His Dog | Page 3

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HIS DOG
by
ALBERT PAYSON TERHUNE
1922
CHAPTER I

. The Derelict
Link Ferris was a fighter. Not by nature, nor by choice, but to keep
alive.
His battleground covered an area of forty acres--broken, scrubby,
uncertain side-hill acres, at that. In brief, a worked-out farm among the
mountain slopes of the North Jersey hinterland; six miles from the
nearest railroad.
The farm was Ferris's, by right of sole heritage from his father, a
Civil-War veteran, who had taken up the wilderness land in 1865 and
who, for thirty years thereafter, had wrought to make it pay. At best the
elder Ferris had wrenched only a meager living from the light and
rock-infested soil.
The first-growth timber on the west woodlot for some time had staved
off the need of a mortgage; its veteran oaks and hickories grimly giving
up their lives, in hundreds, to keep the wolf from the door of their
owner. When the last of the salable timber was gone Old Man Ferris
tried his hand at truck farming, and sold his wares from a wagon to the
denizens of Craigswold, the new colony of rich folk, four miles to
northward.
But to raise such vegetables and fruits as would tempt the eyes and the
purses of Craigswold people it was necessary to have more than mere
zeal and industry. Sour ground will not readily yield sweet abundance,
be the toiler ever so industrious. Moreover, there was large and
growing competition, in the form of other huckster routes.
And presently the old veteran wearied of the eternal uphill struggle. He
mortgaged the farm, dying soon afterward. And Link, his son, was left
to carry on the thankless task.
Link Ferris was as much a part of the Ferris farm as was the giant
bowlder in the south mowing. He had been born in the paintless shack
which his father had built with his own rheumatic hands. He had
worked for more than a quarter century, in and out of the hill fields and
the ramshackle barns. From babyhood he had toiled there. Scant had
been the chances for schooling, and more scant had been the
opportunities for outside influence.
Wherefore, Link had grown to a wirily weedy and slouching manhood,
almost as ignorant of the world beyond his mountain walls as were any
of his own "critters." His life was bounded by fruitless labor, varied

only by such sleep and food as might fit him to labor the harder.
He ate and slept, that he might be able to work. And he worked, that he
might be able to eat and sleep. Beyond that, his life was as barren as a
rainy sea.
If he dreamed of other and wider things, the workaday grind speedily
set such dreams to rout. When the gnawing of lonely unrest was too
acute for bovine endurance--and when he could spare the time or the
money--he was wont to go to the mile-off hamlet of Hampton and there
get as nearly drunk as his funds would