What makes you come so soon?
You used to come at ten o’clock,
But now you come at noon,’”
and MacTavish glared after him.
It was a busy week at the post. Day after day picturesque Indians came in, hauling long, narrow toboggans, pitching their tepees near by, and crowding the shop during daylight hours bartering away their early catch of pelts for necessary and unnecessary things.
Paul and Dan kept steadily at their tasks. Amesbury made no further reference to the arrangement he had made with them until New Year’s eve, when he strolled over to the woodpile toward sundown, where they were hard at work, humming, as he watched them make the last cut in a stick of wood:
“‘If I’d as much money as I could spend,
I never would cry ‘old chairs to mend,
Old chairs to mend, old chairs to mend;’
I never would cry ‘old chairs to mend.’”