The Fighting Starkleys; or The Test of Courage

The Fighting Starkleys or The test of courage by Theodore Goodridge Roberts. BEAVER DAM was a farm; but long before the day of John Starkley and his wife Constance Emma who lived there with their five children the name had been applied to and accepted by a whole settlement of farms a gristmill a meetinghouse a school and a general store. John Starkley was a farmer with no other source of income than his wide fields. Considering those facts it is not to be wondered at that his three boys and two girls had been bred to an active early-rising robust way of life from their early childhood.. The original human habitation of Beaver Dam had been built of pine logs by John's grandfather one Maj. Richard Starkley and his friend and henchman Two-Blanket Sacobie a Malecite sportsman from the big river. The present house had been built only a few years before the major's death by his sons Peter and Richard and a son of old Two-Blanket of hand-hewn timbers whipsawn boards and planks and hand-split shingles. But the older house still stands solid and true and weather-tight on its original ground; its lower floor is a tool house and general lumber room and its upper floor a granary.. Soon after the completion of the new house the major's son Richard left Beaver Dam for the town of St. John where he found employment with a firm of merchants trading to London Spain and the West Indies. He was sent to Jamaica; and from that tropic isle he sent home at one time and another cases of guava jelly and hot stuff a sawfish's saw and half a dozen letters. From Jamaica he was promoted to London; and as the years passed his letters became less and less frequent until they at last ceased entirely. So much for the major's son Richard.. Peter stuck to the farm. He was a big kind-hearted quiet fellow a hard worker a great reader of his father's few books. He married the beautiful daughter of a Scotchman who had recently settled at Green Hill—a Scotchman with a red beard a pedigree longer and a deal more twisted than the road to Fredericton a mastery of the bagpipes two hundred acres of wild land and an empty sporran. Of Peter Starkley and his beautiful wife Flora came John who had his father's steadfastness and his mother's fire. He went farther afield for his wife than his father had gone—out to the big river St. John and down it many miles to the sleepy old village and elm-shaded meadows of Gagetown. It was a long way for a busy young farmer to go courting; but Constance Emma Garden was worth a thousand longer journeys.