With his axe and hunting knife Ben prepared a complete set of furniture for their little abode.  His first Work was a surpassing-marvelous dining-room suite of a table and two chairs.  Then he put up shelves for their rapidly dwindling supplies of provisions and cut chunks of spruce log, with a bit of bark remaining, for fireside seats.  And for more than a week, Beatrice was forbidden to enter a certain covert just beyond the glade lest she should prematurely discover an even greater wonder that Ben, in off hours, was preparing for a surprise.

From time to time she heard him busily at work, the ring of his axe and his gay whistling as he whittled bolts of wood; but other than that it concerned the grizzly skin she had not the least idea of his task.  But the work was completed at last, and then came two days of rather significant silence,—­quite incomprehensible to the girl.  She was at a loss why Ben did not reveal his treasure.

But one morning she missed the familiar sounds of his fire-building, usually his first work on wakening.  The very fact of their absence startled her wide-awake, while otherwise she would have perhaps slept late into the morning.  Ben had seemingly vanished into the heavy timber across the glade.

Presently she heard him muttering and grunting as he moved some heavy object to the door of the cave.  Boyishly, he could not wait for the usual late hour when she wakened.  He made a wholly unnecessary amount of noise as he built the fire.  Then he thrust his lean head into the cavern opening.

“I hope I haven’t waked you up?” he said.

The girl smiled secretly.  “I wanted to wake up, anyway—­to-day.”

“I wish you’d get up and come and look at something ugly I’ve got just outside the door.”

She hurried into her outer garments, and in a moment appeared.  It was ugly, certainly, the object that he had fashioned with such tireless toil:  not fitted at all for a stylish city home; yet the girl, for one short instant, stopped breathing.  It was a hammock, suspended on a stout frame, to take the place of her tree-bough bed on the cave floor.  He had used the grizzly skin, hanging it with unbreakable sinew, and fashioning it in such a manner that folds of the hide could be turned over her on cold nights.  For a moment she gazed, very earnestly, into the rugged, homely, raw-boned face of her companion.

Beatrice was deeply and inexplicably sobered, yet a curious happiness took swift possession of her heart.  Reading the gratitude in her eyes, Ben’s lips broke into a radiant smile.

“I guess you’ve forgotten what day it is,” he said.

“Of course.  I hardly know the month.”

“I’ve notched each day, you know.  And maybe you’ve forgotten—­on the ride out from Snowy Gulch—­we talked of birthdays.  To-day is yours.”

She stared at him in genuine astonishment.  She had not dreamed that this little confidence, given in a careless moment of long weeks before, had lingered in the man’s memory.  She had supposed that the fury and savagery of his war with her father and the latter’s followers had effaced all such things as this.