man is.” We got off our wet rubbers and coats and bundles and sat at the warm oak fire till nearly two o’clock, talking of Jake McClaine. We thought of him in this way: he with Ai Coolidge, have the best houses in all Silverton, the finest, softest beds, with the biggest and best pillows; he has the best things to eat; the warmest fireplace: he doesn’t need to work, yet he would leave all that to go twenty miles into the mountains through an eighth-mile strip of big timber, off into the dead timber, to investigate into the health of just a family of poor mountain people that didn’t know enough to move to the valley, just because the man wanted to live like the trapper and hunter that he was. It was a trip that all the money in the world couldn’t have hired me to make.
But this wasn’t all that gave us food for talk; as father says: “It was this same Jake McClaine, this man with unkempt hair and beard, with one pant leg in his boot and the other out, that came when my family was down to death’s level with smallpox, when we lived in the hills; when neighbors, yes, even relatives, had fled and left me alone; when no one came near to
