When a small boy Dale had had two sisters, and his home with his parents, on the shore of Chesuncook Lake, had been a happy one. But the death of the two sisters and the mother had caused great grief to the father and the son, and it can truthfully be said that after these loved ones were laid away in the little cemetery among the pines, Joel Bradford was never the same. He lost interest in his lumber camp and in the spot that had been his home for so many years, and at the first opportunity he sold out and moved down to Bangor. It was at Bangor that he fell in with several men who were interested in the gold and silver mines of the great West. One of these men induced him to invest nearly all his money in a mine said to be located in Oregon. The ground was purchased by Joel Bradford, and preparations were made to begin mining on a small scale, when word came that no gold or silver was to be found in that locality, and the scheme fell through, and the man who had induced Mr. Bradford to invest disappeared. The money lost in this transaction amounted to six thousand dollars--nearly the whole of Joel Bradford's capital--and the former lumberman felt the blow keenly. He grew reckless and speculated in lumber in and around Bangor, and soon found himself in debt to the sum of five hundred dollars. This he paid all but a hundred dollars, when, during unusually severe weather on the river, he contracted pneumonia, from which he never recovered. Dale was not yet seventeen years of age when he found himself utterly alone in the world, for this branch of the Bradford family had never been large and the grandparents had come to Maine from Connecticut years before. Dale had a fair common-school education, but most of his life had been spent at the lumber camps and along the river and the lakes with his father. He could fell a tree almost as well as a regular lumberman, and had followed more than one drive down the stream to the boom or the sawmill. "I've got to buckle in and make a man of myself," was what he told himself after the first great grief over the loss of his father was over. "I can't afford to sit down and do nothing. I've got to support myself, and pay off that debt father left behind him." He had been doing odd jobs for a lumber firm owning an interest in yards at Bangor and at Oldtown, twelve miles further up the Penobscot. But these did not pay very well, and he looked further, until he struck Larson's Run, a small settlement located on a tributary of the big river. Larson had known Joel Bradford well for years, and had purchased many a cut of logs from him. "So your father is dead and you want a job," John Larson had said. "Well, I'll give you the best that I have open"; and then and there he had engaged Dale at a salary of four dollars per week, a sum which was afterwards raised to six dollars.