“Go on now, Guy, and get the skins—­that is, if you want a drum for the war dance.  You’re the only one in the crowd that’s man enough to make the raise of a hide,” and fired by this flattery, Guy sped away.

Meanwhile Caleb worked on the hollow log.  He trimmed off the bark, then with the hatchet he cleared out all the punk and splinters inside.  He made a fire on the ground in the middle of the drum-log as it stood on end, and watching carefully, he lifted it off from time to time and chopped away all the charred parts, smoothing and trimming till he had the log down thin and smooth within and without.  They heard Guy shouting soon after he left.  They thought him near at hand, but he did not come.  Trimming the drum-log took a couple of hours, and still Guy did not return.  The remark from Caleb, “’Bout ready for the skins now!” called from Sam the explanation, “Guess Old Man Burns snapped him up and put him to weeding the garden.  Probably that was him we heard gettin’ licked.”

“Old Man Burns” was a poor and shiftless character, a thin, stoop-shouldered man.  He was only thirty-five years of age, but, being married, that was enough to secure for him the title “Old Man.”  In Sanger, if Tom Nolan was a bachelor at eighty years of age he would still be Tom Nolan, “wan of the bhoys,” but if he married at twenty he at once became “Old Man Nolan.”

Mrs. Burns had produced the usual string of tow-tops, but several had died, the charitable neighbours said of starvation, leaving Guy, the eldest, his mother’s darling, then a gap and four little girls, four, three, two and one years of age.  She was a fat, fair, easy-going person, with a general sense of antagonism to her husband, who was, of course, the natural enemy of the children.  Jim Burns cherished the ideal of bringing “that boy” up right—­that is, getting all the work he could out of him—­and Guy clung to his own ideal of doing as little work as possible.  In this clash of ideals Guy’s mother was his firm, though more or less secret, ally.  He was without fault in her eyes:  all that he did was right.  His freckled visage and pudgy face were types of noble beauty, standards of comeliness and human excellence; his ways were ways of pleasantness and all his paths were peace; Margat Burns was sure of it.

Burns had a good deal of natural affection, but he was erratic; sometimes he would flog Guy mercilessly for nothing, and again laugh at some serious misdeed, so that the boy never knew just what to expect, and kept on the safe side by avoiding his “Paw” as much as possible.  His visits to the camp had been thoroughly disapproved, partly because it was on Old Man Raften’s land and partly because it enabled Guy to dodge the chores.  Burns had been quite violent about it once or twice, but Mrs. Burns had the great advantage of persistence, and like the steady strain of the skilful angler on the slender line, it wins in the end against the erratic violence of the strongest trout.  She had managed then that Guy should join the Injun camp, and gloried in his outrageously exaggerated accounts of how he could lick them all at anything, “though they wuz so much older’n bigger’n he wuz.”