I'll have that cholo and
Rondeau sent down with the next trainload of logs to the company
hospital. They're a poor lot and deserve manhandling--"
They paused, facing toward the timber, from which came a voice,
powerful, sweetly resonant, raised in song. Shirley knew that half-
trained baritone, for she had heard it the night before when Bryce
Cardigan, faking his own accompaniment at the piano, had sung for her
a number of carefully expurgated lumberjack ballads, the lunatic
humour of which had delighted her exceedingly. She marvelled now at
his choice of minstrelsy, for the melody was hauntingly plaintive--
the words Eugene Field's poem of childhood, "Little Boy Blue."
"The little toy dog is covered with dust,
But sturdy and stanch he stands;
And the little toy soldier is red with rust,
And his musket molds in his hands.
Time was when the little toy dog was new,
And the soldier was passing fair;
And that was the time when our little boy blue,
Kissed them and put them there."
"Light-hearted devil, isn't he?" the Colonel commented approvingly.
"And his voice isn't half bad. Just singing to be defiant, I
suppose."
Shirley did not answer. But a few minutes previously she had seen the
singer a raging fury, brandishing an axe and driving men before him.
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