as his
father had before him. He went where he pleased, safe except from blind
nature and the unfriendly edges of whirling saws. Men fished him out of
the dammed river, where logs floated, waiting conversion into
merchantable planking, and the Varian boys, big, tawny youngsters, were
his body-guard. These perplexed Onnie Killelia in her first days at
Rawling's Hope.

"The agent's lads are whistlin' for Master San," she reported to Mrs.
Rawling. "Shall I be findin' him?"

"The agent's lads? Do you mean the Varian boys?"

"Them's them. Wouldn't Jim Varian be his honor's agent? Don't he be
payin' the tenantry an' sayin' where is the trees to be felled? I forbid
them to come in, as Miss Margot--which is a queer name!--is asleep
sound, an' Master Pete."

"Jim Varian came here with his honor's father, and taught his honor to
shoot and swim, also his honor's brother Peter, in New York, where we
live in winter. Yes, I suppose you'd call Jim Varian his honor's agent.
The boys take care of Master San almost as well as you do."

Onnie sniffed, balancing from heel to heel.

"Fine care! An' Bill Varian lettin' him go romping by the poison-ivy,
which God lets grow in this place like weeds in a widow's garden. An'
his honor, they do be sayin', sends Bill to a fine school, and will the
others after him, and to a college like Dublin has after. An' they
callin' himself San like he was their brother!"

As a volunteer nurse-maid Onnie was quite miraculous to her mistress.
Apparently she could follow Sanford by scent, for his bare soles left no
traces in the wild grass, and he moved rapidly, appearing at home
exactly when his stomach suggested. He was forbidden only the slate
ledges beyond the log basin, where rattlesnakes took the sun, and the
trackless farther reaches of the valley, bewildering to a small boy,
with intricate brooks and fallen cedar or the profitable yellow pine.
Onnie, crying out on her saints, retrieved him from the turn-table-pit
of the narrow-gauge logging-road, and pursued his fair head up the
blue-stone crags behind the house, her vast feet causing avalanches
among the garden beds. She withdrew him with railings from the
enchanting society of louse-infested Polish children, and danced
hysterically on the shore of the valley-wide, log-stippled pool when the
Varians took him to swim. She bore him off to bed, lowering at the
actual nurse. She filled his bath, she cut his toe-nails. She sang him
to sleep with "