gainst the roof and windows of the
bunkhouse, but the wind now came only in fitful gusts.

Everybody, with the exception of the three boys, was smoking, and a blue
fog drifted and eddied through the atmosphere. At last Sandy appeared to
have collected his thoughts, and after a few vigorous puffs to get his
pipe drawing well began his story.

"What I'm goin' to tell yuh about," he said, "happened before I became a
cattle puncher. Then I was workin' in the lumber business up in the
Michigan woods fer Dodd & Robertson, one o' the biggest concerns in the
line. We'd had a pretty successful winter, the boys were all in good
humor, an' the daily cuts averaged pretty high. But the weather was cold,
mighty cold, I can tell yuh. We'd swing an axe until we had to take
off our coats, and we'd be wet with sweat, but if we stopped work fer as
much as a minute we had to skip back into our coats again, or our clothes
would freeze on us as we stood there. Take it from me, boys, it was cold
with a capital C.

"But all this ain't gettin' me any further along with my yarn. As I say,
the winter was a bitter one, and the wild things, panthers an' wolves an'
sech, were pretty hard put to it to rastle enough grub to keep them
alive. Natchally, this made 'em plumb ferocious, and they used to come
right into the clearin' around the camp, hopin', I suppose, to pick up
somethin'. The cook had to watch out to keep the supply house closed up
tight, or there'd 'a' been a famine in camp, sure.

"Waal, one day the foreman sent me out to look over a section of timber
land some distance from the camp, an' I set off right after breakfast.
I took my axe along, o' course; no lumberman ever thinks o' goin'
anywhere without his axe, any more than you boys figure on travelin'
around without packin' a six-gun with yuh. I took enough grub with me to
last the day out, fer, as I said, it was a longish distance, an' I didn't
reckon t' get back much before dark. It was the middle o' winter, an' the
days up there in the woods were mighty short.

"The snow was pretty deep, but I traveled on snowshoes, an' didn't have
much trouble gettin' along. I made tol'able time, an' made a rough survey
o' the timber before I unpacked my grub. After eatin' I started back to
camp, congratulatin' myself that I'd reach it with time an' to spare. But
as some poetry sharp I once heard of says, 'Man proposes, but the
Almighty disposes,' or words that mean the same thing. I'd gotten p