Thus they embraced this new home. The vast and often decaying timbers, hewn out of the very forests they loved, cried out with all the old associations they bore and held them. The miniature citadel contained within the trenchant stockade, the old pelt stores, roofless and worm-eaten, the armory which still suggested the clank of half-armored men, who lived only for the joy of defying death. The factor's house, whence, in the days gone by, the orders for battle had been issued, and the sentence of life and death had been handed out with scant regard for justice. Then there were the ruined walls of the common-room, where the fighting men had caroused and slept. The scenes of frightful orgies held in this place were easy to conjure. All these things counted in a manner which perhaps remained unacknowledged by either. But nevertheless they were as surely a part of the lure as the chase itself, with all its elemental attraction.
They had restored just as much of the old factor's house as they needed for their simple wants. Two rooms were all they occupied, two rooms as simple and plain as their own lives. Buck had added a new roof of logs and clay plaster. He had set up two stretchers with straw-stuffed paillasses for beds. He had manufactured a powerful table, and set it upon legs cut from pine saplings. To this he had added the removal of a cook-stove and two chairs, and their own personal wardrobe from the farm, and so the place was complete. Yet not quite. There was an arm rack upon the wall of the living-room, an arm rack that had at one time doubtless supported the old flintlocks of the early fur hunters. This he had restored, and laden it with their own armory and the spare traps of their craft; while their only luxury was the fastening up beside the doorway of a frameless looking-glass for shaving purposes.
They required a place to sleep in, a place in which to store their produce, a place in which to break their fast and eat their meal at dusk. Here it lay, ready to their hand, affording them just these simple necessities, and so they adopted it.
But the new life troubled the Padre in moments when he allowed himself to dwell upon the younger man's future. He had offered him his release, at the time he had parted with the farm, from a sense of simple duty. It would have been a sore blow to him had Buck accepted, yet he would have submitted readily, even gladly, for he felt that with the passing of the farm out of their hands he had far more certainly robbed Buck of all provision for his future than he had deprived himself, who was the actual owner. He felt that in seeking to help the little starving colony he had done it, in reality, at Buck's expense.