VII
SINCE early May there had been no rain save a sprinkle now and then. From Lake Ontario to Lake Champlain, from the St. Lawrence to Sandy Hook, the earth had been scorching under a hot sun. The heat and dust of midsummer had dimmed the glory of June.
People those days were thinking less of the timber of the woods and more of their abundant, cool, and living green. The inns along the edge of the forest were filling up.
About eleven o'clock of a morning late in June, a young man arrived at Lost River camp—one Robert Master, whose father owned a camp and some forty thousand acres not quite a day's tramp to the north. He was a big, handsome youth of twenty-two, just out of college. Sinth regarded every new-comer as a natural enemy. She suspected most men of laziness and a capacity for the oppression of females. She stood in severe silence at the door of the cook-tent and looked him over as he came. Soon she went to the stove and began to move the griddles. Silas entered with an armful of wood.
"If he thinks I'm goin' to wait on him hand an' foot, he's very much mistaken," said Sinth.
"R-roughlocks!" Silas answered, calmly, as he put a stick on the fire.
Sinth made no reply, but began sullenly rushing to and fro with pots and pans. Soon her quick knife had taken the jackets off a score of potatoes. While her hands flew, water leaped on the potatoes, and the potatoes tumbled into the pot, and the pot jumped into the stove-hole as the griddle took a slide across the top of the stove. And so with a rush of feet and a rattle of pots and pans and a sliding of griddles and a banging of iron doors "Mis' Strong" wore off her temper at hard work.
The Emperor used to smile at this variety of noise and call it "f-f-female profanity," a phrase not wholly inapt. When the "sport" had finished his dinner, and she and her brother sat side by side at the table, she was plain Sinth again, with a look of sickliness and resignation. She ate freely—but would never confess her appetite—and so leisurely that Strong often had most of the dishes washed before she had finished eating.
The young man was eager to begin fishing, and soon after dinner the Emperor took him over to Catamount Pond. On their way the young man spoke of the object of his visit.
"Mr. Strong, you know my father?" he half inquired.