Love stories; Lumber trade -- Fiction; Maine -- Fiction
The name painted on the door of the photograph "saloon" that even now
lies rotting on the banks of Ragmuff in Castonia settlement is: "Linus
Lane. Tintypes and Views." No one in Castonia ever knew whither he had
come. Oxen or horses and a teamster hired for each trip had dragged the
rumbling van from settlement to settlement at the edge of the woods, and
finally to Castonia, where it arrived hobbling on three wheels, one
corner supported by a dragging sapling. Lane strode ahead, swearing over
his shoulder at the driver, and his ill-temper did not seem to leave him
even when he had opened his door for business. It is remembered that his
first customer was old Bailey, who was corresponding with an unknown
woman down-country, and who came for a tintype with hair and whiskers
colored to the hue of the raven's wing, evidently desiring to make an
impression on his correspondent. And when old Bailey, shocked and
disappointed at the painful verity of the tintype, had muttered that it
didn't seem to be a very pretty picture, Lane, who was doubled like a
jack-knife under the saloon's low roof, had yelled at him:
"Pretty picture! You come to me with a face like a scrambled egg dropped
into a bucket of soot and complain because you don't get a pretty
picture! Get out of here!"
And he stopped slicing up the sheet of tintypes, slammed it on the
floor, drove out old Bailey, nailed up the door of the saloon, and
started for the big woods with his few possessions on his back.
To those who remonstrated on behalf of the offended old Bailey, Lane
said he had been feeling like that for some time, and was taking to the
woods before he expressed his disgust by killing some one.
Therefore, the job on the top of Jerusalem that fell to him quite
naturally, after his many years' sojourn as a recluse at its foot, was a
job that fitted admirably with his scheme of life.
"And it looks up there like it must have looked when Noah said, 'All
ashore that's goin' ashore,' on Mount Ariat, or wherever 'twas he
throwed anchor," announced Tommy Eye, of Britt's crew, returning once
from a Sunday trip to the fire station.
For, painfully acquired, with gouges, clawings, and scratches to show
for it all, "Ladder" Lane had accumulated companions of his loneliness,
to wit:
One bull moose, captured in calfhood in deep snow; two bear cubs; a
raccoon; a three-legged bobcat, victim of an excited hunter; two horned
owls; and a fisher cat.
On this menagerie, variously tethered or crated in sapling cages, the
visitor with the disabled arm bestowed a contemptuous side glance while
he blinked at the tall figure on the cabin's flat roof.
Without haste Lane worked himself through the roof-scuttle like an
angle-worm drawing into his hole; without cordiality he appeared at the
cabin door, lounging out into the sunshine.
"I suppose you are still doing the second-hand swearing for Britt,
MacLeod," he suggested.
The young man grunted.
"How did ye hurt your arm? Britt chaw it?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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