It was a week later, and a hot afternoon, when Muller laid the big crosscut saw down on the log he was severing and slowly straightened his back. Then he stood up, red and very damp in face, a burly, square-shouldered man, and, having mislaid his spectacles, blinked about him. On three sides of him the prairie, swelling in billowy rises, ran back to the horizon; but on the fourth a dusky wall of foliage followed the crest of a ravine, and the murmur of water came up faintly from the creek in the hollow. Between himself and its slender birches lay piled amidst the parched and dusty grass, and the first courses of a wooden building, rank with the smell of sappy timber, already stood in front of him. There was no notch in the framing that had not been made and pinned with an exact precision. In its scanty shadow his daughter sat knitting beside a smouldering fire over which somebody had suspended a big blackened kettle. The crash of the last falling trunk had died away, and there was silence in the bluff; but a drumming of hoofs rose in a sharp staccato from the prairie. "Now," said Muller quietly, "I think the chasseurs come." The girl looked up a moment, noticed the four mounted figures that swung over the crest of a rise, and then went on with her knitting again. Still, there was for a second a little flash in her pale blue eyes. The horsemen came on, the dust floating in long wisps behind them, until, with a jingle of bridle and stirrup, they pulled up before the building. Three of them were bronzed and dusty, in weather-stained blue shirts, wide hats, and knee-boots that fitted them like gloves; and there was ironical amusement in their faces. Each sat his horse as if he had never known any other seat than the saddle; but the fourth was different from the rest. He wore a jacket of richly embroidered deerskin, and the shirt under it was white; while he sat with one hand in a big leather glove resting on his hip. His face was sallow and his eyes were dark. "Hallo, Hamburg!" he said, and his voice had a little commanding ring. "You seem kind of busy." Muller blinked at him. He had apparently not yet found his spectacles, but he had in the meanwhile come upon his axe, and now stood very straight, with the long haft reaching to his waist. "Ja," he said. "Mine house I build." "Well," said the man in the embroidered jacket, "I fancy you're wasting time. Asked anybody's leave to cut that lumber, or put it up?" "Mine friend," said Muller, smiling, "when it is nod necessary I ask nodings of any man." "Then," said the horseman drily, as he turned to his companions, "I fancy that's where you're wrong. Boys, we'll take him along in case Torrance would like to see him. I guess you'll have to walk home, Jim." A man dismounted and led forward his horse with a wrench upon the bridle that sent it plunging. "Get your foot in the stirrup, Hamburg, and I'll hoist you up," he said.