“Friend Barn,” broke in the old woodsman, quietly, “don’t slip out any slur that you’ll wish you hadn’t.”
“Well,” growled the operator, “it may be that ‘Stumpage John’ Barrett ain’t always set a model for a Sunday-school, but if I had as pretty a daughter as that one that was settin’ in his room with him, and as nice a girl as she seems to be, though of course she didn’t stoop to talk to a grizzly looservee like me, I’d hate to have an old dead and decayed scandal dug up in these woods, and dragged out and dumped over my front-yard fence in the city!”
And Christopher remembered what he had remarked on one occasion to Dwight Wade, when they had seen the waif of the Skeet tribe on Misery Gore, and now he half chuckled as he squinted at Withee and muttered in his beard, “Lots of folks don’t recognize white birch when it’s polished and set up in a parlor.”
“What say?” demanded the operator, suspiciously.
“I’m so sleepy I’m dreamin’ out loud,” explained Christopher, blandly, “and I’m goin’ to turn in.” And he sighed to himself as he rolled in upon the fir boughs and pulled the spread about his ears. “There’s some feller said that good counsel cometh in the morning. Mebbe so—mebbe so! But it will have to be me and the boy here for the job, because old Dan’l Webster, with all his flow of language, couldn’t convince Barn Withee now that it’s John Barrett’s daughter that is lost in the woods. I know now why something told me to go slow on the hue and cry.”
CHAPTER XXIII
IN THE MATTER OF JOHN BARRETT’S DAUGHTER
“Warmth and comfort? Ay, all these
Under the arch of the great spruce trees;
But our cup o’ content holds naught but foam!—
No woman’s hand to make a home.”