From the first, Rosy-Lilly made herself at home in the camp. For a few days she fretted after her father, whenever she was left for a moment to her own devices; but Jimmy Brackett was ever on hand to divert her mind with astounding fairy-tales during the hours when the rest of the hands were away chopping and hauling. Long after she had forgotten to fret, she would have little “cryin’ 117 spells” at night, remembering her father’s good-night kiss. But a baby’s sorrow, happily, is shorter than its remembrance; and Rosy-Lilly soon learned to repeat her phrase: “Poor Daddy had to go ’way-’way-off,” without the quivering lip and wistful look which made the big woodsmen’s hearts tighten so painfully beneath their homespun shirts. Conroy’s Camp was a spacious, oblong cabin of “chinked” logs, with a big stove in the middle. The bunks were arranged in a double tier along one wall, and a plank table (rude, but massive) along the other. Built on at one end, beside the door, was the kitchen, or cookhouse, crowded, but clean and orderly, and bright with shining tins. At the inner end of the main room a corner was boarded off to make a tiny bedroom, no bigger than a cupboard. This was the Boss’s private apartment. It contained two narrow bunks––one for the Boss himself, who looked much too big for it; and one for the only guest whom the camp ever expected to entertain, the devoted missionary-priest, who, on his snowshoes, was wont to make the round of the widely scattered camps once or twice in a winter. This guest-bunk the Boss at once allotted to Rosy-Lilly, but on the strict condition that Johnson should continue to act as nurse and superintend Rosy-Lilly’s nightly toilet.
Rosy-Lilly had not been in the camp a week before McWha’s “ugliness” to her had aroused 118 even the Boss’s resentment, and the Boss was a just man. Of course, it was generally recognized that McWha was not bound, by any law or obligation, to take any notice of the child, still less to “make a fuss over her,” with the rest of the camp. But Jimmy Brackett expressed the popular sentiment when he growled, looking sourly at the back of McWha’s unconscious red head bowed ravenously over his plate of beans––
“If only he’d do something, so’s we c’ld lick some decency inter ’im!”
There was absolutely nothing to be done about it, however; for Red McWha was utterly within his rights.
Rosy-Lilly, as we have seen, was not yet five years old; but certain of the characteristics of her sex were already well developed within her. The adulation of the rest of the camp, poured out at her tiny feet, she took graciously enough, but rather as a matter of course. It was all her due. But what she wanted was that that big, ugly, red-headed man, with the cross grey eyes and loud voice, should be nice to her. She wanted him to pick her up, and set her on his knee, and whittle wonderful wooden dogs and dolls and boats and boxes for her with his jack-knife, as Walley Johnson and the others did. With Walley she would hardly condescend to coquet, so sure she was of his abject slavery to her whims; and, moreover, as must be confessed 119 with regret, so unforgiving was she in her heart toward his blank eye. She merely consented to make him useful, much as she might a convenient and altogether doting but uninteresting grandmother. To all the other members of the camp––except the Boss, whom she regarded with some awe––she would make baby-love impartially and carelessly. But it was Red McWha whose notice she craved.
When supper was over, and pipes filled and lighted, some one would strike up a “chantey”––one of those interminable, monotonous ballad-songs which are peculiar to the lumber camps.
These “chanteys,” however robust their wordings or their incidents, are always sung in a plaintive minor which goes oddly with the large-moulded virility of the singers. Some are sentimental, or religious, to the last degree, while others reek with an indecency of speech that would shroud the Tenderloin in blushes. Both kinds are equally popular in the camps, and both are of the most astounding naïveté. Of the worst of them, even, the simple-minded woodsmen are not in the least ashamed. They seem unconscious of their enormity. Nevertheless, it came about that, without a word said by any one, from the hour of Rosy-Lilly’s arrival in camp, all the indecent “chanteys” were dropped, as if into oblivion, from the woodsmen’s repertoire. 120
During the songs, the smoking, and the lazy fun, Rosy-Lilly would slip from one big woodsman to another, an inconspicuous little figure in the smoke-gloomed light of the two oil-lamps. Man after man would snatch her up to his knee, lay by his pipe, twist her silky, yellow curls about his great blunt fingers, and whisper wood-folk tales or baby nonsense into her pink little ear. She would listen solemnly for a minute or two, then wriggle down and move on to another of her admirers. But before long she would be standing by the bench on which sat Red McWha, with one big knee usually hooked high above the other, and his broad back reclined against the edge of a bunk. For a few minutes the child would stand there smiling with a perennial confidence, waiting to be noticed. Then she would come closer, without a word from her usually nimble little tongue, lean against McWha’s knee, and look up coaxingly into his face. If McWha chanced to be singing, for he was a “chanter” of some note, he would appear so utterly absorbed that Rosy-Lilly would at last slip away, with a look of hurt surprise in her face, to be comforted by one of her faithful. But if McWha were not engrossed in song, it would soon become impossible for him to ignore her. He would suddenly look down at her with his fierce eyes, knit his shaggy red brows, and demand harshly: “Well, Yaller Top, an’ what d’you want?” 121
From the loud voice and angry eye the child would retreat in haste, clear to the other end of the room, and sometimes a big tear would track its way down either cheek. After such an experiment she would usually seek Jimmy Brackett, who would console her with some sticky sweetmeat, and strive to wither McWha with envenomed glances. McWha would reply with a grin, as if proud of having routed the little adventurer so easily. He had discovered that the name “Yaller Top” was an infallible weapon of rebuff, as Rosy-Lilly considered it a term of indignity. To his evil humour there was something amusing in abashing Rosy-Lilly with the title she most disliked. Moreover, it was an indirect rebuke to the “saft” way the others acted about her.
If Rosy-Lilly felt rebuffed for the moment by McWha’s rudeness, she seemed always to forget it the next time she saw him. Night after night she would sidle up to his knee, and sue for his notice; and night after night she would retire discomfited. But on one occasion the discomfiture was McWha’s. She had elicited the customary rough demand––