“Hick'ry, dick'ry, dock
The mouse ran up the clock,
The clock struck one,
An' down he come
Hick'ry, dick'ry, dock,”
was side-splitting. Nan laughed till she cried. Poor, simple Tom did know just what amused his little cousin so.
Rafe was by no means so slow, or so simple. Nan caught him cheating more than once at fox and geese. Rafe was a little sly, and he was continually making fun of his slow brother, and baiting him. Uncle Henry warned him:
“Now, Rafe, you're too big for your Marm or me to shingle your pants; but Tom's likely to lick you some day for your cutting up and I sha'n't blame him. Just because he's slow to wrath, don't you get it in your head that he's afraid, or that he can't settle your hash in five minutes.”
Nan was greatly disturbed to hear so many references to fistic encounters and fighting of all sorts. These men of the woods seemed to be possessed of wild and unruly passions. What she heard the boys say caused her to believe that most of the spare time of the men in the lumber camps was spent in personal encounters.
“No, no, deary. They aren't so bad as they sound,” Aunt Kate told her, comfortably. “Lots of nice men work in the camps all their lives and never fight. Look at your Uncle Henry.”
But Nan remembered the “mess of words” (as he called it) that Uncle Henry had had with Gedney Raffer on the railroad station platform at the Forks, and she was afraid that even her aunt did not look with the same horror on a quarrel that Nan herself did.
The girl from Tillbury had a chance to see just what a lumber camp was like, and what the crew were like, on the fourth day after her arrival at her Uncle Henry's house. The weather was then pronounced settled, and word came for the two young men, Tom and Rafe, to report at Blackton's camp the next morning, prepared to go to work. Tom drove a team which was then at the lumber camp, being cared for by the cook and foreman; Rafe was a chopper, for he had that sleight with an ax which, more than mere muscle, makes the mighty woodsman.
“Their dad'll drive 'em over to Blackton's early, and you can go, too,” said Aunt Kate. “That is, if you don't mind getting up right promptly in the morning?”
“Oh, I don't mind that,” Nan declared. “I'm used to getting up early.”