“I don’t know,” said Ambrose.

“Tell you what,” said Peter; “you take the furs out on the steamboat.”

“I won’t,” said Ambrose quickly.  “I went out last year.  It’s your turn.”

“But I’m contented here,” said Peter.

Ambrose shook his head.  “It wouldn’t do me any real good,” he said.  “It makes it worse after.  It did last year.  I couldn’t bring a white wife up here.”

“Well, sir, it’s a problem,” said Peter with a weighty shake of the head.

This serious, sentimental kind of talk was a strain on both partners.  Ambrose made haste to drop the subject.

“I believe I’ll start the new warehouse to-morrow,” he said.  “I like to work with logs.  First, I must measure the ground and make a working plan.”

Peter was not sorry to be diverted.  “Hadn’t we better get lumber from the ‘Company’ mill?” he suggested.  “Looks like up to date somehow.”

“A board shack looks rotten in the woods?” said Ambrose.

“You’re so gol-durn artistic,” said Peter quizzically.

Minot & Doane’s store was a long log shack with a sod roof sprouting a fine crop of weeds.  The original shack had been added to on one side, then on the other.  There was a pleasing diversity of outline in the main building and its wings.  The whole crouched low on the ground as though for warmth.

Three crooked little windows and three doors so low that a short man had to duck his head under the lintels, faced the lake.  The middle door gave ingress to the store proper; the door on the right was the entrance to Peter Minot’s household quarters; while that on the left opened to a large room used variously for stores and bunks.

Farther to the left stood the little shack that housed Ambrose Doane in bachelor solitude, and a few steps beyond, the long, low, log stable for the use of the freighters in winter.

Seen from the lake the low, spreading buildings in the rough clearing among gigantic pines were not unpleasing.  Rough as they were, they fulfilled the first aim of all architecture; they were suitable to the site.

The traveler by water landed on a stony beach, climbed a low bank and followed a crooked path to the door of the store.  On either hand potato and onion patches flourished among the stumps.

From the door-sill where the partners sat, the farther shore of the lake could be seen merely as a delicate line of tree tops poised in the air.

Off to the right their own shore made out in a shallow, sweeping curve, ending half a mile away in a bold hill-point where the Company’s post of Fort Moultrie had stood for two hundred years commanding the western end of the lake and its outlet, Great Buffalo River.

To one who should compare the outward aspects of the two establishments, Minot & Doane’s offered a ludicrous contrast to the imposing white buildings of Fort Moultrie, arranged military-wise on the grassy promontory; nevertheless, as is not infrequently the case elsewhere, the humbler store did the larger trade.