The very judge who had granted the
injunction forbidding Mr. Sherwood to cut timber on the tract was
related to the present owners of the piece of timberland; and the
tract had been the basis of a feud in the Perkins family for two
generations.
Many people were more or less interested in the case and they
came to the Sherwood home and talked excitedly about it in the
big kitchen. Some advised an utter disregard of the law. Others
were evidently minded to increase the trouble between Raffer and
Uncle Henry by malicious tale-bearing.
Often Nan thought of what Uncle Henry had said to old Toby
Vanderwiller. She learned that Toby was one of the oldest
settlers in this part of the Michigan Peninsula, and in his youth
had been a timber runner, that is, a man who by following the
surveyors' lines on a piece of timber, and weaving back and forth
across it, can judge its market value so nearly right that his
employer, the prospective timber merchant, is able to bid
intelligently for the so-called "stumpage" on the tract.
Toby was still a vigorous man save when that bane of the
woodsman, rheumatism, laid him by the heels. He had a bit of a
farm in the tamarack swamp. Once, being laid up by his arch
enemy, with his joints stiffened and muscles throbbing with pain,
Toby had seen the gaunt wolf of starvation, more terrible than
any timber wolf, waiting at his doorstone.
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