“Father Brachet—­him know him heap better send Nicholas when him want man go God-damn quick.  Me no stop—­no—­no stop.”

He drew on his mittens proudly, unjarred by remembrance of how his good resolution had come to grief.

“Where you off to now?”

“Me ketchum Father Wills—­me give letter.”  He tapped his deerskin-covered chest.  “Ketchum sure ’fore him leave Ikogimeut.”

“You come back with Father Wills?”

Nicholas nodded.

“Hooray! we’ll all work like sixty!” shouted the Boy, “and by Saturday (that’s five sleeps) we’ll have the wall done and the house warm, and you and”—­he caught himself up; not thus in public would he break the news to Mac—­“you’ll be back in time for the big Blow-Out.”  To clinch matters, he accompanied Nicholas from the cabin to the river trail, explaining:  “You savvy?  Big feast—­all same Indian.  Heap good grub.  No prayer-meetin’—­you savvy?—­no church this time.  Big fire, big feed.  All kinds—­apples, shuhg, bacon—­no cook him, you no like,” he added, basely truckling to the Prince’s peculiar taste.

Nicholas rolled his single eye in joyful anticipation, and promised faithfully to grace the scene.

* * * * *

This was all very fine ... but Father Wills!  The last thing at night and the first thing in the morning the Boy looked the problem in the face, and devised now this, now that, adroit and disarming fashion of breaking the news to Mac.

But it was only when the daring giver of invitations was safely in bed, and Mac equally safe down in the Little Cabin, that it seemed possible to broach the subject.  He devised scenes in which, airily and triumphantly, he introduced Father Wills, and brought Mac to the point of pining for Jesuit society; but these scenes were actable only under conditions of darkness and of solitude.  The Colonel refused to have anything to do with the matter.

“Our first business, as I see it, is to keep peace in the camp, and hold fast to a good understanding with one another.  It’s just over little things like this that trouble begins.  Mac’s one of us; Father Wills is an outsider.  I won’t rile Mac for the sake of any Jesuit alive.  No, sir; this is your funeral, and you’re obliged to attend.”

Before three of Nicholas’s five sleeps were accomplished, the Boy began to curse the hour he had laid eyes on Father Wills.  He began even to speculate desperately on the good priest’s chances of tumbling into an air-hole, or being devoured by a timely wolf.  But no, life was never so considerate as that.  Yet he could neither face being the cause of the first serious row in camp, nor endure the thought of having his particular guest—­drat him!—­flouted, and the whole House-Warming turned to failure and humiliation.

Indeed, the case looked desperate.  Only one day more now before he would appear—­be flouted, insulted, and go off wounded, angry, leaving the Boy with an irreconciliable quarrel against Mac, and the House-Warming turned to chill recrimination and to wretchedness.