'
"'Better come inside, then,' he grins, an' I followed him into a little
box of a private office. 'Of course,' I says later, when I'd told him
what I wanted, 'most of my collateral is pine timber, an' I suppose, as
Orcutt says, it's depreciated----'
"'Depreciated?' he asks. 'Why has it depreciated? It's all standin'
on end, ain't it?' he says. An' it ain't gettin' no smaller, is it?
An' they're layin' down the pine a damn sight faster than God Almighty
can grow it, ain't they?' An' when I admitted that such was the facts,
he laughed. 'Well then, we'll just go over your reports an' estimates,
an' I don't think we'll have any trouble about doin' business.'
"An we never have had no trouble, an' we've been doin' business every
day since."
"But the coat?" reminded Hedin, after an interval of several minutes.
"I'm coming to that. Orcutt ain't human, but his wife is. When he
found out I'd slipped out of his clutches an' swung all my business
over to Bronson's bank he never by so much as a word or a look let on
that he even noticed it. They still have an account at the store; they
can't help it, because no other store in Terrace City keeps the stock
we do. But Mrs. Orcutt does all her real shoppin' in New York or
Chicago."
II
Oskar Hedin loved fur, and the romance of fur. From his earliest
recollection he had loved it as he had curled up and listened to the
stories of his father, a great upstanding Viking of a sailor man, who
year after year had forced his little vessel into the far North where
he traded with the natives, and who had lost his life in the ice floes
of the frozen sea while sailing with Nordenskjold.
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