threatened them with a shotgun. He was a cantankerous, crabbed old Scotsman, snarling like an unowned dog, and going about in shabbier clothes than the most ragged tramp that had ever honoured Stumpville with his fleeting presence.
Dugald and his younger brother Neil, the latter then newly married, came out of the highlands of Scotland to the lowlands of Michigan. It was not that the life in the American backwoods was harder than life in the northern part of Scotland, but the hardships were different, and they affected the health of the young wife; she died because of a falling tree—a tree she had never seen, and whose final crash she had not heard. Her husband was felling oaks in the forest, and one of them lodged in the branches of another, resting there at an angle of forty-five degrees. Neil, unaccustomed to forestry in its gigantic American form, not knowing the danger he ran, set himself to chop down the impediment, when the half-fallen tree suddenly completed its descent and crushed him, face downward and lifeless, into the forest mould. To the elder brother fell the grim task of chopping through the fallen timber and rolling the log from off the dead man. The wife died from the shock, and their little boy was left to the care of his taciturn uncle.
No one is alive who knew Dugald Steele in his youth, and so none can tell what early experiences may have warped his character. Perhaps the stinging poverty of those days gave him an exaggerated idea of the necessity of hoarding money; perhaps the tragic death of his brother, whose rude coffin he made with his own hands from slabs of the tree that killed him, crushed out his natural affections instead of ripening them; but, be that as it may, he was, during the latter part of his life, a hard man, whom no tale of pathos could move into the expenditure of a penny; a gnarled, cross-grained, twisted specimen of humanity from whom all emotion, except that of hatred, seemed to have departed.
When he died a will was found leaving all his property to a neighbouring town simply, as he said in the document, written by his own hand to save a lawyer’s fee, that he might wreak posthumous revenge upon his neighbours, who would understand, now that it was too late, what they had missed by not being decent to him. But this will was invalidated by a later one, which shows how a man with a kind heart may sometimes do well for himself when he little understands what he is about.
Nemesis comes to all of us, and it is strange that it should have rested on old Dugald, as the result of the hard, honest work in his young days. Seeing no smoke from his chimney, a kindly woman neighbour, with fear and trembling, penetrated to his dwelling, and found him knotted on the floor with rheumatism, snarling and waspish as ever, but helpless. The woman ran for assistance, and he was lifted into his bed, where he lay when the doctor came, while the old man protested that he had no money to pay him, and would not pay him if he had. The doctor, however, did the best he could for him, and told the neighbours that the old man was stricken with his last illness, which indeed proved to be the case. The doctor said to his patient that if he had any relatives he wished to see he had better send for them, offering to write if the old man gave him an address. All his life Dugald Steele had distrusted medical advice, but it is likely that on this occasion something within him corroborated the verdict which had been passed upon him. He lay there for a long time in silence, the doctor waiting, and at last said, in a hoarse whisper, that he would like his nephew to know he was ill, giving the address as John Steele, Hitchen’s Siding; but, he added, with a return of his cantankerousness, that the doctor was to tell his nephew he need not come unless he wanted to. The doctor at his own cost sent a telegram, and late that night received a long answering despatch from John Steele which deplored the impossibility of the sender’s going to Stumpville at that time, begged that no expense should be spared in getting the old man what comforts he needed, and concluded by saying that a check for a hundred dollars had been posted to the physician for the purpose indicated.