“Until Mac’s eyes get all right.  I understand.”

Again the Colonel had made a sound like “Sh!” and went on swinging his axe.

They worked without words till the Boy’s tree came down.  Then he stopped a moment, and wiped his face.

“It isn’t so cold to-day, not by a long shot, for all Potts’s howling about his rheumatics.”

“It isn’t cold that starts that kind of pain.”

“No, siree.  I’m not much of a doctor, but I can see Potts’s rheumatism doesn’t depend on the weather.”

“Never you mind Potts.”

“I don’t mind Potts.  I only mind Mac.  What’s the matter with Mac, anyway?”

“Oh, he’s just got cold feet.  Maybe he’ll thaw out by-and-by.”

“Did you ever think what Mac’s like?  With that square-cut jaw and sawed-off nose, everything about him goin’ like this”—­the Boy described a few quick blunt angles in the air—­“well, sir, he’s the livin’ image of a monkey-wrench.  I’m comin’ to think he’s as much like it inside as he is out.  He can screw up for a prayer-meetin’, or he can screw down for business—­when he’s a mind, but, as Jimmie over there says, ‘the divil a different pace can you put him through.’  I like monkey-wrenches!  I’m only sayin’ they aren’t as limber as willa-trees.”

No response from the Colonel, who was making the chips fly.  It had cost his great body a good many aches and bruises, but he was a capital axeman now, and not such a bad carpenter, though when the Boy said as much he had answered: 

“Carpenter!  I’m just a sort of a well-meanin’ wood-butcher”; and deeply he regretted that in all his young years on a big place in the country he had learnt so little about anything but horses and cattle.

On the way back to dinner they spoke again of this difficulty of the boards.  O’Flynn whistled “Rory O’More” with his pleasant air of detachment.

“You and the others would take more interest in the subject,” said the Boy a little hotly, “if we hadn’t let you fellows use nearly all the boat-planks for your bunks, and now we haven’t got any for our own.”

“Let us use ’em!  Faith! we had a right to’m.”

“To boards out of our boat!”

“And ye can have the loan o’ the whip-saw to make more, whenever the fancy takes ye.”

“Loan o’ the whip-saw!  Why, it’s mine,” says the Colonel.

“Divil a bit of it, man!” says O’Flynn serenely.  “Everything we’ve got belongs to all of us, except a sack o’ coffee, a medicine-chest, and a dimmi-john.  And it’s mesilf that’s afraid the dimmi-john—­”

“What’s the use of my having bought a whip-saw?” interrupted the Colonel, hurriedly.  “What’s the good of it, if the only man that knows how to use it—­”

“Is more taken up wid bein’ a guardjin angel to his pardner’s dimmi-john—­”

The Colonel turned and frowned at the proprietor of the dimmi-john.  The Boy had dropped behind to look at some marten tracks in the fresh-fallen snow.