The Boss's Boy by Chandler Roy F

Author:Chandler, Roy F. [Chandler, Roy F.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Katherine R. Chandler
Published: 2013-04-26T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

The winter had been brutal. Snowfall did not break records, but deep and bitter cold arrived and hung on week in and week out. Both rivers froze so solidly that loaded wagons crossed without maneuvering around thin spots.

Traveling was miserable. Stone-hard roads with teams slipping and sliding forced injurious falls.

The Captain and Lukey Bates spent most of January in the city because returning to Perry County—only to retrace their route in a few weeks—would be painful and wasted effort. Separating the businesses was proving far more difficult than big Matt had expected, and Brascomb Miller fought it all of the way.

With Matt Miller owner of everything except Brascomb's home, the transfer should have been simple. Big Matt saw the separation as giving both he and his brother even freer hands with opportunity to increase their profit. Brascomb saw the changes as reducing his importance and perhaps his income. The Captain could not know Brascomb's secret hunger to own it all.

Without important contact with the western projects, Brascomb believed his ability to influence Miller enterprises would be greatly lessened. How could he know what was happening out there? He knew that big Matt withheld profits and used them along the rivers, and Brascomb hated even that loss of involvement.

Brascomb Miller was not an evil man who regularly wished misery on others, but the thought of how he could take charge and move the companies forward if young Matt were not there to inherit appeared often. Brascomb knew with all of his being that young Matt Miller was not the man to run important and moneymaking operations.

Big Matt could prattle all he wanted about the ideas his son came up with, but ideas did not make money. Close figuring and careful bargaining did. Young Matt was a mere youth who liked (actually liked) to fist fight, who was pathetic with the accounts, and whose mind wandered instead of sticking to the figuring and calculating. If only . . . Brascomb did not dare think further.

Young Matt watched the rivers with trepidation. He had moved a small fortune in logs behind Halderman's Island, and they were tightly secured, but when the Susquehanna rose, anything in the river's way was likely to end up in Chesapeake Bay. In full flood, entire islands and every log in the river could disappear downstream.

As the winter wore on and expected melting did not appear, Matt measured the snowfall accumulations and judged that the approaching spring thaw might reach flood records. His logs should be moved to high ground, but the time and effort involved would be considerable. The Boss was again in Philadelphia, and Matt believed he should not wait for his father's approval.

Matt needed ox teams that could pull heavy logs from their frozen berths and drag them across the river ice into storage near the sawmill high above possible flooding. The oxen would have to come from nearby farms.

Most local farmers were German, and Matt had discovered that the Germans were as clannish as the Scots, the Scotch-Irish or the Irish.

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