The next day heavy rolling clouds were drawn across the sky, and all the world was somber and dark.  Paul stood at the entrance to the hut, and now, indeed, he was thankful that they had that shelter, and that they had furs and skins to reinforce their clothing.  As he looked, something cold and wet came out of the sky and struck him upon the face.  Another came, and then another, and in a few moments the air was full of flakes whirled by the wind.

“The first snow,” said Paul.

“Yes,” said Henry, “and let us pray for snows—­many, hard, and deep.  The fiercer the winter the easier it will be to hold back the allied tribes.”

It was not a heavy snow, but it gave an earnest of what might come.  The bare boughs were whipped about in the gale, and creaked dismally.  The ground was covered with white to the depth of about two inches, and dark, rolling waves, looking very chill, chased one another across the lake.  Jim Hart and Paul had managed to build of stones, in one corner of their hut, a rude oven or furnace, with an exterior vent.  They had plastered the stones together with mud, which hardened into a sort of cement, and in this furnace they kindled a little fire.  They did not dare to make it large, because of the smoke, but they had enough coals to give out a warm and pleasant glow.

All of them retreated for a while to the “mansion,” as Paul rather proudly called it, and Henry.  Ross, and Shif’less Sol busied themselves with making new and stout moccasins of deerskin, fastened with sinews and lined with fur.  Shif’less Sol was especially skillful at this work; in fact, the shiftless one was a wonderfully handy man at any sort of task, and with only his hunting knife, a wooden needle of his own manufacture, and deer sinews, he actually made Paul a fur-lined hunting shirt, which seemed to the boy’s imaginative fancy about the finest garment ever worn in the wilderness.  All of them also put fur flaps on their raccoon-skin caps, and Shif’less Sol even managed to fashion an imitation of gloves out of deerskin.

“I wouldn’t advise you to try to use your hands much with these gloves on,” he said; “leastways, not to shoot at anything till you took ’em off; but I do say that so long ez your hands are idle, they’ll be pow’ful warmin’ to the fingers.”

“We don’t have to go out very much just now,” said Paul, “and if we only had two or three books here, we could pass the time very pleasantly.”

“That’s so,” said Shif’less Sol musingly.  “You an’ me, Paul, wuz intended to be eddicated men.  Ez fur Jim Hart here, he’s that dull he’d take more pride in cookin’ in a stone furnace than in writin’ the finest book in the world.”

“When I cook I git’s somethin’ that I kin see,” said Jim Hart.  “I never read but one book in my life, an’ I didn’t find it very sustainin’.  I guess if you wuz starvin’ to death here in the wilderness, you’d ruther hev a hot hoe cake than all the books in the world.”