The two boys set out together for a rock-maple district five miles off, drawing their impedimenta heaped high on a large sled. They were fortified for a three weeks’ stay. Mrs. Strang had baked them several batches of bread, and with unwonted enthusiasm supplied them with corn-meal for porridge, and tea and sugar, and butter and molasses, and salt pork and beef, all stowed into the barrel that would come home full of sugar. Their kitchen paraphernalia embraced a teapot and a teakettle, a frying-pan and a pot, while their manufacturing apparatus comprised tin pails, Yankee buckets, dippers, and axes. Guns, ammunition, and blankets completed their equipment. Matt’s painting materials were stowed away on his person unobtrusively.
They took possession of a disused log-cabin, formerly the property of a woodsman, as the advertising agent would have put it, had he penetrated to the backwoods. Possibly under his roseate vision it might have expanded into a detached villa without basement, or a bungalow standing in its own grounds, but a non-professional eye would have seen nothing but four walls and a pitched roof with a great square hole in it to let the light in and the smoke out. These walls were built of unhewn logs in their rough, natural bark. The floor was even more primitive, being simply the soil. It was necessary to thaw it by lighting the fire on it before the stakes could be driven in to support the cross-pieces from which the sugar-pot depended.
Then the boys chopped down a vast store of hardwood for fuel, and lanced the tall maples, catching their blood in birch-bark troughs through pine spills. They emptied the troughs into pails, and carried the sap to their cabin, and boiled it in the big pot, and cooled it again to sugar. A halcyon fortnight passed, full of work, yet leaving Matt leisure for daubing boyish fancies on pieces of birch-bark to cover withal the wooden walls of his home, which the aforesaid advertiser might not unwarrantably have described as a studio with a novel top-light in a quiet neighborhood. Possibly Matt’s mural decorations would have enhanced the description. They comprised a fantastic medley of angels with faces more or less like Ruth Hailey, and devils fashioned more or less after the similitude of Bully Preep, and strange composite animals more or less like nothing on earth, moving amid hills and ships and lurid horizons. One night Matt sat by the fire in the centre of the hut painting a more realistic picture and meditating a weeding of his gallery. There had been no sap running that day, a sudden return of winter had congealed it, and so this extra artistic output during the comparatively idle hours had almost exhausted his hanging-space. While he painted he gave an eye to the seething pot in which the sap must change to molasses, and then thicken to maple syrup, and then to maple wax ere it was ladled into the birch-bark dishes and set to cool outside the hut. A piece of fat pork hanging from a hook in the cross-piece just touched the surface of the sap and prevented it from effervescing. Tommy was asleep on a heap of fir boughs in a corner, for the boys took it in turn to watch the pot and replenish the fire. The soundness of Tommy’s sleep to-night astonished Matt, for usually the young Micmac slept the sleep of the vigilant, a-quiver at the slightest unwonted sound. Matt did not know that his ingenious partner had just completed the distillation of a crude rum from a portion of sap arrested at the molasses stage, and that he had imbibed gloriously thereof.
