“I reckoned so,” M’Graw said. “Yep, I’m ‘Old Ike’ to my friends, and what my enemies call me don’t matter at all—not at all.”
“I fancy you don’t make many enemies up here in the woods, M’Graw,” said Mr. Howbridge, waving the visitor to a comfortable seat before the fire.
“Nor friends, nuther,” chuckled the man. “No, sir, there ain’t sech a slather of folks up here to mix in with, by any count.”
Before the woodsman took his seat the lawyer introduced him to Mrs. MacCall and to Ruth, individually, and to the rest of the group in general.
“Hi gorry!” exclaimed Ike M’Graw, “you’ve got a right big fam’ly, haven’t you? You won’t be lonesome up here—no, you won’t be lonesome.”
“And that is what I should think you would be,” Mr. Howbridge said. “Lonesome. If you get snowed in you don’t see anybody for weeks, I suppose?”
“Better say ‘months,’ Mister,” declared M’Graw. “I’ve been snowed into my cabin back yonder in the valley from the day before Christmas till come St. Patrick’s Day. That’s right.”
“I understood you lived near the Lodge, here, Ike?” said the lawyer.
“Oh, I do in winter, since Mr. Birdsall asked me to,” the man said. “But sometimes—’specially when there was visitors up here—the population of this here ridge got too thick for Old Ike. Then I’d hike out for my old cabin in the valley.”
Quickly Mr. Howbridge put in a query that had formed in his mind early in the evening: