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. He could carry only one at a
time, so that to bring each one meant a journey of a mile, and the
post got woefully heavy each time before that mile was over. To
get those twelve logs he had twelve miles to walk. It took several
Saturdays, but he stuck doggedly to it. Twelve good logs completed
his shanty, making it five feet high and leaving three logs over for
rafters. These he laid flat across, dividing the spaces equally. Over
them he laid plenty of small sticks and branches till it was thickly
covered. Then he went down to a rank, grassy meadow and