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.