This
would, of course, spell nearly a total loss of it, as far as Orde
was concerned.
The chief anxiety under which the riverman laboured, however, was
the imminent prospect of losing under the mortgage all the Northern
Peninsula timber. He had thought that the firm would be able to
step in for its redemption, even if he personally found himself
unable to meet the obligation. Three hundred million feet would
seem to be too important a matter to let go under so small a
mortgage. Now as the time approached, he realised that if he could
not pay the notes, the firm would certainly be unable to do so.
What with the second mortgage, due two years later, and to be met by
Newmark; with the outstanding obligations; with the new enterprise
of the vessels ordered from Duncan McLeod, Newmark and Orde would be
unable to raise anything like the necessary amount. To his personal
anxieties Orde added a deep and bitter self-reproach at having
involved his partner in what amounted to a total loss.
Spurred doubly by these considerations, then, he fell upon the woods
work with unparalleled ferocity. A cut and sale of the forty
million feet remaining of the firm's up-river holdings, together
with the tolls to be collected for driving the river that spring
would, if everything went right and no change in the situation took
place, bring Orde through the venture almost literally by "the skin
of his teeth.
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