Page:Jackson Gregory--joyous trouble maker.djvu/165

Rh things he had accomplished. A few old boards which Bill Rice had discovered off in the forest where many, many years ago a solitary individual had lived his solitary life in his rude shanty, now a lonesome ruin, had been made into the gabled roof of Steele's palace. But that Beatrice could not know; for the boards were concealed first by the damp leaf mould which Steele had brought a hundred yards for the purpose, and in the rich soil giving a gaily coloured thatch were the countless blue and yellow flowers which thrived here as they had done in the meadow.

Nor was that all; Beatrice wondered where was the end of all that "that man Steele" had accomplished in this handful of days? Up on the hillside, at some spot lost to view in a tangle of bushes, he had tricked a bright little stream from its course, swung it this way and that with an old spade serving quite as well as wand or Aladdin lamp, so that now the merriest of flashing rivulets gurgled by his door and sped away through grass and rocks to fall bickering into Thunder River. Along its rim were flowers of the sort that love the waterways, red blossomed with lush, thick green leaves.

On each side of the cabin door was a pile of rocks with rich black soil sifted among them, crowned with ferns with pretended at being very much at home here.

"Isn't it pretty!" cried Beatrice, her eyes brightening. Since she had come today, since that coming was a tacit acknowledgment of defeat, she had meant from the first to show him that she knew how to lose with no