"Where did you get that thing?" she asked with a gasp, instantly recognizing the bucket as identical with the two filled with lard which had been stolen.
Mrs. M'Kree appeared slightly confused, and tried to hide her embarrassment by scolding her offspring.
"Jamie, Jamie, why will you make such a fearful riot? Miss Radford will run away and never come back if you are not quiet."
"I don't care if she does," replied the juvenile. He had not yet reached the age when pretty girls become interesting, and the noise he was producing filled him with tremendous satisfaction, so he banged away with renewed ardour.
Katherine crossed the room with a quick step, and, seizing Jamie, swung him up to the window. "See, here comes Miles," she said, "and he has some toffee in the sledge. Run out and ask him to give you some."
One look of beaming satisfaction Jamie flung her, then, wriggling from her grasp, he tore away to the door and was seen no more for some time. Then Katherine turned to Mrs. M'Kree and said imploringly: "Please tell me where you got that bucket from, and how long you have had it?"
"I'll tell you, of course, seeing that you make such a point of it, but I'm not specially proud of the business, I can assure you," Mrs. M'Kree said, with a touch of irritability very unusual with her. "Oily Dave was up here about a week ago, and he said that he had some buckets of rough fat that would do for greasing sledge runners, or to mix with caulking pitch. He told us he bought the stuff from one of the American whalers that were fishing in the bay last summer, and he offered to sell us a bucket at such a ridiculously low price that Astor bought one off-hand."
"What happened then?" demanded Katherine, her lips twitching with amusement; for she knew quite enough of Oily Dave and his methods to be sure that Astor M'Kree had been rather badly duped.
"The stuff was more than half sawdust, but it had been worked in so carefully that you could not tell that until you came to rub the grease on to runners and that sort of thing; then of course it gritted up directly. But the worst of it was that Astor had mixed some of it with a lot of caulking pitch, which of course is quite spoiled, and he was about the maddest man in Keewatin on the day that he found it out."
Katherine was laughing; she really could not help it. But Mrs. M'Kree, not understanding where the joke came in, said in a reproachful tone: "My dear, it was not a laughing matter to me, either then or now; for when one is married what affects one's husband affects one's self also, and that sometimes in a very disagreeable fashion."