It was so utterly and dishearteningly foreign to the orderly arrangement, the meticulous neatness of the home wherein Thompson had grown to young manhood under the tutelage of the prim spinsters that he could scarcely accept as a reality that this, henceforth, was to be his abode.

He could only stand, with a feeling in his throat that was new in his experience of emotions, staring in dismay at this forlorn habitation abandoned to wind and weather, to the rats and the birds.

CHAPTER IV

IN WHICH MR. THOMPSON BEGINS TO WONDER PAINFULLY

To Breyette and MacDonald that forlorn cabin was after all nothing new or disheartening in their experience.  They knew how a deserted house goes to rack and ruin.  They knew also how to restore such an abandoned place to a measure of its original homeliness.  And neither the spectacle of the one nor the labor of the other gave them any qualms.  They were practical-minded men to whom musty, forsaken cabins, isolation, the hollow emptiness of the North, the sultry heat of the brief summer, the flies, the deep snows and iron frosts of the long winter, were a part of their life, the only life they knew.

But they were not wholly devoid of sentiment and perception.  They recognized in Thompson a lively susceptibility to certain disagreeable things which they accepted as a matter of course.  They saw that he was rather less capable of coping with such a situation than a ten-year-old native boy, that a dirty cabin in a lonely clearing made him stand aghast.  And so—­although their bargain with him was closed when they deposited him and his goods on the bank of Lone Moose—­they set to work with energy to renovate his forlorn-looking abode.

They made short work of the rats’ and the swallows’ nests.  Breyette quickly fashioned a broom of fine willow twigs, brought up a shovel from the canoe, and swept and shovelled the place out.  MacDonald meanwhile cleared the weeds and grass from a space before the cabin and burned up the unseemly refuse.  The stove fulfilled its functions perfectly despite the red rust of disuse.  With buckets of boiling water they flooded and drenched the floor and walls till the interior was as fresh and clean as if new erected.

The place was habitable by sundown.  While the long northern twilight held the three of them carried up the freight that burdened the canoe, and piled it in one corner, sacks of flour, sides of bacon and salt pork, boxes of dried fruit, the miscellaneous articles with which a man must supply himself when he goes into the wilderness.

That night they slept upon a meager thickness of blanket spread on the hard floor.