"There need be no reserve on that score," returned George. "How are you off for tools?"
"Starting at London and ending at Montreal, we secured a full complement, including axes, broad-axes, shingle knives, cross-cut saws, etc. Then all the drivers are skilled woodsmen, and can show our men how to use them."
"When will you be ready to start?"
"Immediately after mess."
"Another thing, Captain, we must not forget that Mrs. Manning is here to stay. One of our first buildings must be for herself and her husband."
"I thought of that. How would it do to put up a house at once big enough to hold them and the officers, too?"
"You might throw up a little cottage for them and a larger one for ourselves. That would be better than the double combination. Then we could wait a bit. For that matter, we might build the new fort of stone."
In another hour a score of axes were at work. Busy hands swung them from morning until evening for many successive days. Saws were used to cut the logs into necessary lengths, while the little Frenchmen with their teams snaked the logs out of the woods into the clearing where the houses were to be built.
Some of the men cleared the ground of underwood and dug cellars with bevelled edges for the coming dwellings; others, discovering a spring, hollowed out the surface, put in a cedar block curb and turned it into a flowing well; while another gang felled clear stuff white pines, sawed them into short lengths and split them into shingles.
And so, under control of Captain Payne, this complex host of industry busied itself day after day, from early dawn until the darkening. The weather was in every way propitious, and though it thawed in day time, it always froze at night. The sun, in a clear sky, daily reached a loftier altitude and shed a warmer ray, melting the snow until the water ran in ripples to the lake. But the tightening each night saved the situation. Every body knew that warm weather was coming, and with so much impending, not a moment was lost. So the time passed until one afternoon a man was squaring the butt-end of a log when Captain Payne joined him.