r
broad-axes they took toll of their ancient foe. For while in spring and
summer they farmed their narrow fields, and rescued new lands from the
brule; in winter they sought the forest, and back on their own farms or
in "the shanties" they cut sawlogs, or made square timber, their only
source of wealth. The shanty life of the early fifties of last century
was not the luxurious thing of to-day. It was full of privation, for
the men were poorly housed and fed, and of peril, for the making of the
timber and the getting it down the smaller rivers to the big water was
a work of hardship and danger. Remote from the restraints of law and
of society, and living in wild surroundings and in hourly touch with
danger, small wonder that often the shanty-men were wild and reckless.
So that many a poor fellow in a single wild carouse in Quebec, or more
frequently in some river town, would fling into the hands of sharks
and harlots and tavern-keepers, with whom the bosses were sometimes in
league, the earnings of his long winter's work, and would wake to find
himself sick and penniless, far from home and broken in spirit.

Of all the shanty-men of the Ottawa the men of Glengarry, and of
Glengarry men Macdonald's gang were easily first, and of the gang Donald
Bhain Macdonald, or Macdonald More, or the Big Macdonald, for he was
variously known, was not only the "boss" but best and chief. There was
none like him. A giant in size and strength, a prince of broad-axe men,
at home in the woods, sure-footed and daring on the water, free with
his wages, and always ready to drink with friend or fight with foe, the
whole river admired, feared, or hated him, while his own men followed
him into the woods, on to a jam, or into a fight with equal joyousness
and devotion. Fighting was like wine to him, when the fight was worth
while, and he went into the fights his admirers were always arranging
for him with the easiest good humor and with a smile on his face. But
Macdonald Bhain's carousing, fighting days came to an abrupt stop about
three years before the opening of this tale, for on one of his summer
visits to his home, "The word of the Lord in the mouth of his servant
Alexander Murray," as he was wont to say, "found him and he was a new
man." He went into his new life with the same whole-souled joyousness as
had marked the old, and he announced that with the shanty and the river
he was "done for ever more." But after the summer's work was done, and