As soon as breakfast was despatched, Johnston called the men together to give them directions about the building of the shanty, which was the first thing of all to be done; and having divided them up into parties, to each of which a different task was assigned, he set them at work without delay.
Frank was very glad that attention to his duties would not prevent his watching the others at theirs; for what could be more interesting than to study every stage of the erection of the building that was to be their shelter and home during the long winter months now rapidly approaching? It was a first experience for him, and nothing escaped his vigilant eye. This is the way he described the building of the shanty to his mother on his return to Calumet:--
"You see, mother, everybody except Baptiste and myself took a hand, and just worked like beavers. I wish you could have seen the men. And Mr. Johnston--why, he was in two places at once most of the time, or at least seemed to be! It was grand fun watching them. The first thing they did was to cut down a lot of trees--splendid big fellows, that would make the trees round here look pretty small, I can tell you. Then they chopped off all the branches and cut up the trunks into the lengths that suited, and laid them one on the top of the other until they made a wall about as high as Mr. Johnston, or perhaps higher, in the shape of one big room forty feet long by thirty feet wide, Mr. Johnston said. It looked very funny then--just like a huge pig-pen, with no windows and only one door--on the side that faced the river. Next day they laid long timbers across the top of the wall, resting them in the middle on four great posts they called 'scoop-bearers.' Funny name, isn't it? But they called them that because they bear the 'scoops' that make the roof; and a grand roof it is, I tell you. The scoops are small logs hollowed out on one side and flat on the other; and they lay them on the cross timbers in such a way that the edges of one fit into the hollows of two others, so that the rain hasn't a chance to get in, no matter how bard it tries. Next thing they made the floor; and that wasn't a hard job, for they just made logs flat on two sides and laid them on the ground, so that it was a pretty rough sort of a floor. All the cracks were stuffed tight with moss and mud, and a big bank of earth thrown up around the bottom of the wall to keep the draught out.