As soon as they had gone Tug set about his traps in one corner of the house, behind the stove, while Katy went to work to make the hut a little more homelike.
The cabin was about twelve feet square, and one side was the smooth face of a great rock, against which was heaped the rude chimney of mud and stones. In front of this the stove was placed, and behind it, on the side of the room farthest from the door, the fishermen had built a bunk.
"You must call that your bedroom," Tug said, and he helped Katy to set up in front of it poles sustaining a curtain made of a shawl.
"Now," said the lad, when this had been arranged, "you must have a mattress."
So, taking the axe, he went out, and soon came back with a great armful of hemlock boughs, and then a second one, with which he heaped the bunk, laying them all very smoothly, and making a delightful bed.
"I'm thinkin' we'll have to fix some more bunks for ourselves," said the boy, as he tried this springy couch. "That's a heap better 'n the soft side of a plank."
Then with a hemlock broom Katy swept the floor, and spread down the canvas as a carpet. Finding in her little trunk some clothing wrapped in an old Harper's Weekly, she cut out the pictures and tacked them up, and finally she washed the grimy window to let more light in, so that the rough little house soon came to look quite warm and cosey.
Meanwhile Tug, getting out his few tools, had made the triggers of half a dozen such box-traps as they had caught snow-birds with when living on the ice, and one other queer little arrangement, of sticks delicately balanced, an upright one in the middle bearing at its top a bit of red rag:
"What in the world is that?" Katy inquired with much curiosity.