The Fighting Starkleys
CHAPTER I
THE CALL COMES TO BEAVER DAM
BEAVER DAM was a farm; but long before the day of John Starkley and his wife, Constance Emma, who lived there with their five children, the name had been applied to and accepted by a whole settlement of farms, a gristmill, a meetinghouse, a school and a general store. John Starkley was a farmer, with no other source of income than his wide fields. Considering those facts, it is not to be wondered at that his three boys and two girls had been bred to an active, early-rising, robust way of life from their early childhood.
The original human habitation of Beaver Dam had been built of pine logs by John's grandfather, one Maj. Richard Starkley, and his friend and henchman, Two-Blanket Sacobie, a Malecite sportsman from the big river. The present house had been built only a few years before the major's death, by his sons, Peter and Richard, and a son of old Two-Blanket, of hand-hewn timbers, whipsawn boards and planks and hand-split shingles. But the older house still stands solid and true and weather-tight on its original ground; its lower floor is a tool house and general lumber room and its upper floor a granary.
Soon after the completion of the new house the major's son Richard left Beaver Dam for the town of St. John, where he found employment with a firm of merchants trading to London, Spain and the West Indies. He was sent to Jamaica; and from that tropic isle he sent home, at one time and another, cases of guava jelly and "hot stuff," a sawfish's saw and half a dozen letters. From Jamaica he was promoted to London; and as the years passed, his letters became less and less frequent until they at last ceased entirely. So much for the major's son Richard.
Peter stuck to the farm. He was a big, kind-hearted, quiet fellow, a hard worker, a great reader of his father's few books. He married the beautiful daughter of a Scotchman who had recently settled at Green Hill—a Scotchman with a red beard, a pedigree longer and a deal more twisted than the road to Fredericton, a mastery of the bagpipes, two hundred acres of wild land and an empty sporran. Of Peter Starkley and his beautiful wife, Flora, came John, who had his father's steadfastness and his mother's fire. He went farther afield for his wife than his father had gone—out to the big river, St. John, and down it many miles to the sleepy old village and elm-shaded meadows of Gagetown. It was a long way for a busy young farmer to go courting; but Constance Emma Garden was worth a thousand longer journeys.
When Henry, the oldest of the five Starkley children, went to college to study civil engineering, sixteen-year-old Peter, fourteen-year-old Flora, twelve-year-old Dick and eight-year-old Emma were at home. Peter, who was done with school, did a man's work on the farm; he owned a sorrel mare with a reputation as a trotter, contemplated spending the next winter in the lumber woods and planned agriculture activities on a scale and of a kind to astonish his father.
On a Saturday morning in June Dick and Flora, who were chums, got up even earlier than usual. They breakfasted by themselves in the summer kitchen of the silent house, dug earthworms in the rich brown loam of the garden and, taking their fishing rods from behind the door of the tool house, set out hurriedly for Frying Pan River. When they were halfway to the secluded stream they overtook Frank Sacobie, the great-grandson of Two-Blanket Sacobie, who had helped Maj. Richard Starkley build his house.
The young Malecite's black eyes lighted pleasantly at sight of his friends, but his lips remained unsmiling. He was a very thin, small-boned, long-legged boy of thirteen, clothed in a checked cotton shirt and the cut-down trousers of an older Sacobie. He did not wear a hat. His straight black hair lay in a fringe just above his eyebrows.
"Didn't you bring any worms?" asked Flora.