The Magnetic North Part 7

At the same time it is to be feared that none of his companions really appreciated the pedagogue's learning. Nor had anyone but the Boy sympathised with his resolution to make a Collection. What they wanted was eatable game, and they affected no intelligent interest in knowing the manners and customs of the particular species that was sending up appetising odours from the pot.

They even applauded the rudeness of the Boy, who one day responded to Mac's gravely jubilant "Look here! I've got the _Parus Hudsonicus_!"--

"Poor old man! What do you do for it?"

And when anybody after that was indisposed, they said he might be sickening for an attack of Parus Hudsonicus, and in that case it was a bad look-out.

Well for Mac that he wouldn't have cared a red cent to impress the greatest naturalist alive, let alone a lot of fellows who didn't know a t.i.tmouse from a disease.

Meanwhile work on the Big Cabin had gone steadily forward. From the outside it looked finished now, and distinctly imposing. From what were left of the precious planks out of the bottom of the best boat they had made the door--two by four, and opening directly in front of that masterpiece, the rock fireplace. The great stone chimney was the pride of the camp and the talk before the winter was done of all "the Lower River."

Spurred on partly by the increased intensity of the cold, partly by the Colonel's nonsense about the way they did it "down South," Mac roused himself, and turned out a better piece of masonry for the Big Cabin than he had thought necessary for his own. But everybody had a share in the glory of that fireplace. The Colonel, Potts, and the Boy selected the stone, and brought it on a rude litter out of a natural quarry from a place a mile or more away up on the bare mountain-side. O'Flynn mixed and handed up the mud-mortar, while Mac put in some brisk work with it before it stiffened in the increasing cold.

Everybody was looking forward to getting out of the tent and into the warm cabin, and the building of the fireplace stirred enthusiasm. It was two and a half feet deep, three and a half feet high, and four feet wide, and when furnished with ten-inch hack logs, packed in glowing ashes and laid one above another, with a roaring good blaze in front of birch and spruce, that fire would take a lot of beating, as the Boy admitted, "even in the tat-pine Florida country."

But no fire on earth could prevent the cabin from being swept through, the moment the door was opened, by a fierce and icy air-current. The late autumnal gales revealed the fact that the sole means of ventilation had been so nicely contrived that whoever came in or went out admitted a hurricane of draught that nearly knocked him down. Potts said it took a good half-hour, after anyone had opened the door, to heat the place up again.

"What! You cold?" inquired the usual culprit. The Boy had come in to put an edge on his chopper. "It's stopped snowin', an' you better come along with me, Potts. Swing an axe for a couple of hours--that'll warm you."

"I've got rheumatism in my shoulder to-day," says Potts, hugging the huge fire closer.

"And you've got something wrong with your eyes, eh, Mac?"

Potts narrowed his and widened the great mouth; but he had turned his head so Mac couldn't see him.

The Nova Scotian only growled and refilled his pipe. Up in the woods the Boy repeated the conversation to the Colonel, who looked across at O'Flynn several yards away, and said: "Hus.h.!.+"

"Why must I shut up? Mac's _eyes_ do look rather queer and bloodshot. I should think he'd rather feel we lay it to his eyes than know we're afraid he's peterin' out altogether."

"I never said I was afraid--"

"No, you haven't _said_ much." "I haven't opened my head about it."

"No, but you've tried hard enough for five or six days to get Mac to the point where he would come out and show us how to whip-saw. You haven't _said_ anything, but you've--you've got pretty dignified each time you failed, and we all know what that means."

"We ought to have begun sawing boards for our bunks and swing-shelf a week back, before this heavy snowfall. Besides, there's enough fire-wood now; we're only marking time until--"

"Until Mac's eyes get all right. I understand."

Again the Colonel had made a sound like "s.h.!.+" and went on swinging his axe.

They worked without words till the Boy's tree came down. Then he stopped a moment, and wiped his face.

"It isn't so cold to-day, not by a long shot, for all Potts's howling about his rheumatics."

"It isn't cold that starts that kind of pain."

"No, siree. I'm not much of a doctor, but I can see Potts's rheumatism doesn't depend on the weather."

"Never you mind Potts."

"I don't mind Potts. I only mind Mac. What's the matter with Mac, anyway?"

"Oh, he's just got cold feet. Maybe he'll thaw out by-and-by."

"Did you ever think what Mac's like? With that square-cut jaw and sawed-off nose, everything about him goin' like this"--the Boy described a few quick blunt angles in the air--"well, sir, he's the livin' image of a monkey-wrench. I'm comin' to think he's as much like it inside as he is out. He can screw up for a prayer-meetin', or he can screw down for business--when he's a mind, but, as Jimmie over there says, 'the divil a different pace can you put him through.' I _like_ monkey-wrenches! I'm only sayin' they aren't as limber as willa-trees."

No response from the Colonel, who was making the chips fly. It had cost his great body a good many aches and bruises, but he was a capital axeman now, and not such a bad carpenter, though when the Boy said as much he had answered:

"Carpenter! I'm just a sort of a well-meanin' wood-butcher"; and deeply he regretted that in all his young years on a big place in the country he had learnt so little about anything but horses and cattle.

On the way back to dinner they spoke again of this difficulty of the boards. O'Flynn whistled "Rory O'More" with his pleasant air of detachment.

"You and the others would take more interest in the subject," said the Boy a little hotly, "if we hadn't let you fellows use nearly all the boat-planks for _your_ bunks, and now we haven't got any for our own."

"_Let_ us use 'em! Faith! we had a right to'm."

"To boards out of _our_ boat!"

"And ye can have the loan o' the whip-saw to make more, whenever the fancy takes ye."

"Loan o' the whip-saw! Why, it's mine," says the Colonel.

"Divil a bit of it, man!" says O'Flynn serenely. "Everything we've got belongs to all of us, except a sack o' coffee, a medicine-chest, and a dimmi-john. And it's mesilf that's afraid the dimmi-john--"

"What's the use of my having bought a whip-saw?" interrupted the Colonel, hurriedly. "What's the good of it, if the only man that knows how to use it--"

"Is more taken up wid bein' a guardjin angel to his pardner's dimmi-john--"

The Colonel turned and frowned at the proprietor of the dimmi-john. The Boy had dropped behind to look at some marten tracks in the fresh-fallen snow.

"I'll follow that trail after dinner," says he, catching up the others in time to hear O'Flynn say:

"If it wusn't that ye think only a feller that's been to Caribou can teach ye annything it's Jimmie O'Flynn that 'ud show ye how to play a chune on that same whip-saw."

"Will you show us after dinner?"

"Sure I will."

And he was as good as his word.

This business of turning a tree into boards without the aid of a saw-mill is a thing many placer-miners have to learn; for, even if they are disposed to sleep on the floor, and to do without shelves, they can't do sluicing without sluice-boxes, and they can't make those long, narrow boxes without boards.

So every party that is well fitted out has a whip-saw.

"Furrst ye dig a pit," O'Flynn had said airily, stretched out before the fire after dinner. "Make it about four feet deep, and as long as ye'd like yer boards. When ye've done that I'll come and take a hand."

The little job was not half finished when the light tailed. Two days more of soil-burning and shovelling saw it done.