Two Little Savages | Page 9

he kept the place to himself and loved it more and more. He would
look out through the thick Hemlock tops, the blots of Basswood green
or the criss-cross Butternut leafage and say: "My own, my own." Or
down by some pool in the limpid stream he would sit and watch the
arrowy Shiners and say: "You are mine, all; you are mine. You shall
never be harmed or driven away."
A spring came from the hillside by a green lawn, and here Yan would
eat his sandwiches varied with nuts and berries that he did not like, but
ate only because he was a wildman, and would look lovingly up the
shady brookland stretches and down to the narrow entrance of the glen,
and say and think and feel. "This is mine, my own, my very own."

VII
The Shanty
He had none but the poorest of tools, but he set about building a shanty.
He was not a resourceful boy. His effort to win the book had been an
unusual one for him, as his instincts were not at all commercial. When
that matter came to the knowledge of the Home Government, he was
rebuked for doing "work unworthy of a gentleman's son" and forbidden

under frightful penalties "ever again to resort to such degrading ways of
raising money."
They gave him no money, so he was penniless. Most boys would have
possessed themselves somehow of a good axe and spade. He had
neither. An old plane blade, fastened to a stick with nails, was all the
axe and spade he had, yet with this he set to work and offset its
poorness as a tool by dogged persistency. First, he selected the quietest
spot near the spring--a bank hidden by a mass of foliage. He knew no
special reason for hiding it, beyond the love of secrecy. He had read in
some of his books "how the wily scouts led the way through a pathless
jungle, pulled aside a bough and there revealed a comfortable dwelling
that none without the secret could possibly have discovered," so it
seemed very proper to make it a complete mystery--a sort of secret
panel in the enchanted castle--and so picture himself as the wily scout
leading his wondering companions to the shanty, though, of course, he
had not made up his mind to reveal his secret to any one. He often
wished he could have the advantage of Rad's strong arms and
efficacious tools; but the workshop incident was only one of many that
taught him to leave his brother out of all calculation.
Mother Earth is the best guardian of a secret, and Yan with his crude
spade began by digging a hole in the bank. The hard blue clay made the
work slow, but two holidays spent in steady labour resulted in a hole
seven feet wide and about four feet into the bank.
In this he set about building the shanty. Logs seven or eight feet long
must be got to the place--at least twenty-five or thirty would be needed,
and how to cut and handle them with his poor axe was a question.
Somehow, he never looked for a better axe. The half-formed notion that
the Indians had no better was sufficient support, and he struggled away
bravely, using whatever ready sized material he could find. Each piece
as he brought it was put into place. Some boys would have gathered the
logs first and built it all at once, but that was not Yan's way; he was too
eager to see the walls rise. He had painfully and slowly gathered logs
enough to raise the walls three rounds, when the question of a door
occurred to him. This, of course, could not be cut through the logs in

the ordinary way; that required the best of tools. So he lifted out all the
front logs except the lowest, replacing them at the ends with stones and
blocks to sustain the sides. This gave him the sudden gain of two logs,
and helped the rest of the walls that much. The shanty was now about
three feet high, and no two logs in it were alike: some were much too
long, most were crooked and some were half rotten, for the simple
reason that these were the only ones he could cut. He had exhausted the
logs in the neighbourhood and was forced to go farther. Now he
remembered seeing one that might do, half a mile away on the home
trail (they were always "trails"; he never called them "roads" or
"paths"). He went after this, and to his great surprise and delight found
that it was one of a dozen old cedar posts that had been cut long before
and thrown aside as culls, or worthless.