"Hooch! be quate!" shouted Big Malcolm. "It is a child you are yourself, Callum!"'
At the sounds of the noise and laughter a small figure stirred in the shadowy chimney-corner, the figure of a little, bent, old man, with a queer, elfish, hairy visage. He sat up and his small, red eyes blinked wonderingly. "Hech, hech, and it will be the cold night, Malcolm!" he said in Gaelic.
"A cold night it is, Farquhar," cried Big Malcolm, piling the wood upon the fire. "But we will soon be fixing that, whatever."
"It will be a good thing to be by a warm fire this night," continued Old Farquhar solemnly, "och, hone, a good thing, indeed!"
Outside the wind had once more gathered its forces, and was howling about the house, and the swaying branches of the silver maple were tapping upon the roof as though to remind the inhabitants that it was still there to protect them. But the little old man shivered at the sound, for he had once known what it was to be homeless on those hills over which the blast was sweeping.
How Old Farquhar came to be a member of Big Malcolm MacDonald's family no one could quite tell. He was one of those unattached fragments of humanity often found in a new country. A sort of wandering minstrel was Farquhar, content so long as he could pay for a meal or a night's lodging at a wayside tavern by a song, or a tune on his fiddle. Thus he had drifted musically for years through the Canadian backwoods, until homeless old age had overtaken him. Four years before he had spent a summer at Big Malcolm's, helping perfunctorily in the harvest fields, working little and singing much, and when the first hard frost had set the forest aflame he had gathered his poor, scant bundle of clothes into his carpet-bag preparatory to taking the road again.
"And where will you be going for the winter?" Big Malcolm had asked.
"She'll not know," said Old Farquhar, glancing tremulously over the great stretches of dying forest, "she'll not know."
"Hooch!" cried his host angrily, "sit down with ye!" He snatched up Old Farquhar's carpet-bag and flung it into a corner, and there it had lain ever since.
And in another corner, the warm one by the chimney, Old Farquhar had sat every winter since, too, smoking his pipe in utter content. Always in summer his Bohemian nature asserted itself again, and he would take his stick and wander away, remaining, perhaps, for months; but as soon as the silver maple beside the house began to turn to gold he would come hobbling back, sure of a warm welcome in the home where there was no stint.