Chapter 6

The lone pine stood in Brower's pasture, just clear of the woods.
When the sun rose, one could see its taper shadow stretching away
to the foot of Woody Ledge, and at sunset it lay like a fallen mast
athwart the cow-paths, its long top arm a flying pennant on the
side of Bowman's Hill. In summer this bar of shadow moved like a
clock-hand on the green dial of the pasture, and the help could tell
the time by the slant of it. Lone Pine had a mighty girth at the
bottom, and its bare body tapered into the sky as straight as an
arrow. Uncle Eb used to say that its one long, naked branch that
swung and creaked near the top of it, like a sign of hospitality on
the highway of the birds, was two hundred feet above ground.
There were a few stubs here and there upon its shaft -the roost of
crows and owls and hen-hawks. It must have passed for a low
resort in the feathered kingdom because it was only the robbers of
the sky that halted on Lone Pine.

This towering shaft of dead timber commemorated the ancient
forest through which the northern Yankees cut their trails in the
beginning of the century. They were a tall, big fisted, brawny lot of
men who came across the Adirondacks from Vermont, and began
to break the green canopy that for ages had covered the valley of
the St Lawrence. Generally they drove a cow with them, and such
game as they could kill on the journey supplemented their diet of
'pudding and milk'. Some settled where the wagon broke or where
they had buried a member of the family, and there they cleared the
forests that once covered the smooth acres of today. Gradually the
rough surface of the trail grew smoother until it became Paradise
Road - the well-worn thoroughfare of the stagecoach with its 'inns
and outs', as the drivers used to say - the inns where the 'men folks'
sat in the firelight of the blazing logs after supper and told tales of
adventure until bedtime, while the women sat with their knitting in
the parlour, and the young men wrestled in the stableyard. The
men of middle age had stooped and massive shoulders, and
deep-furrowed brows: Tell one of them he was growing old and he
might answer you by holding his whip in front of him and leaping
over it between his hands.

There was a little clearing around that big pine tree when David
Brower settled in the valley. Its shadows shifting in the light of sun
and moon, like the arm of a compass, swept the spreading acres of
his farm, and he built his house some forty rods from the foot of it
on higher ground. David was the oldest of thirteen children. His
father had died the year before he came to St Lawrence county,
leaving him nothing but heavy responsibilities. Fortunately, his
great strength and his kindly nature were equal to