xes, peavies, and tools of all descriptions. This was evidently the
last wagon-trip, for little remained to be done.

"I ought by rights to take the lumber of the roofs and floors," observed
Radway thoughtfully, "but I guess she don't matter."

Thorpe had never seen him in better spirits. He ascribed the older man's
hilarity to relief over the completion of a difficult task. That evening
the seven dined together at one end of the long table. The big room
exhaled already the atmosphere of desertion.

"Not much like old times, is she?" laughed Radway. "Can't you just shut
your eyes and hear Baptiste say, 'Mak' heem de soup one tam more for
me'? She's pretty empty now."

Jackson Hines looked whimsically down the bare board. "More room than
God made for geese in Ireland," was his comment.

After supper they even sat outside for a little time to smoke their
pipes, chair-tilted against the logs of the cabins, but soon the chill
of melting snow drove them indoors. The four teamsters played seven-up
in the cook camp by the light of a barn lantern, while Thorpe and the
cook wrote letters. Thorpe's was to his sister.

"I have been in the hospital for about a month," he wrote. "Nothing
serious--a crack on the head, which is all right now. But I cannot get
home this summer, nor, I am afraid, can we arrange about the school this
year. I am about seventy dollars ahead of where I was last fall, so you
see it is slow business. This summer I am going into a mill, but the
wages for green labor are not very high there either," and so on.

When Miss Helen Thorpe, aged seventeen, received this document she
stamped her foot almost angrily. "You'd think he was a day-laborer!"
she cried. "Why doesn't he try for a clerkship or something in the city
where he'd have a chance to use his brains!"

The thought of her big, strong, tanned brother chained to a desk rose to
her, and she smiled a little sadly.

"I know," she went on to herself, "he'd rather be a common laborer
in the woods than railroad manager in the office. He loves his
out-of-doors."

"Helen!" called a voice from below, "if you're through up there, I wish
you'd come down and help me carry this rug out."

The girl's eyes cleared with a snap.

"So do I!" she cried defiantly, "so do I love out-of-doors! I like
the woods and the fields and the trees just as much as he does, only
differently; but I don't get out!"

And thus she came to feeling rebelliously that her brother h