Page:Ralph Connor - The man from Glengarry.djvu/279

  with me. But, stay or not, all that I have will be yours, if it please the Lord to spare you."

"I would want nothing better," said Ranald, "than to stay with you and work with you, but I do not draw toward the farm."

"And what else would you do, Ranald?"

"Indeed, I know not," said Ranald, "but something else than farming. But meantime I should like to go to the shanties with you this winter."

And so, when the Macdonald gang went to the woods that winter, Ranald, taking his father's ax, went with them. And so clever did the boy prove himself that by the time they brought down their raft in the spring there was not a man in all the gang that Macdonald Bhain would sooner have at his back in a tight place than his nephew Ranald. And, indeed, those months in the woods made a man out of the long, lanky boy, so that, on the first Sabbath after the shantymen came home, not many in the church that day would have recognized the dark-faced, stalwart youth had it not been that he sat in the pew beside Macdonald Bhain. It was with no small difficulty that the minister's wife could keep her little boy quiet in the back seat, so full of pride and joy was he at the appearance of his hero; but after the service was over, Hughie could be no longer restrained. Pushing his way eagerly through the crowd, he seized upon Ranald and dragged him to his mother.

"Here he is, mother!" he exclaimed, to Ranald's great confusion, and to the amusement of all about him. "Isn't he splendid?"