“After this maybe he won’t want to follow orders.  Maybe he’ll get sort of free and easy and independent.”

“If he does, you watch Dad give him his marching orders.  Dad won’t have no one lifting heads agin’ him.”

“Neither will I,” snapped Joe.  “I guess we own this house.  I guess we support that big hulk.  I’m going to try him right quick.”

He went back to the door of the shack.  “Bull, they ain’t any wood for the stove tonight.  Go chop some quick.”

The floor squeaked and groaned under Bull’s weight as he rose, and again the brothers looked to each other.

“All right,” came cheerily from Bull Hunter.

He came through the door with his ax and went to the log pile.  The brothers watched him throw aside the top logs and get at the heavier trunks underneath.  He tore one of these out, laid it in place, and the sun flashed on the swift circle of the ax.  Joe and Harry stepped back as though the light had blinded them.

“He didn’t never work like that before,” declared Joe.

The ax was buried almost to the haft in the tough wood, and the steel was wrenching out with a squeak of the metal against the resisting wood.  Again the blinding circle and the indescribable sound of the ax’s impact, slicing through the wood.  A great chip snapped up high over the shoulder of the chopper and dropped solidly to the ground at the feet of the brothers.  Again they exchanged glances and drew a little closer together.  The log divided under the shower of eating blows, and Bull attacked the next section.

Presently he came to a pause, leaning on the handle of the ax and staring into the distance.  At this the brothers sighed with relief.

“I guess he ain’t changed so much,” said Harry.  “But it was queer, eh?  Kind of like a bear waking up after he’d been sleeping all winter!”

They jarred Bull out of his dream with a shout and set him to work again; then they started the preparations for the evening meal.  The simple preparations were soon completed, but after the potatoes were boiled, they delayed frying the bacon, for their father, old Bill Campbell, had not yet returned from his hunting trip and he disliked long-cooked food.  Things had to be freshly served to suit Bill, and his sons dared the wrath of heaven rather than the biting reproaches of the old man.

It was strange that Bill delayed his coming so long.  As a rule he was always back before the coming of evening.  An old and practiced mountaineer, he had never been known to lose sense of direction or sense of distance, and he was an hour overdue when the sun went down and the soft, beautiful mountain twilight began.

There were other reasons which would ordinarily have disturbed Bill and brought him home even ahead of time.  Snow had fallen heavily above the timberline a few days before, and now the keen whistling of the wind and the swift curtaining of clouds, which was drawing across the sky, threatened a new storm that might even reach down to the shack.