That night a heavy storm set in, and next day the boys found their flimsy wigwam blown down—­nothing but a heap of ruins.

Some time after, Raften asked at the table in characteristic stern style, “Bhoys, what’s doin’ down to yer camp?  Is yer wigwam finished?”

“No good,” said Sam.  “All blowed down.”

“How’s that?”

“I dunno’.  It smoked like everything.  We couldn’t stay in it.”

“Couldn’t a-been right made,” said Raften; then with a sudden interest, which showed how eagerly he would have joined in this forty years ago, he said, “Why don’t ye make a rale taypay?”

“Dunno’ how, an’ ain’t got no stuff.”

“Wall, now, yez have been pretty good an’ ain’t slacked on the wurruk, yez kin have the ould wagon kiver.  Cousin Bert could tache ye how to make it, if he wuz here.  Maybe Caleb Clark knows,” he added, with a significant twinkle of his eye.  “Better ask him.”  Then he turned to give orders to the hired men, who, of course, ate at the family table.

“Da, do you care if we go to Caleb?”

“I don’t care fwhat ye do wid him,” was the reply.

Raften was no idle talker and Sam knew that, so as soon as “the law was off” he and Yan got out the old wagon cover.  It seemed like an acre of canvas when they spread it out.  Having thus taken possession, they put it away again in the cow-house, their own domain, and Sam said:  “I’ve a great notion to go right to Caleb; he sho’ly knows more about a teepee than any one else here, which ain’t sayin’ much.”

“Who’s Caleb?”

“Oh, he’s the old Billy Goat that shot at Da oncet, just after Da beat him at a horse trade.  Let on it was a mistake:  ’twas, too, as he found out, coz Da bought up some old notes of his, got ’em cheap, and squeezed him hard to meet them.  He’s had hard luck ever since.

“He’s a mortal queer old duck, that Caleb.  He knows heaps about the woods, coz he was a hunter an’ trapper oncet.  My! wouldn’t he be down on me if he knowed who was my Da, but he don’t have to know.”

IV

The Sanger Witch

  The Sanger Witch dwelt in the bend of the creek,
  And neither could read nor write;
  But she knew in a day what few knew in a week,
  For hers was the second sight. 
  “Read?” said she, “I am double read;
  You fools of the ink and pen
  Count never the eggs, but the sticks of the nest,
  See the clothes, not the souls of men.”

  —­Cracked Jimmy’s Ballad of Sanger.

The boys set out for Caleb’s.  It was up the creek away from the camp ground.  As they neared the bend they saw a small log shanty, with some poultry and a pig at the door.

“That’s where the witch lives,” said Sam.

“Who—­old Granny de Neuville?”

“Yep, and she just loves me.  Oh, yes; about the same way an old hen loves a Chicken-hawk.  ’Pears to me she sets up nights to love me.”