“The main gang is a long distance away; sound carries very clearly in this still air. As for that fellow you hear so plainly, he is only clearing out small stuff to get ready for the others. You wouldn't see anything different from your Indian chopping the cordwood for your camp fire. He won't chop out any big trees.”
“Let's not go, then,” said Hilda submissively.
“When you come up in the winter,” he pursued, “you will see any amount of big timber felled.”
“I would like to know more about it,” she sighed, a quaint little air of childish petulance graving two lines between her eyebrows. “Do you know, Harry, you are a singularly uncommunicative sort of being. I have to guess that your life is interesting and picturesque,—that is,” she amended, “I should have to do so if Wallace Carpenter had not told me a little something about it. Sometimes I think you are not nearly poet enough for the life you are living. Why, you are wonderful, you men of the north, and you let us ordinary mortals who have not the gift of divination imagine you entirely occupied with how many pounds of iron chain you are going to need during the winter.” She said these things lightly as one who speaks things not for serious belief.
“It is something that way,” he agreed with a laugh.
“Do you know, sir,” she persisted, “that I really don't know anything at all about the life you lead here? From what I have seen, you might be perpetually occupied in eating things in a log cabin, and in disappearing to perform some mysterious rites in the forest.” She looked at him with a smiling mouth but tender eyes, her head tilted back slightly.
“It's a good deal that way, too,” he agreed again. “We use a barrel of flour in Camp One every two and a half days!”
She shook her head in a faint negation that only half understood what he was saying, her whole heart in her tender gaze.
“Sit there,” she breathed very softly, pointing to the dried needles on which her feet rested, but without altering the position of her head or the steadfastness of her look.
He obeyed.