sy-Lilly made herself at home in the camp. For a few
days she fretted after her father, whenever she was left for a moment
to her own devices; but Jimmy Brackett was ever on hand to divert her
mind with astounding fairy-tales during the hours when the rest of the
hands were away chopping and hauling. Long after she had forgotten to
fret, she would have little "cryin' spells" at night, remembering her
father's good-night kiss. But a baby's sorrow, happily, is shorter
than its remembrance; and Rosy-Lilly soon learned to repeat her
phrase: "Poor Daddy had to go 'way-'way-off," without the quivering
lip and wistful look which made the big woodsmen's hearts tighten so
painfully beneath their homespun shirts. Conroy's Camp was a spacious,
oblong cabin of "chinked" logs, with a big stove in the middle. The
bunks were arranged in a double tier along one wall, and a plank table
(rude, but massive) along the other. Built on at one end, beside the
door, was the kitchen, or cookhouse, crowded, but clean and orderly,
and bright with shining tins. At the inner end of the main room a
corner was boarded off to make a tiny bedroom, no bigger than a
cupboard. This was the Boss's private apartment. It contained two
narrow bunks--one for the Boss himself, who looked much too big for
it; and one for the only guest whom the camp ever expected to
entertain, the devoted missionary-priest, who, on his snowshoes, was
wont to make the round of the widely scattered camps once or twice in
a winter. This guest-bunk the Boss at once allotted to Rosy-Lilly, but
on the strict condition that Johnson should continue to act as nurse
and superintend Rosy-Lilly's nightly toilet.

Rosy-Lilly had not been in the camp a week before McWha's "ugliness"
to her had aroused even the Boss's resentment, and the Boss was a
just man. Of course, it was generally recognized that McWha was not
bound, by any law or obligation, to take any notice of the child,
still less to "make a fuss over her," with the rest of the camp. But
Jimmy Brackett expressed the popular sentiment when he growled,
looking sourly at the back of McWha's unconscious red head bowed
ravenously over his plate of beans--

"If only he'd _do_ something, so's we c'ld _lick_ some decency inter
'im!"

There was absolutely nothing to be done about it, however; for Red
McWha was utterly within his rights.

Rosy-Lilly, as we have seen, was not yet five years old; but certain
of the characteristics of her se