“Buy grub? We have enough to last us weeks—and I haven’t a dollar.”
The Maliseet smiled and tapped his chest with a mittened finger.
“Got plenty dollar an’ plenty fur, me, Mick Otter,” he said.
They worked all that day and the next at the construction of a real toboggan, leaving their work only to eat, and to climb into the top of their look-out tree once in every couple of hours of daylight. They failed to discover any sign of pursuit.
This toboggan was made of thin strips of seasoned ash which Mick had prepared for this very purpose two years ago. These were held in place, edge to edge, by numerous cross-pieces of the same tough wood; and as they lacked both nails and screws they had to tie the cross-pieces down with thongs of leather. They were without a gimlet; they hadn’t even a small bit of wire to heat and burn holes with; so the numerous holes through which the thongs of leather were passed had to be bored and cut with knives—Mick Otter’s sheath-knife and Tom’s pen-knife. The strips of ash of which the floor of the toboggan was formed were an inch thick. They bored and they gouged. They raised blisters in unexpected places on their hard fingers. Tom broke the tips off both blades of his knife. But they stuck to it and made a good job of it.
They buried half of their wheat flour and a little of their bacon in the cave, along with the half-full jug of molasses and the tin can of buckwheat meal, and banked the low door with logs and brush. Then they dragged their new toboggan up and over the hill and down its northern slope. The newly-risen sun showed a hazy face above the black hills, and the light wind that fanned along out of the east had no slash or sting in it.
“That snow work for us agin, maybe,” said Mick Otter.
CHAPTER IX
GASPARD UNDERSTANDS
Back in Gaspard’s clearings the days had not passed so pleasantly nor so uneventfully. You may remember Catherine’s parting with Tom in the dark, outside the big log house, and the effect of her parting action on Tom. In that case I need only say that she had been almost as keenly and deeply affected as Tom by her action. Her astonishment had been almost as great as his—but not quite, of course. She had slipped into the house again and safely up to her room without disturbing any one of the three sleepers, and had lain wide awake for hours. At five o’clock she had heard sounds in the house—the voices of Ned Tone and the detective, then the voice of her grandfather; then the rattling and banging of the lids and door of the stove. But she had continued to lie still, denying her hospitable instincts. She had heard the front door open and shut half an hour later; and then she had left her bed, gone to her open window and thrust her hand out between the woolen curtains. She had smiled happily at the touch of the big snow-flakes on her hand. Then she had dressed and gone downstairs and found her grandfather seated alone at the lamp-lit table, feeding scraps of scorched bacon to Blackie.
“I didn’t cook fer ’em nor eat with ’em,” he had said.