Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/18

 saying to himself throughout the night, but the night brought no answer.

Meagning, however, was more communicative. At the breakfast table he got his answer. It was while he gulped his coffee and glanced the Free Press through. Upon an inside page his eyes encountered that which made him growl and start.

"Well, I be darned," he muttered with incredulous wonder. "I do be darned."

"What is it, pop?" demanded George pertly. But the father's manner became at once confused and forbidding. He vouchsafed no reply, but folding the paper as for further perusal at noontime, pushed it down into his side coat-pocket.

The day was Saturday.

"Jim, you come with me today," his father directed. "There's a lot of broken scantlings and waste lumber Mulligan said I could have if I'd haul it away. Some of it will be good for kindling, and some for tomato and bean stakes, and some of it for fencing and chicken coops. It'll take you all day to gather it. George, you stay and help your mother."

George could not repress a grin and a gloating wink at his brother. Helping mother was a snap. Jim, on the contrary, would have to put in a day of grinding toil, get splinters in his hands, perhaps a nail in his sensitive flesh, and generally punish his lazy body.