dvance."

"That's me!" Hal seated himself on the pile of stuff and gave vent to an
exaggerated sigh of contentment. "Haven't I labored all day? Tell the
bellhop to take my stuff to my room. I think I'll have my dinner served
there."

He ended with a grunt, the result of a sharp poke in the pit of his
stomach from an axe handle. "To turn on the heat with," explained Pat
sweetly, thrusting the axe into Hal's hands, and pointing to a pile of
birch logs.

Hal got to his feet with a groan and a grimace and followed Upton who,
with another axe, had already started for the wood-pile. "You're a slave
driver! That's what you are, a flint-hearted slave driver," he grumbled,
albeit with a twinkle that belied his words.

"My tummy, oh, my tummy!
It gives me such a pain!
I wonder will it ever
Feel really full again!"

"That depends on how soon you get that wood split," grinned Pat. "If you
don't get a move on it will be so dark you can't see what you are doing,
and I give you fair warning--no wood, no dinner."

"Let it never be said I am ever a shirk
When a dinner depends on the way that I work,"

retorted Hal, and forthwith fell to his task with a vim that put Upton
on his mettle to break even with him, for Hal was no mean axeman, as Pat
well knew. The handling of an axe was one of the things which Hal had
learned, and learned well during his three summers in the woods. To the
thorough woodsman an axe is a complete tool-chest. With it he can do
almost anything that needs to be done from the cutting of fire-wood to
the building of a log cabin.

Sparrer was put to work pulling down the hemlock boughs which had been
piled in front of the lean-to to keep out the snow, while Pat unpacked
things, started the fire and made preparations for the evening meal.
This was Sparrer's first experience in a lean-to, and when the boughs
were out of the way he examined it with interest. The back and two ends
were of logs, the front being open its whole width. The roof was of big
sheets of hemlock bark laid overlapping and with a sharp pitch to the
back.

On the ground about seven feet from the rear wall two six-foot logs
about eight inches through had been staked end to end so that they
reached from one side wall to the other. Midway a similar log had been
laid across to the rear wall, making two pens, as it were. These had
been filled with small balsam boughs thrust at an angle, butts down, so
that they "shi