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There are no trees growing upon any part of the country, so that the inhabitants have nothing to build their houses with, excepting the planks and trees which the sea washes away from other countries and leaves upon their coast. With these they erect large cabins, where several families live together.
Other casks were opened, and the drink-crazed Indians yelled and fought and sang in a perfect frenzy of delirium. Fire-brands were hurled high into the air, to fall whirling among the cabins. And it was these whirling brands that riveted the attention of the occupants of the big canoe that approached swiftly along the shore from the direction of the Yellow Knife. LeFroy had timed his work well.
The wave had flooded the cabins, broken in doors, and washed everything and everybody about. So we all had to set to work to bale out water, and mop up our bed-rooms; and as the wave had also put out what lights there were, we had to work in the dark, and very uncomfortable work it was! What the women and children did, and the poor people who were sea-sick, I hardly know.
"The lonely man?" asked the passenger, who was not a deck-passenger. He was the only saloon passenger, and because of that, he slept first in one, then in the other of the two small cabins, alternating according to which side the wind blew from. "You would not mind, perhaps," continued the Captain, "if, after all in spite of this long delay we still found time for the lonely man?
I remember, one morning, Stell and I came home in the dawn after an all-night vigil with a dying woman. We were both nearly asleep as we stumbled along through the pines, but not too far gone to see Dollar Mark come charging at us. We had stopped at the cookhouse and begged a pot of hot coffee to take to our cabins.
It might have been observed by the others, but wasn't, that Perry and Ossie, on the Adventurer, and Wink, on the Follow Me, exhibited a strange fondness for the seclusion of the cabins from that time until the next day at eight, when the cruisers up-anchored and passed out of the harbour. And as the broad Atlantic rolled under the keels three hearty sighs emerged from as many throats.
They forgot their designs against the cat, and no longer thought of their promise to shoot the boycotted man if he ventured to address them. They ran to their cabins, and seizing their rifles, rallied at the saloon, which was the only building capable of affording shelter. It was built of stout logs, and its one door was immensely thick and strong.
They found the savages socially superior, though their moral character does not rank high. The Kafir cabins they entered were caves, lighted only by the door, but deliciously cool, and quite clean; the floors of puddled clay or ants' nests, and very clean.
It stood a little way from the loose-edged group of cabins that formed the nucleus of the settlement, on ground a little higher, and closer to the wooded cañon that gashed the hills on the east. The style of house most common in the village was long, low-roofed, of hewn logs, its front pierced by alternating doors and windows.
In the rear of the fantastic dwelling, and not far from it, stood a row of log cabins for the negroes who served on the place, and a cluster of barns and stables abundantly stocked. All the houses were new, and the adjacent cultivated land showed many signs that it had not long been tilled, or even cleared.
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