Frederick cast back for solace through their joint history.  It was he who had always been the mainstay, the dependable one.  Tom had laughed and rollicked, played hooky from school, disobeyed Isaac’s commandments.  To the mountains or the sea, or in hot water with the neighbours and the town authorities—­it was all the same; he was everywhere save where the dull plod of work obtained.  And work was work in those backwoods days, and he, Frederick, had done the work.  Early and late and all days he had been at it.  He remembered the season when Isaac’s wide plans had taken one of their smashes, when food had been scarce on the table of a man who owned a hundred thousand acres, when there had been no money to hire harvesters for the hay, and when Isaac would not let go his grip on a single one of his acres.  He, Frederick, had pitched the hay, while Isaac mowed and raked.  Tom had lain in bed and run up a doctor bill with a broken leg, gained by falling off the ridge-pole of the barn—­which place was the last in the world to which any one would expect to go to pitch hay.  About the only work Tom had ever done, it seemed to him, was to fetch in venison and bear-oil, to break colts, and to raise a din in the valley pastures and wooded canyons with his bear-hounds.

Tom was the elder, yet when Isaac died, the estate, with all its vast possibilities would have gone to ruin, had not he, Frederick, buckled down to it and put the burden on his back.  Work!  He remembered the enlargement of the town water-system—­how he had manoeuvred and financed, persuaded small loans at ruinous interest, and laid pipe and made joints by lantern light while the workmen slept, and then been up ahead of them to outline and direct and rack his brains over the raising of the next week-end wages.  For he had carried on old Isaac’s policy.  He would not let go.  The future would vindicate.

And Tom!—­with a bigger pack of bear dogs ranging the mountains and sleeping out a week at a time.  Frederick remembered the final conference in the kitchen—­Tom, and he, and Eliza Travers, who still cooked and baked and washed dishes on an estate that carried a hundred and eighty thousand dollars in mortgages.

“Don’t divide,” Eliza Travers had pleaded, resting her soap-flecked, parboiled arms.  “Isaac was right.  It will be worth millions.  The country is opening up.  We must all pull together.”

“I don’t want the estate,” Tom cried.  “Let Frederick have it.  What I want....”

He never completed the sentence, but all the vision of the world burned in his eyes.

“I can’t wait,” he went on.  “You can have the millions when they come.  In the meantime let me have ten thousand.  I’ll sign off quitclaim to everything.  And give me the old schooner, and some day I’ll be back with a pot of money to help you out.”

Frederick could see himself, in that far past day, throwing up his arms in horror and crying: 

“Ten thousand!—­when I’m strained to the breaking point to raise this quarter’s interest!”