Dale secured board with a mill hand living near by, and as soon as he was settled he began a systematic reduction of the debt his father had left unpaid. He felt that this was a duty he owed to the memory of his parent and to the honor of the family at large. "They shan't say that he swindled anybody," was the way he put it to himself. "I'll pay every dollar of it before I buy a thing for myself that isn't actually necessary." In the bottom of his trunk at the boarding house Dale had the deed to the land in Oregon which his father had purchased--that unfortunate transaction that had practically beggared them. The young lumberman often read the papers over carefully. They showed that his father had been the sole owner of many acres of territory located in the heart of the great West. Of this great tract of land Dale was now the sole owner. "And to think that the tract is only a rocky mountain side, good for nothing at all," he would say with a sigh. "Now, if it were only a stretch of farm land, I might go out and try my luck at farming some day. I guess it's only fit for a stone quarry,--same as the rocky lands here,--but nobody wants a quarry out there, a hundred miles or more from nowhere at all." So far Dale had managed to pay up all but thirty dollars of the debt left behind by his parent. He might have paid this, but a log had rolled on his foot, causing him a bruise that had kept him from work for two weeks and given him a doctor's bill to pay in addition. The thirty dollars was owing to a riverman named Hen McNair. The fellow was a Scotchman and exceedingly close-fisted, and he had bothered Dale a good deal, hoping to have his claim paid at once. "You can pay up if you want to," said McNair in his Scotch accent. "If you've not the money sell off some of your things." "I've sold off all I can spare," had been Dale's reply. "You'll have to wait. From next Saturday on I'll pay you two dollars a week." "Hoot! 'Twill be fifteen weeks--nigh four months--before we come to the end." "It's the very best I can do." "Can't you pay me five or ten dollars now?" "No. The most I can give you is two dollars." "Then give me that. And see you keep your word about the balance." And stuffing the bill Dale handed him into his pocket, Hen McNair had gone off grumbling something about the want of honor in a lad who wouldn't pull himself together and pay his father's honest debts. The sawmill owned by John Larson was run both by water power and by steam--the latter helping out the former when the flow of the stream was not at its best. Rain had been wanting for several weeks, and this had delayed a drive of logs the mill owner had counted on, and had also made it necessary to depend entirely on steam as a motive power. The plant employed twenty-four hands, and this and another mill on the opposite shore were the main industries of the Run.