But they were not wholly devoid of sentiment and perception. They recognized in Thompson a lively susceptibility to certain disagreeable things which they accepted as a matter of course. They saw that he was rather less capable of coping with such a situation than a ten-year-old native boy, that a dirty cabin in a lonely clearing made him stand aghast. And so--although their bargain with him was closed when they deposited him and his goods on the bank of Lone Moose--they set to work with energy to renovate his forlorn-looking abode.
They made short work of the rats' and the swallows' nests. Breyette quickly fashioned a broom of fine willow twigs, brought up a shovel from the canoe, and swept and shovelled the place out. MacDonald meanwhile cleared the weeds and grass from a space before the cabin and burned up the unseemly refuse. The stove fulfilled its functions perfectly despite the red rust of disuse. With buckets of boiling water they flooded and drenched the floor and walls till the interior was as fresh and clean as if new erected.
The place was habitable by sundown. While the long northern twilight held the three of them carried up the freight that burdened the canoe, and piled it in one corner, sacks of flour, sides of bacon and salt pork, boxes of dried fruit, the miscellaneous articles with which a man must supply himself when he goes into the wilderness.
That night they slept upon a meager thickness of blanket spread on the hard floor.
In the morning Mike went to work again. He showed Thompson how to arrange a mattress of hemlock boughs on the bed frame. It was a simple enough makeshift, soft and springy when Thompson spread his bedding over it. Then Mike superintended the final disposition of his supplies so that there would be some semblance of order instead of an indiscriminately mixed pile in which the article wanted was always at the bottom. Incidentally he strove to impart to Thompson certain rudimentary principles in the cooking of simple food. He illustrated the method of mixing a batch of baking-powder bread, and how to parboil salt pork before cooking, explained to him the otherwise mysterious expansion of rice and beans and dried apples in boiling water, all of which Breyette was shrewd enough to realize that Thompson knew nothing about. He had a ready ear for instructions but a poor understanding of these matters. So Mike reiterated out of his experience of camp cooking, and Thompson tried to remember.