Both of them were drenched and shivering, and the breeze was cold.
“Come along over to my camp. Fire there,” said Tom. “We’ll put your canoe safe first.”
They pulled the canoe high and dry, rescuing a shot-gun that was tied in it, and then the two boys took up the heavy pack and started across the ridge to the old barn.
The fire was still smoldering, and Tom built it up to a roaring flame. He hastened to change his wet clothes for dry ones; but Charlie, who had no other clothes, merely stood in the heat until he steamed like a kettle, finally becoming passably dry. He said there was tea in his pack, however, and Tom hastened to get it out. There was a little sugar, too; and they hastened to boil the tea, and drank great mugs of the hot, strong, sweet beverage, the first hot drink Tom had had for several days.
As Charlie thawed out he explained that he belonged to an Ojibway village north of Oakley, but he had been trapping far in the northwest with two friends all winter. They had taken another route home; he was returning this way alone with his fur pack, and after selling the plunder he was going to spend the summer at his village. The boy had been partly educated at a mission station. He spoke both English and French in some fashion, frequently mixing them, and when excited he combined them with his native tongue in a manner that would have shattered the nerves of a philologist.
He presently opened up his pack of furs, and Tom was astonished at the showing. There were nearly fifty minks, scores of muskrats, besides skunks, sables, foxes, fishers, and weasels. Altogether there must have been upward of a thousand dollars’ worth of peltry, and all the skins were taken off, cured, and stretched with a neatness that showed the boy an expert at his craft. There were several deer hides also, and one bearskin. Charlie told a great tale of how they had smoked the bear out of his winter nest.
“You trap, too,” he said, his eye lighting on Tom’s single mink skin. “Good pelt, if it ain’t shot. Too bad. Ain’t stretched right neither. You git mebbe seven dollar.”
“More than that,” said Tom. “Look here, you want to trade? I’ll swap you that pelt for some of your traps and grub and—what else you got?”
“Dunno,” said Charlie cunningly. “What you want?”
The boys plunged into a war of bargaining, in which the Indian patience wore out the white nerve. In the end Tom secured four good steel traps, a little tea and sugar and flour from the remains of Charlie’s provisions, and a box of matches, in exchange for the mink and the muskrat skin, an old pair of trousers, and a brilliant red and green necktie which irresistibly took Charlie’s fancy.