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.
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