s, although I'd have to argue there
is a little brain in the combination. I must figure out all these
things. But there is one on the lady: She should have settled these
points before she became quite so familiar. I have that for a foundation
anyway, so I'll go on cutting wood, and the remainder will be up to her
when I find her. When I find her," repeated the Harvester slowly. "But I
am not going to locate her very soon monkeying around in these woods. I
should be out where people are, looking for her right now."

He chopped steadily until the tree crashed over, and then, noticing a
rapidly filling bucket, he struck the ax in the wood and began gathering
sap. When he had made the round, he drove to the camp, filled the
kettles, and lighted the fire. While it started he cut and scraped
sassafras roots, and made clippings of tag alder, spice brush and white
willow into big bundles that were ready to have the bark removed during
the night watch, and then cured in the dry-house.

He went home at evening to feed the poultry and replenish the
ever-burning fire of the engine and to keep the cabin warm enough that
food would not freeze. With an oilcloth and blankets he returned to camp
and throughout the night tended the buckets and boiling sap, and worked
or dozed by the fire between times. Toward the end of boiling, when the
sap was becoming thick, it had to be watched with especial care so it
would not scorch. But when the kettles were freshly filled the Harvester
sat beside them and carefully split tender twigs of willow and slipped
off the bark ready to be spread on the trays.

"You are a good tonic," he mused as he worked, "and you go into some of
the medicine for rheumatism. If she ever has it we will give her some
of you, and then she will be all right again. Strange that I should be
preparing medicinal bark by the sugar camp fire, but I have to make this
hay, not while the sun shines, but when the bark is loose, while the sap
is rising. Wonder who will use this. Depends largely on where I sell it.
Anyway, I hope it will take the pain out of some poor body. Prices so
low now, not worth gathering unless I can kill time on it while waiting
for something else. Never got over seven cents a pound for the best I
ever sold, and it takes a heap of these little quills to make a pound
when they are dry. That's all of you----about twenty-five cents' worth.
But even that is better than doing nothing while I wait, and some one
ha