To Breyette and MacDonald that forlorn cabin was after all nothing new
or disheartening in their experience. They knew how a deserted house
goes to rack and ruin. They knew also how to restore such an abandoned
place to a measure of its original homeliness. And neither the spectacle
of the one nor the labor of the other gave them any qualms. They were
practical-minded men to whom musty, forsaken cabins, isolation, the
hollow emptiness of the North, the sultry heat of the brief summer, the
flies, the deep snows and iron frosts of the long winter, were a part of
their life, the only life they knew.
But they were not wholly devoid of sentiment and perception. They
recognized in Thompson a lively susceptibility to certain disagreeable
things which they accepted as a matter of course. They saw that he was
rather less capable of coping with such a situation than a ten-year-old
native boy, that a dirty cabin in a lonely clearing made him stand
aghast. And so--although their bargain with him was closed when they
deposited him and his goods on the bank of Lone Moose--they set to work
with energy to renovate his forlorn-looking abode.
They made short work of the rats' and the swallows' nests. Breyette
quickly fashioned a broom of fine willow twigs, brought up a shovel from
the canoe, and swept and shovelled the place out. MacDonald meanwhile
cleared the weeds and grass from a space before the cabin and burned up
the unseemly refuse. The stove fulfilled its functions perfectly despite
the red rust of disuse. With buckets of boiling water they flooded and
drenched the floor and walls till the interior was as fresh and clean as
if new erected.
The place was habitable by sundown. While the long northern twilight
held the three of them carried up the freight that burdened the canoe,
and piled it in one corner, sacks of flour, sides of bacon and salt
pork, boxes of dried fruit, the miscellaneous articles with which a man
must supply himself when he goes into the wilderness.
That night they slept upon a meager thickness of blanket spread on the
hard floor.
In the morning Mike went to work again. He showed Thompson how to
arrange a mattress of hemlock boughs on the bed frame. It was a simple
enough makeshift, soft and springy when Thompson spread his bedding over
it. Then Mike superintended the final disposition of his supplies so
that there would be some semblance of order instead of an
indiscriminately mixed pile in which the article wanted was always at
the bottom. Incidentally he strove to impart to Thompson certain
rudimentary principles in the cooking of simple food. He illustrated the
method of mixing a batch of baking-powder bread, and how to parboil salt
pork before cooking, explained to him the otherwise mysterious
expansion of rice and beans and dried apples in boiling water, all of
which Breyette was shrewd enough to realize that Thompson knew nothing
about. He had a ready ear for instructions but a poor understanding of
these matters. So Mike reiterated out of his experience of camp cooking,
and Thompson tried to remember.