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First Edition

The Challenge of the North

I

Oskar Hedin, head of the fur department of old John McNabb’s big store, looked up from his scrutiny of the Russian sable coat spread upon a table before him, and encountered the twinkling eyes of old John himself.

“It’s a shame to keep this coat here—­and that natural black fox piece, too.  Who is there in Terrace City that’s got thirty thousand dollars to spend for a fur coat, or twenty thousand for a fox fur?”

Old John grinned.  “Mrs. Orcutt bought one, didn’t she?”

“Yes, but she bought it down in New York——­”

“An’ paid thirty-five thousand for a coat that runs half a dozen shades lighter, an’ is topped an’ pointed to bring it up to the best it’s got.  Did I ever tell ye the story of Mrs. Orcutt’s coat?”

“No.”

“It goes back quite a ways—­the left-handed love me an’ Fred Orcutt has for one another.  We speak neighborly on the street, an’ for years we’ve played on opposite sides of a ball-a-hole foursome at the Country Club, but either of us would sooner lose a hundred dollars than pay the other a golf ball.

“It come about in a business way, an’ in a business way it’s kept on.  Not a dollar of McNabb money passes through the hands of Orcutt’s Wolverine Bank—­an’ he could have had it all, an’ he knows it.

“As ye know, I started out, a lad, with the Hudson’s Bay Company, an’ I’d got to be a factor when an old uncle of my mother’s in Scotlan’ died an’ left me a matter of twenty thousand pounds sterling.  When I got the money I quit the Company an’ drifted around a bit until finally I bought up a big tract of Michigan pine.  There wasn’t any Terrace City then.  I located a sawmill here at the mouth of the river an’ it was known as McNabb’s Landin’.

“D’ye see those docks?  I built ’em, an’ I’ve seen the time when they was two steamers warped along each side of ’em, an’ one acrost the end, an’ a half a dozen more anchored in the harbor waitin’ to haul McNabb’s lumber.  The van stood on this spot in the sawmill days, an’ when it got too small I built a wooden store.  Folks began driftin’ in.  They changed the name from McNabb’s Landin’ to Terrace City, an’ I turned a many a good dollar for buildin’ sites.