Bright with Silver by Kathrene Sutherland Gedney Pinkerton

Author:Kathrene Sutherland Gedney Pinkerton [Pinkerton, Kathrene Sutherland Gedney]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781839740480
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Red Kestrel Books
Published: 2019-11-22T00:00:00+00:00

The family in the old homestead had increased. Edward and Alice had two daughters, Henry and Mamie had a son and a daughter, and in January Walter married Mabel Woller, a girl of the neighborhood. They had known each other for years and had met when, as a youngster, Mabel had weeded ginseng. They both loved flowers and growing things, and it promised to be a happy and companionable marriage. But young families, and three generations, overflowed the old farmhouse.

The Company needed homes as badly as it had once needed roads, fences, pens, arbors, barns, drying rooms for fur and ginseng, crews’ quarters, and all the equipment of a fur farm. Henry and Mamie saw possibilities in an old log cabin in the center of the homestead furring range. Built of birch logs, it had been the Company’s first office and later was used for maple sugar boiling parties. When these woods were converted into a furring range the foxes had spent their days trying to tear the cabin apart, but Henry, who enjoyed creating something out of nothing, chose it for his home.

“I always liked that old cabin,” he said, “and we want to live in the woods.”

Walter too desired trees around their home, but he and Mabel wished to have a great open space for a flower garden. He found a site in the furring range that provided both. Fromms like to live near their foxes.

John’s wants were slight but unalterable; he insisted on privacy. A corner in the upper floor of the warehouse was ideal, because it could be barricaded against intrusion. Footsteps on the stairway could warn him in time to escape to the roof, and the telephone, which the Company insisted was a necessity, could be silenced by taking the receiver off the hook. John’s energies were never wasted by the irritations of a telephone, for he made sure it could be used only for outgoing service. When he planned his upper-story citadel the Company feared he had forgotten how necessary the forest had always been to him. “There’s miles of woods around me,” he said, and the others knew that John’s old habit of solitary wandering was not broken.

The Company built and furnished these three homes according to the requirements of the dwellers. That it should do so seemed no different from the procedure of the early days, when a boy had needed new shoes or Henry had had to go to the Battle Creek Sanitarium. A farm was expected to take care of its people, and the Company was still essentially a farm. Corporation status had not changed the boys’ thinking, nor had it altered the old association of “The Wolves” when the four had given everything to a Company and its cash crops. Now the Company, become a creature of substance, repaid those first years with as little accounting as had gone into its building. Any earnings above its needs or those of its builders it retained, and because its welfare was always the primary concern there was no danger that its treasury would be raided.

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