ied Alec.

"What's a stretching board, and how do you use it?" Hal was all
interest.

"To stretch skins on. Dinna ye know that all skins have to be
stretched?" Alec tossed the board one side and reached for another.

"Don't know a thing about trapping or furs except that Dad has promised
me a new fur coat when I get back," retorted Hal. "I'm painfully and
sublimely ignorant, but willing to learn, and I have a hunch that there
are others. Suppose you elucidate the facts by way of killing time."

"Here, here! That will do for you, Hal!" cried Upton. "Your alleged
poetry is bad enough without springing anything like that. What have you
been doing at that prep school--confabulating with the profs or flirting
with the dictionary? Elucidate! I move, fellows, that if he springs
anything more like that we throw him in the snow. I would suggest doing
it anyway if his idea wasn't so good. Go to it, Alec, and tell us about
fur."

"I dinna ken where to begin," protested Alec as he carefully rounded the
smaller of his board to a point so that it looked much like one of the
shingle boats every boy knows.

"Begin with that thing you're making--stretching board, I believe you
called it," said Hal.

"That would be holding the gun by the wrong end," protested Pat. "The
story all happens before one of these things is needed." Pat was himself
at work on a stretching board.

"Begin with the kinds of fur, and the ways in which it is trapped, and
the life of a trapper and all that sort of stuff," suggested Upton.

"Just tell us what youse do every day and how youse live all alone and
de scraps youse gets inter wid de bears 'n' things, and how youse has t'
foight for life, an' pass it out hot--right off de fire."

"That's the stuff, Sparrer! That's what we want," cried Hal, as
everybody laughed. "Give us the story of trapping right off the
griddle."

"Ye dinna find anything very hot aboot a trapper's life." Alec paused in
his work to gaze reflectively into the fire. "It's mostly cold and
lonesomeness and hard work. There's no fighting with the beasties worth
mentioning; it's mostly fighting with storms and sometimes hunger, and a
struggle with nature. I've sometimes wondered if some of the grand
ladies and men, too, would be so proud and take so much pleasure in
their fine furs if they knew what it has cost in suffering to man and
beastie to get them. And yet I am no complaining, laddies. Ye ken that.
It's a hard life, and yet th