climbing down.

Prosper neither shouted nor chopped, but he grinned a little as he
watched the tree quiver and shake, and heard the rain of "SACRES!"
and "MAUDITS!" that came out of the swaying top. He grinned--until
he saw that a half-dozen more blows would fell the birch right on
the roof of the shanty.

"Are you crazy?" he cried, as he picked up an axe; "you know nothing
how to chop. You kill a man. You smash the cabane. Let go!" He
shoved one of the boys away and sent a few mighty cuts into the side
of the birch that was farthest from the cabin; then two short cuts
on the other side; the tree shivered, staggered, cracked, and swept
in a great arc toward the deep snow-drift by the brook. As the top
swung earthward, Raoul jumped clear of the crashing branches and
landed safely in the feather-bed of snow, buried up to his neck.
Nothing was to be seen of him but his head, like some new kind of
fire-work--sputtering bad words.

Well, this was the first thing that put an edge on Vaillantcoeur's
hunger to fight. No man likes to be chopped down by his friend,
even if the friend does it for the sake of saving him from being
killed by a fall on the shanty-roof. It is easy to forget that part
of it. What you remember is the grin.

The second thing that made it worse was the bad chance that both of
these men had to fall in love with the same girl. Of course there
were other girls in the village beside Marie Antoinette Girard--
plenty of them, and good girls, too. But somehow or other, when
they were beside her, neither Raoul nor Prosper cared to look at any