There was no sentiment about Tim. If the citified fishermen objected to what they found, "Be gob, you kin kape away," he readily told them. A quarter for each meal, or a night's lodging, was the price, whether a bed or the floor was provided, and from early spring until frost came, all the occupants went barefoot. When snow had made the sixty miles of log road to the nearest settlement passable, Tim invariably journeyed hither with horse and bob-sled for clothing and supplies. No knowledge or news from the world reached here, unless brought by chance visitors. Sundays were an unknown factor, the work of clearing land and potato-raising became a continuous performance from spring until autumn; and the change of seasons, the rise and fall of the river, were the only measure of time. An addition to Tim's Place, other than babies and pigs, came one fall in an old Indian who, by ample presents of game, soon won Tim's good-will and help in the erection of a log wigwam; but this relic of a vanishing race--reckoned by Tim as partially insane--remained there only winters, and when spring returned, disappeared into the wilderness. There were also two other occasional visitors both meriting description. First, a beetle-browed, keen-eyed, red-haired man garbed as a hunter, whose speech disclosed something of the Scotch dialect, and who, presenting Tim with a deer and two bottles of whiskey as a peace-offering on his first arrival, soon obtained a welcome. He told a plausible tale of having been pursued for years by enemies seeking his life; how he had been robbed and driven away from the settlements; and how two of these enemies had even followed him into the woods. He had been shot at by them, had killed one in self-defence, a price had been set upon his capture, dead or alive, and, all in all, he was a sorely abused man. How much of this lurid and fantastic tale Tim believed, is not pertinent to this narrative. The stranger, calling himself McGuire, was evidently a good fellow, since he brought good whiskey, and Tim made him welcome. The facts as to McGuire, however, were somewhat at variance with his assertions. He had originally been a dive-keeper in a focal city for the lumbering interests of this wilderness, had entertained swarms of log-drivers just paid off and anxious to spend money, and when the law interfered, he retreated to a smaller town. In the interval, strange to say, his moral nature--or rather immoral--suffered a brief relapse, during which he persuaded an excellent if confiding young woman to share his name and infamy. His second business venture came to grief, however, and his wife deserted him and met with a fatal accident a few years after. In the meantime he had kept busy, exercising his peculiar talents and tastes in an individual manner, and evading officers, and his ways of money-getting were peculiar and diverse.