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CHAPTER I

THE SQUATTER FOLK

The lazy warmth of a May afternoon, the spring following Orn Skinner's
release from Auburn Prison, was reflected in the attitudes of three men
lounging on the shore in front of "Satisfied" Longman's shack. At their
feet, the waters of Cayuga Lake dimpled under the rays of the western
sun. Like a strip of burnished silver, the inlet wound its way through
the swamp from the elevators and railroad stations near the foot of
south hill. Across the lake rose the precipitous slopes of East Hill,
tapestried in green, etched here and there by stretches of winding white
road, and crowned by the buildings on the campus of Cornell University.
Stretched from the foot of State Street on either side of the Lehigh
Valley track lay the Silent City, its northern end spreading several
miles up the west shore of the Lake. Its inhabitants were canalers,
fishermen and hunters, uneducated, rough and superstitious. They built
their little huts in the simplest manner out of packing boxes and rough
lumber and roofed them with pieces of tin and sheet iron. Squatters they
were appropriately named, because they paid no attention to land titles,
but stuck their shacks wherever fancy indicated or convenience dictated.
The people of the Silent City slept by day and went very quietly about
their work under the cover of darkness, for the game laws compelled the
fishermen to pull their nets at night, and the farmers' chickens were
more easily caught, his fruit more easily picked when the sun was
warming China.

Summers, their lives were comparatively free from hardships. Fish were
plentiful and easy to take; the squatter women picked flowers and
berries in the woods and sold them in the city and the men worked
occasionally, as the fit struck them. But the winters were bitter and
cruel. The countryside, buried deep in snow, made travel difficult.
When the mercury shrank timidly into the bulb and fierce winds howled
down the lake, the Silent City seemed, indeed, the Storm Country.

"I were up to the Graves' place yesterday, helpin' Professor Young,"
said Jake Brewer, the youngest and most active of the three men.

"Never had no use fer that duffer, Dominie Graves, myself," answered
Longman. The speaker turned a serious face to the third member of the
party. "Ner you nuther, eh, Orn?"

Orn Skinner was an enormous man, some six and a half feet tall. Two
great humps on his shoulders accentuated the breadth an