March 16, 1907.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
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shaw, can go for the doctor,’ says Captain Ire¬ 
land. 
“‘Are you Jacob Henshaw? If so, you are 
more than welcome,’ says the girl. ‘Grandfather 
has told me how good you were to him, and 
when I came home from Montreal last Monday 
he said he had been praying for you to come 
along. He is ill, and my old nurse is ill too, 
and I came through here on my snowshoes and 
found them without any wood, and the cattle 
starving in the barn.’ 
“As she said this she swayed over, and the 
Captain caught her in his arms. ‘Shut that barn 
door,’ says the Captain, ‘and catch those dogs 
up before they do any more mischief. (Old 
Satan was coming round, in spite of the smash 
On the head I gave him.) Tether them out in 
some of these old buildings where they can’t get 
loose, and we’ll see *what we can do for these 
people.’ 
“He carried the girl over to the house, kicked 
his snowshoes off. and went in without knock¬ 
ing. A few minutes after I followed him. I 
had tied the dogs up in an old hog pen, and 
Satan had come to. There were two beds in 
the front room. Old Mr. Castin was in one of 
them, the housekeeper was in the other. There 
was some wood in the wood box, but it was 
mainly green alders and rotten fence poles. 
“ ‘Jake,’ says the Captain, ‘take this message 
and put for the nearest telegraph station for 
all you are worth. Then, when you’ve sent it, 
make arrangements to have the doctor and nurse 
sent out here as quick as they can be got. Just 
read the message over before you go. I don’t 
want the telegraph operator to make a mess of 
it. “Send doctor and nurse to Tupper’s Lake 
station. Expense no object. Typhoid fever case. 
Signed, ‘Dunshannon’; to Colonel White, 143d 
Regiment, Halifax.” ’ 
“‘What’s this last word?’ 
“ ‘Dunshannon,’ says the Captain; ‘Colonel 
White will understand it all right. You hurry 
off, and get that message through as soon as 
you can.’ 
“By good luck I managed to fall in with a 
team soon after I got to the main road, and I 
was back before dark. The Captain had foraged 
around and got some decent wood, then he had 
gone back to camp for some grub, and brandy. 
I got the keys of the old house, found a room 
j we could sleep in, and fixed up some kind of a 
bed. Then I went over and milked the cow 
and fed the stock. The fox that caused all the 
trouble was still in the barn. I made a noose, 
put it on a pole, and snared him. I found he 
I wasn’t much hurt, one of his hind legs was 
' broken below the knee, but that soon mends 
; in a fox. I carried him down to the house, and 
! Miss Castin told me to let him go. I waited 
until the Captain came back, and we turned him 
loose, and his game leg didn’t seem to bother 
him much. 
“The doctor came next day. He said the 
| sick people must be moved at once, where they 
could have proper care and decent food. We 
rigged up two big toboggans, put them on board, 
well wrapped in blankets, and hauled them out 
to Tupper’s Lake station. My sister was living 
there, and she took them in. I sent one of 
; her boys back to Lake Castin to look after the 
!• live stock. MiSs Castin had left all her boxes 
1 at the station, and when we had the old people 
fixed up I took a team and hauled them to the 
priest’s house where she was to stay. She was 
u a pretty tired girl when we got out of the 
woods, her arm was sore where the dog pinned 
her, though the leather gauntlet she wore saved 
her from all but one tush mark; her hands were 
all blistered with shoveling the road from the 
house to the barn, and chopping wood for the 
1 stove. 
“She sent word that she wanted to see me the 
next day, and I went over to the glebe house. 
‘I remember you when I was a little girl be¬ 
fore I went to the convent at Montreal,’ she 
1 said, and she held out her hand to me. ‘You 
used to make little canoes for me, and you built 
me a birch bark summer house in the old gar¬ 
den. Now, I want you to tell me how long 
grandfather has been living like I found him, 
ji and how he comes to be so poor. He never told 
j| me anything about it, and I have plenty of 
money. I thought I would come down to see 
him at Christmas time, so I sent him a telegram 
to meet me at the station, and when I arrived 
there was no one there. I couldn’t hire a team 
to take me through, so I put my dressing bag 
and a little valise on a hand sled and started 
on my snowshoes. They say that I am the best 
lady snowshoer in Montreal, so the tramp was 
nothing to me. I found the house shut up, and 
the only sign of life was the little smoke coming 
from that wretched hovel I found grandfather 
in. Father Richards has only been here a few 
weeks, and h'e didn’t know that anyone lived 
out at the lake.’ 
“I told her all I knew about the bank failing 
at Londonderry, and the gold playing out in the 
New El Dorado mine, and how Mr. Castin had 
lost his farm, and come down to living in the 
tenant house. She and Father Richards listened 
to me, and when I’d finished she said, ‘So far 
you’ve told me the truth, but you left out the 
loads of wood you hauled and cut up, and the 
moose meat you brought to the house. Three 
nights ago, when grandfather was delirious, he 
was praying God to send Jake Henshaw along, 
and if his prayer hadn’t been answered we’d 
have frozen or starved to death.’ Then the Cap¬ 
tain came in and she said something to him in 
French. He and the priest both laughed, and 
I made an excuse and went out. I thought 
maybe I wasn’t wanted any more. 
“We went back to camp two days later. We 
never set eyes on the lame fox again, but we 
killed quite a few foxes and cats and had a 
good time generally. As soon as old Mr. Castin 
was fit to move the girl took him to Montreal, 
and next spring a fire came along and burned 
every building on the place. They say the lum¬ 
bermen set it, so they could buy the land cheap, 
and have the water privilege. Miss Castin sent 
me that rifle from Montreal (pointing to the 
Snider), and Snider rifles cost money thirty 
years ago. If you notice it’s not an ordinary 
army rifle. It has my initials on a silver plate 
and the stock is black walnut. 
“Well, we finished up our hunting trip, and 
the Captain went to Halifax saying he would 
write to me later on. About a week after I 
came out of the woods a note I’d given to 
Martin Porter was falling due at the bank at 
Truro. I had some business there and a week 
before the note was due I went into the bank 
and laid mv money down and asked for the 
note. The bank man picked up the money and 
looked at it. ‘You know Porter failed and 
skipped to the States last week,’ he says. ‘Yes, 
but I’m going to pay the note, all the sarrq,’ I 
replied. ‘The note reads for one thousand and 
fourteen dollars, with interest,’ says the Lank 
man. ‘Why, all I ever had from him was a 
barrel of flour, and another of meal, and some 
pork and molasses. Here's the bill, fourteen 
dollars, paid by note at sixty days,’ and I pulled 
the receipt out of my pocket. ‘I can’t help that. 
The note says one .thousand and fourteen, and 
it’s got to be paid in full the day it falls due.’ 
“I was dumfounded. That miserable thief 
knew I had some money laid by; he got me to 
sign the note, and then he raised it one thou¬ 
sand dollars. I went out of the bank, and down 
to old lawyer Muir’s office. The old man had 
hunted with me quite a lot. I told him my 
story, and asked him what I was to do. He 
thought the matter over for a while, and then 
he says. ‘As a lawyer, I advise you to fight the 
bank and say the note is a forgery; as a friend 
I advise you to gather up all the cash you have 
and go after Martin Porter. Don’t look for 
him, but if you happen to meet him west of 
Chicago, where the law isn’t very strict, and you 
think he’s going to shoot you. you shoot first, 
and don’t let your’ conscience bother you if you 
happen to kill him.’ 
“I had rather over a thousand dollars saved, 
and in three days’ time I was over the line with 
my money in my pocket. It was the savings of 
a good many years’ hard work, stream driving, 
chopping and trapping. In the course of a couple 
of years I drifted back into Canada, and struck 
a good thing on the Gatineau River. Later on 
the call for Canadian volunteers to go up the 
Nile came, and I enlisted. When I got back to 
Suakim I had a Dervish bullet in my shoulder. 
4 1 1 
I had it taken out and then they sent me on 
board a troopship, to be sent to Halifax by way 
of Queenstown. I have no recollection of any¬ 
thing after we left Malta, until I came to, and 
found myself in hospital at Queenstown. I was 
wasted to a skeleton, and so weak I couldn’t 
lift my hand. I asked where I was, and the 
sister in charge told me the Serapis had landed 
several of us, and that 1 was the worst case of 
the lot. ‘Your friends at home know you are 
on the mend,’ she told me; ‘His Lordship recog¬ 
nized you by the tattoo marks on your chest, and 
he has sent two cable messages to your sister at 
1 upper Lake, to let her know how things are go¬ 
ing with you.’ 
“In about a week’s time the doctor said I could 
see visitors, and a day or so later, Captain Ireland 
came in. He told me that he was only allowed 
to stay for a few minutes, but that as soon as I 
was fit to leave the hospital, I was to come to 
his place, and stay until I got well. Three weeks 
later they told me 1 could go, and they put me 
into a carriage, along with a nurse, and a man 
in livery to drive us. They put me into one of 
the prettiest little stone cottages you ever saw. 
It had been all ready fixed up for me. There 
was a servant to wait on us, and everything else 
that I could wish for. That afternoon the 
servant asked the nurse if Lord and Lady Dun¬ 
shannon could see Sergeant Henshaw, or was he 
too tired. 
“It was ‘Captain Ireland’ and Miss Castin, that 
was. She looked very little older than when I 
saw her standing the dogs off in the snow. It 
seems that he took a fancy to her at the time, 
and after he left me, he went to Montreal and 
met her again. They were married a year or so 
after I left the country. He sent word to me, 
but the letter came back marked ‘gone away; no 
address.’ She happened to notice in one of the 
papers that several Canadian voyageurs had been 
landed at Kingston from the Serapis, and at the 
head of the list was my name, ‘Sergeant Jacob 
Henshaw.’ Lord Dunshannon went to the hos¬ 
pital and he identified me by the moosehead tat- 
toed on my chest. I was so changed by sickness 
that my own mother wouldn’t have known me, 
and he told them to give me a private room and 
the best of everything, and he would foot the 
bill. They made me stay with them until after the 
March gales—I landed at Kingston in July—and if 
I’d been the finest gentleman in the land, they 
couldn’t have done more for me. His Lordship 
offered to find a place for me, with a house free 
of rent, and four hundred dollars a year of our 
money, but I knew I couldn’t stand the life there. 
I have lived in the woods all my life, and I hope 
to die there. 
“My note to Martin Porter went outlawed. He 
made some kind of settlement with his creditors 
and came back again, but he didn’t dare to sue 
on that, or several other notes he raised. It 
takes all kinds of people to make a world. Look 
at old Mr. Castin living in a shanty, half starved 
and half frozen, and too proud to ask his grand¬ 
daughter for a dollar, out of all her thousands; 
and she, more than willing to give him all he 
wanted, and that miserable praying, preaching 
sneak of a Martin Porter trying to rob me of ten 
years’ savings on a forged note. He died a 
pauper in Colchester County Poor House, where 
he helped to send so many other people. Mr. 
Castin died at Dunshannon Priory, and lived to 
see two great-grandchildren, both boys. They 
call them both St. Castine-Ireland, so the name 
is still kept alive. The wild apple trees are 
twenty feet high in the cellar of the old place at 
Lake Castin, and last year I went there on a 
partridge hunt. There isn’t a log or a board of 
the old buildings left, but I had only to shut my 
eyes, and I could see the whole thing over again 
as it happened that Christmas day—the old build¬ 
ings, the cutting in the snow, and the wee scrap 
of a girl at the hovel door, standing off the 
three dogs from the fox who’d taken sanctuary.” 
Nova Scotia. EDMUND F. L. Jenner. 
ROUGHING IT 
soon grows tiresome unless the food is good. Good milk 
is one item indispensable to a cheerful camp, and 
Borden’s solves the problem. Borden’s Eagle Brand 
Condensed Milk and Peerless Brand Evaporated Milk 
keep indefinitely, anywhere, and fill every milk or cream 
requirement. Beware of cheap imitations.— Adv. 
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