文档介绍：HIS DOG
HIS DOG
By ALBERT PAYSON TERHUNE 1922
1
HIS DOG
CHAPTER I. The Derelict
Link Ferris was a fighter. Not by nature, nor by choice, but to keep
alive.
His battleground covered an area of forty acres--broken, scrubby,
uncertain side-hill acres, at that. In brief, a worked-out farm among the
mountain slopes of the North Jersey hinterland; six miles from the nearest
railroad.
The farm was Ferris's, by right of sole heritage from his father, a Civil-
War veteran, who had taken up the wilderness land in 1865 and who, for
thirty years thereafter, had wrought to make it pay. At best the elder Ferris
had wrenched only a meager living from the light and rock-infested soil.
The first-growth timber on the west woodlot for some time had staved
off the need of a mortgage; its veteran oaks and hickories grimly giving up
their lives, in hundreds, to keep the wolf from the door of their owner.
When the last of the salable timber was gone Old Man Ferris tried his
hand at truck farming, and sold his wares from a wagon to the denizens of
Craigswold, the new colony of rich folk, four miles to northward.
But to raise such vegetables and fruits as would tempt the eyes and the
purses of Craigswold people it was necessary to have more than mere zeal
and industry. Sour ground will not readily yield sweet abundance, be the
toiler ever so industrious. Moreover, there was large and growing
competition, in the form of other huckster routes.
And presently the old veteran wearied of the eternal uphill struggle.
He mortgaged the farm, dying soon afterward. And Link, his son, was left
to carry on the thankless task.
Link Ferris was as much a part of the Ferris farm as was the giant
bowlder in the south mowing. He had been born in the paintless shack
which his father had built with his own rheumatic hands. He had worked
for more than a quarter century, in and out of the hill fields and the
ramshackle barns. From babyhood he had toiled there. Scant had