That night his uncle talked long with him about his future.
"I have no son, Ranald," he said, as they sat talking; "and, for your father's sake and for your own, it is my desire that you should become a son to me, and there is no one but yourself to whom the farm would go.
And glad will I be if you will stay 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.