nd straightway fled for refuge to the broad back
of the surprised and flattered pig.

"The little critter's all right!" declared MacPhairrson, when he and
the Boy were done laughing. "Ananias-an'-Sapphira won't hurt him. She
likes all the critters she kin bully an' skeer. An' Stumpy an' that
comical cuss of a Ebenezer, they be goin' to look out fer him."

II

About a week after this admission of the little raccoon to his Family,
MacPhairrson met with an accident. Coming down the long, sloping
platform of the mill, the point of one of his crutches caught in a
crack, and he plunged headlong, striking his head on a link of heavy
"snaking" chain. He was picked up unconscious and carried to the
nearest cabin. For several days his stupor was unbroken, and the
doctor hardly expected him to pull through. Then he recovered
consciousness--but he was no longer MacPhairrson. His mind was a sort
of amiable blank. He had to be fed and cared for like a very young
child. The doctor decided at last that there was some pressure of bone
on the brain, and that operations quite beyond his skill would be
required. At his suggestion a purse was made up among the mill hands
and the Settlement folk, and MacPhairrson, smiling with infantile
enjoyment, was packed off down river on the little tri-weekly steamer
to the hospital in the city.

As soon as it was known around the mill--which stood amidst its
shanties a little apart from the Settlement--that MacPhairrson was to
be laid up for a long time, the question arose: "What's to become of
the Family?" It was morning when the accident happened, and in the
afternoon the Boy had come up to look after the animals. After that,
when the mill stopped work at sundown, there was a council held, amid
the suddenly silent saws.

"What's to be done about the orphants?" was the way Jimmy Wright put
the problem.

Black Angus MacAllister, the Boss--so called to distinguish him from
Red Angus, one of the gang of log-drivers--had his ideas already
pretty well formed on the subject, and intended that his ideas should
go. He did not really care much about any one else's ideas except the
Boy's, which he respected as second only to those of MacPhairrson
where the wild kindreds were concerned. Black Angus was a huge,
big-handed, black-bearded, bull-voiced man, whose orders and
imprecations made themselves heard above the most piercing crescendos
of the saws. When his intolerant eyes fixed a man, what he had