II

Under the dominion of Rosy-Lilly fell Conroy's camp at sight,

capitulating unconditionally to the first appeal of her tearful blue

eyes, and little, hurt red mouth. Dan Logan, the Boss, happened to

know just how utterly alone the death of her father had left the

child, and he was the first to propose that the camp should adopt her.

Fully bearing out the faith which Walley Johnson had so confidently

expressed back in the dead man's cabin, Jimmy Brackett, the cook, on

whom would necessarily devolve the chief care of this new member of

his family, jumped to the proposal of the Boss with enthusiastic

support.

"We'll every mother's son o' us be guardeen to her!" he declared, with

the finality appropriate to his office as autocrat second only to the

Boss himself. Every man in camp assented noisily, saving only Red

McWha; and he, as was expected of him, sat back and grinned.

From the first, Rosy-Lilly made herself at home in the camp. For a few

days she fretted after her father, whenever she was left for a moment

to her own devices; but Jimmy Brackett was ever on hand to divert her

mind with astounding fairy-tales during the hours when the rest of the

hands were away chopping and hauling. Long after she had forgotten to

fret, she would have little "cryin' spells" at night, remembering her

father's good-night kiss. But a baby's sorrow, happily, is shorter

than its remembrance; and Rosy-Lilly soon learned to repeat her

phrase: "Poor Daddy had to go 'way-'way-off," without the quivering

lip and wistful look which made the big woodsmen's hearts tighten so

painfully beneath their homespun shirts. Conroy's Camp was a spacious,

oblong cabin of "chinked" logs, with a big stove in the middle. The

bunks were arranged in a double tier along one wall, and a plank table

(rude, but massive) along the other. Built on at one end, beside the

door, was the kitchen, or cookhouse, crowded, but clean and orderly,

and bright with shining tins. At the inner end of the main room a

corner was boarded off to make a tiny bedroom, no bigger than a

cupboard. This was the Boss's private apartment. It contained two

narrow bunks--one for the Boss himself, who looked much too big for

it; and one for the only guest whom the camp ever expected to

entertain, the devoted missionary-priest, who, on his snowshoes, was

wont to make the round of the widely scattered camps once or twice in

a winter. This guest-bunk the Boss at once allotted to Rosy-Lilly, but

on the strict condition that Johnson should continue to act as nurse

and superintend Rosy-Lilly's nightly toilet.

Rosy-Lilly had not been in the camp a week before McWha's "ugliness"

to her had aroused even the Boss's resentment, and the Boss was a

just man. Of course, it was generally recognized that McWha was not

bound, by any law or obligation, to take any notice of the child,

still less to "make a fuss over her," with the rest of the camp. But

Jimmy Brackett expressed the popular sentiment when he growled,

looking sourly at the back of McWha's unconscious red head bowed

ravenously over his plate of beans--

"If only he'd _do_ something, so's we c'ld _lick_ some decency inter

'im!"

There was absolutely nothing to be done about it, however; for Red

McWha was utterly within his rights.

Rosy-Lilly, as we have seen, was not yet five years old; but certain

of the characteristics of her sex were already well developed within

her. The adulation of the rest of the camp, poured out at her tiny

feet, she took graciously enough, but rather as a matter of course. It

was all her due. But what she wanted was that that big, ugly,

red-headed man, with the cross grey eyes and loud voice, should be

nice to her. She wanted _him_ to pick her up, and set her on his knee,

and whittle wonderful wooden dogs and dolls and boats and boxes for

her with his jack-knife, as Walley Johnson and the others did. With

Walley she would hardly condescend to coquet, so sure she was of his

abject slavery to her whims; and, moreover, as must be confessed with

regret, so unforgiving was she in her heart toward his blank eye. She

merely consented to make him useful, much as she might a convenient

and altogether doting but uninteresting grandmother. To all the other

members of the camp--except the Boss, whom she regarded with some

awe--she would make baby-love impartially and carelessly. But it was

Red McWha whose notice she craved.

When supper was over, and pipes filled and lighted, some one would

strike up a "chantey"--one of those interminable, monotonous

ballad-songs which are peculiar to the lumber camps.

These "chanteys," however robust their wordings or their incidents,

are always sung in a plaintive minor which goes oddly with the

large-moulded virility of the singers. Some are sentimental, or

religious, to the last degree, while others reek with an indecency of

speech that would shroud the Tenderloin in blushes. Both kinds are

equally popular in the camps, and both are of the most astounding

_naivete_. Of the worst of them, even, the simple-minded woodsmen are

not in the least ashamed. They seem unconscious of their enormity.

Nevertheless, it came about that, without a word said by any one, from

the hour of Rosy-Lilly's arrival in camp, all the indecent "chanteys"

were dropped, as if into oblivion, from the woodsmen's repertoire.

During the songs, the smoking, and the lazy fun, Rosy-Lilly would slip

from one big woodsman to another, an inconspicuous little figure in

the smoke-gloomed light of the two oil-lamps. Man after man would

snatch her up to his knee, lay by his pipe, twist her silky, yellow

curls about his great blunt fingers, and whisper wood-folk tales or

baby nonsense into her pink little ear. She would listen solemnly for

a minute or two, then wriggle down and move on to another of her

admirers. But before long she would be standing by the bench on which

sat Red McWha, with one big knee usually hooked high above the other,

and his broad back reclined against the edge of a bunk. For a few

minutes the child would stand there smiling with a perennial

confidence, waiting to be noticed. Then she would come closer, without

a word from her usually nimble little tongue, lean against McWha's

knee, and look up coaxingly into his face. If McWha chanced to be

singing, for he was a "chanter" of some note, he would appear so

utterly absorbed that Rosy-Lilly would at last slip away, with a look

of hurt surprise in her face, to be comforted by one of her faithful.

But if McWha were not engrossed in song, it would soon become

impossible for him to ignore her. He would suddenly look down at her

with his fierce eyes, knit his shaggy red brows, and demand harshly:

"Well, Yaller Top, an' what d'_you_ want?"

From the loud voice and angry eye the child would retreat in haste,

clear to the other end of the room, and sometimes a big tear would

track its way down either cheek. After such an experiment she would

usually seek Jimmy Brackett, who would console her with some sticky

sweetmeat, and strive to wither McWha with envenomed glances. McWha

would reply with a grin, as if proud of having routed the little

adventurer so easily. He had discovered that the name "Yaller Top" was

an infallible weapon of rebuff, as Rosy-Lilly considered it a term of

indignity. To his evil humour there was something amusing in abashing

Rosy-Lilly with the title she most disliked. Moreover, it was an

indirect rebuke to the "saft" way the others acted about her.

If Rosy-Lilly felt rebuffed for the moment by McWha's rudeness, she

seemed always to forget it the next time she saw him. Night after

night she would sidle up to his knee, and sue for his notice; and

night after night she would retire discomfited. But on one occasion

the discomfiture was McWha's. She had elicited the customary rough

demand--

"Well, Yaller Top, what d'_you_ want?"

But this time she held her ground, though with quivering lips.

"Yaller Top ain't my name 'tall," she explained with baby politeness.

"It's Rosy-Lilly; 'n' I jes' thought you _might_ want me to sit on

yer knee a little, teeny minit."

Much taken aback, McWha glanced about the room with a loutish grin.

Then he flushed angrily, as he felt the demand of the sudden silence.

Looking down again, with a scowl, at the expectant little face of

Rosy-Lilly, he growled: "Well, not as I knows of!" and rose to his

feet, thrusting her brusquely aside.

"Ain't he uglier'n hell?" murmured Bird Pigeon to Walley Johnson,

spitting indignantly on the stove-leg. "He'd 'a' cuffed the kid ef he

da'st, he glared at her that ugly!"

"Like to see 'im try it!" responded Johnson through his teeth, with a

look to which his blank eye lent mysterious menace.

The time soon came, however, when McWha resumed his old seat and his

old attitude on the bench. Rosy-Lilly avoided him for two evenings,

but on the third the old fascination got the better of her pique.

McWha saw her coming, and, growing self-conscious, he hurriedly

started up a song with the full strength of his big voice.

The song was a well-known one, and nothing in it to redden the ear of

a maiden; but it was profane with that rich, ingenious amplitude of

profanity which seems almost instinctive among the lumbermen--a sort

of second mother-tongue to them. Had it been any one but McWha who

started it, nothing would have been said; but, as it was, Walley

Johnson took alarm on the instant. To his supersensitive watchfulness,

McWha was singing that song "jest a purpose to be ugly to the kid."

The fact that "the kid" would hardly understand a word of it, did not

occur to him. Rising up from his bench behind the stove he shouted out

across the smoky room: "Shet up that, Red!"

The song stopped. Every one looked inquiringly at Johnson. For several

moments there was silence, broken only by an uneasy shuffling of feet.

Then McWha got up slowly, his eyebrows bristling, his angry eyes

little pin-points. First he addressed himself to Johnson.

"What the ---- business is't o' yourn what I sing?" he demanded,

opening and shutting his big fingers.

"I'll show ye what," began Johnson, in a tense voice. But the Boss

interrupted. Dave Logan was a quiet man, but he ruled his camp.

Moreover, he was a just man, and Johnson had begun the dispute.

"Chuck that, Walley!" he snapped, sharp as a whip. "If there's to be

any row in this here camp, I'll make it myself, an' don't none o' you

boys forgit it!"

McWha turned upon him in angry appeal.

"You're Boss, Dave Logan, an' what you sez goes, fer's I'm

concerned," said he. "But I ax you, _as_ Boss, be this here camp a

_camp_, er a camp-meetin'? Walley Johnson kin go straight to hell; but

ef _you_ sez we 'ain't to sing nawthin' but hymns, why, o' course,

it's hymns for me--till I kin git away to a camp where the hands is

men, an' not wet-nurses!"

"That's all right, Red!" said the Boss. "I kin make allowances for yer

gittin' riled, considerin' the jolt Walley's rude interruption give

ye! He hadn't no right to interrupt, nor no call to. This ain't no

camp-meetin'. The boys have a right to swear all they like. Why,

'twouldn't be noways natural in camp ef the boys couldn't swear!

somethin'd hev to bust before long. An' the boys can't be expected to

go a-tiptoe and talk prunes an' prisms, all along o' a little

yaller-haired kid what's come to brighten up the old camp fer us. That

wouldn't be sense! But all we've got to mind is jest this--_nothin'

vile!_ That's all, boys. We'll worry along without that!"

When the Boss spoke, he liked to explain himself rather fully. When he

ceased, no one had a word to say. Every one was satisfied but Johnson;

and he was constrained to seem so. There was an oppressive silence for

some seconds. It was broken by the soft treble of Rosy-Lilly, who had

been standing before the Boss and gazing up into his face with awed

attention throughout the harangue.

"What did you say, Dave?" she piped, her hands clasped behind her

back.

"Somethin' as shall never tech you, Rosy-Lilly!" declared Johnson,

snatching up the child and bearing her off to bed, amid a roar of

laughter which saved Dave Logan the embarrassment of a reply.

For a time, now, Rosy-Lilly left McWha alone, so markedly that it

looked as if Walley Johnson or Jimmy Brackett had admonished her on

the subject. She continued, indeed, to cast at him eyes of pleading

reproach, but always from a distance, and such appeals rolled off

McWha's crude perception like water off a musk rat's fur. He had

nothing "agin her," as he would have put it, if only she would keep

out of his way. But Rosy-Lilly, true to her sex, was not vanquished by

any means, or even discouraged. She was only biding her time. Bird

Pigeon, who was something of a beau in the Settlements, understood

this, and stirred the loyal wrath of Walley Johnson by saying so.

"There ain't nawthin' about Red McWha to make Rosy-Lilly keer shucks

fer 'im, savin' an' except that she can't git him!" said Bird. "She's

that nigh bein' a woman a'ready, if she _be_ but five year old!"