in time's the matter with you, Hollis?" says Bob Stokes, with a
great slap on my arm; "you're giving that 'ere ox molasses on his hay!"

Sure enough I was, and he said I acted like a dazed creatur, and very
likely I did. But I couldn't have told Bob the reason. You see, I knew
Nancy was just drawing up her little rocking-chair--the one with the
green cushion--close by the fire, sitting there with the children to
wait for the tea to boil. And I knew--I couldn't help knowing, if I'd
tried hard for it--how she was crying away softly in the dark, so that
none of them could see her, to think of the words we'd said, and I gone
in without ever making of them up. I was sorry for them then. O Johnny,
I was sorry, and she was thirty miles away. I'd got to be sorry five
months, thirty miles away, and couldn't let her know.

The boys said I was poor company that first week, and I shouldn't wonder
if I was. I couldn't seem to get over it any way, to think I couldn't
let her know.

If I could have sent her a scrap of a letter, or a message, or
something, I should have felt better. But there wasn't any chance of
that this long time, unless we got out of pork or fodder, and had to
send down,--which we didn't expect to, for we'd laid in more than
usual.

We had two pretty rough weeks' work to begin with, for the worst storms
of the season set in, and kept in, and I never saw their like, before or
since. It seemed as if there'd never be an end to them. Storm after
storm, blow after blow, freeze after freeze; half a day's sunshine, and
then at it again! We were well tired of it before they stopped; it made
the boys homesick.

However, we kept at work pretty brisk,--lumbermen aren't the fellows to
be put out for a snow-storm,--cutting and hauling and sawing, out in the
sleet and wind. Bob Stokes froze his left foot that second week, and I
was frost-bitten pretty badly myself. Cullen--he was the boss--he was
well out of sorts, I tell you, before the sun came out, and cross enough
to bite a ten-penny nail in two.

But when the sun _is_ out, it isn't so bad a kind of life, after all. At
work all day, with a good hot dinner in the middle; then back to the
shanties at dark, to as rousing a fire and tiptop swagan as anybody
could ask for. Holt was cook that season, and Holt couldn't be beaten on
his swagan.

Now you don't mean to say you don't know what swagan is? Well, well! To
think of it! All I have to say is, you don't know what's g