The companions of Frank Higgins were the children of the Sioux Indians, whose tepees were near the homestead. With the children of the Indians he took his lessons in woodcraft, learned to draw the bow, or childishly labored at the tasks of the growing braves. One of his early recollections is of secretly carrying a loaf of bread from his home to trade with an Indian youth for bow and arrows. Perhaps the subsequent strapping he received had something to do with the permanency and vividness of the recollection. For three years the Indians were his constant playmates. From the warlike Sioux, fearlessness was imbibed, their love of the forest became his, and an ineffaceable delight in tree and stream was stamped in the character of the growing boy. "I feel it now," he said to me, but recently when we were in the city together, "I want to get back to the solitudes where the trees have voices and every stream a story. I love the camps rather than the cities. I have never passed from my boyhood love--my first love--the trees, the hills, the brooks. In the pineries I feel as if I were a boy back in the old days again." [Illustration: STEAM-JAMMER AT WORK] These were days of gold and purple when the child was learning the mysteries of life, days of ceaseless roaming in which nature taught her truths through leaf and twig, through dew and whispering breeze. He was nature taught--all that touches "the wild and pillared shades" belongs to his free, frank nature. Unknowingly he was beholding the beauty of his future kingdom and unconsciously equipping himself for the years of zealous toil among the white nomads whose weapons are the ax, the saw and the peavey--a change in equipment and complexion, with the same stage setting. Few school privileges came to the forest lad. When he should have been at his studies there was no school to attend; when the school came, only brief periods were allowed to him. At twelve he took his place by his stepfather's side and assisted in supporting the family. Every hand was needed, and the boy's little counted for much. There was ground to clear of trees and underbrush, there were rails to split and fields to fence, and in the winter logging, claimed his labor for the cash it gave in return.