t a prisoner.

During this time Jimmy Brackett, with severe and detailed admonition,
kept Rosy-Lilly from again obtruding upon the patient's leisure; and
McWha had nothing to do but smoke and whittle. He whittled diligently,
but let no one see what he was making. Then, borrowing a small tin cup
from the cook, he fussed over the stove with some dark, smelly
decoction of tobacco-juice and ink. Rosy-Lilly was consumed with
curiosity, especially when she saw him apparently digging beads off an
Indian tobacco-pouch which he always carried. But she did not go near
enough to get enlightened as to his mysterious occupation.

On the following day McWha went to work again, but not till after
breakfast, when the others had long departed. Rosy-Lilly, with one
hand twisted in her little apron, was standing in the doorway as he
passed out. She glanced up at him with the most coaxing smile in her
whole armoury of allurements. McWha would not look at her, and his
face was as sullenly harsh as ever; but as he passed he slipped
something into her hand. To her speechless delight, it proved to be a
little dark-brown wooden doll, daintily carved, and with two white
beads, with black centres, cunningly set into its face for eyes.

Rosy-Lilly hugged the treasure to her breast. Her first proud impulse
was to run to Jimmy Brackett with it. But a subtler instinct withheld
her. The gift had been bestowed in such a surreptitious way that she
felt it to be somehow a kind of secret. She carried it away and hid it
in her bunk, where she would go and look at it from time to time
throughout the day. That night she brought it forth, but with several
other treasures, so that it quite escaped comment. She said nothing
about it to McWha, but she played with it when he could not help
seeing it. And thereafter her "nigger-baby" was always in her arms.

This compliment, however, was apparently all lost on McWha, who had
again grown unconscious of her existence. And Rosy-Lilly, on her part,
no longer strove to win his attention. She was content either with the
victory she had won, or with the secret understanding which, perforce,
now existed between them. And things went on smoothly in the camp,
with every one now too occupied to do more than mind his own
business.

It chanced this year that the spring thaws were early and unusually
swift, warm rains alternating with hot, searching sunshine which
withered and devoured the snow. The ice went out with a rus