ure's confession. The assistant, not himself, was a
surveyor. "I'm only a paper-maker. I'm looking for cheap timber, good
snow for haulage, water-power to mill the lumber into paper-pulp, and a
road to market. I've been traveling some months now in search of that
combination, and if your lovely waterfall will give me five thousand
horse-power, I shall have to build your cut-off road for myself, also
the house. Then there'll be war against these black pines, your enemies.
As to Spite House, it seems hardly the kind of thing for you to deal
with. Perhaps you'll leave that to me."

CHAPTER III

RESCUE

_Jesse's Letter_

Mother in Heaven:

Please thank God for me and say I'm grateful. Tell the neighbor angels
how little mothers having sons on earth are badly missed and grudged by
hungering mortals. Prayers sent to Heaven are answered, but not letters.
I reckon no one here could ever write a letter happy enough, so light
with joy that it could fly up there. And when I'd a notion to write, in
these last years, I knew a heavy letter might reach the wrong address,
to make more sorrow in the other place. I've passed the hours writing,
times when I had paper, but the stuff I wrote would make no creature
happy, except, perhaps, critics, who enjoy to scoff. What can't make
happiness is worse than dirt.

In the days when I thought this Jesse person was important, I used to
read the Old Testament, which is full human with pride and arrogance of
man. But since I learned that this whole world is only a dream from
which we shall awake, the New Testament has been my pasturage. Maybe
three moons ago, when my ammunition had run out, and my neighbor animals
had learned all the little secrets of my traps and snares, there was no
food for the earthly part of me, and I wondered what God was going to do
about it. Of course I couldn't question about His business, but seeing
that likely He intended me to leave my little worries behind, I made a
good fire in the cabin, lay down in the bunk, arranged my body to be in
decent order in case I left it, and took my Bible to pass away the time.

I suppose I'd dropped off to sleep, when something rough began to
happen, jolting me back into the world of fuss. A man in a buckskin
shirt and a bad temper, stamping the snow off his moccasins, shaking me
by the arm. He was my old friend Iron Dale, a man of the world--which
smashed him.

He seemed to be worried, and that, of course, was nat