Two days later a rectangular clearing, three hundred by five hundred
feet, was completed, and early in the morning of the third day Chloe
stood beside Lapierre and looked over the cleared oblong with its piles
of smoking grey ashes, and its groups of logs that lay ready to be rolled
into place to form the walls of her buildings.

Lapierre seemed ill at ease. Immediately upon the arrival of the outfit
he had dispatched two of his own Indians northward to spy upon the
movements of MacNair, for the man made no secret of his desire to be well
upon his way before the trader should learn of the building of the fort
on the river.

It had been Chloe's idea to lay out her "village," as she called it, upon
a rather elaborate scheme, the plans for which had been drawn by an
architect whose clients' tastes ran to million-dollar "summer cottages"
at Seashore-by-the-Sea.

First, there was to be the school itself, an ornate building of crossed
rafters and overhanging eaves. Then the dormitories, two long, parallel
buildings with halls, individual rooms, and baths--one for the women and
one for men--the two to be connected by a common dining-hall in such a
manner as to form three sides of a hollow square. Connected to the
dining-hall was to be a commodious kitchen, and back of that a fully
equipped carpenter-shop and a laundry.

There were also to be a trading-post, where the Indians could purchase
supplies at cost; a six-room cottage for the accommodation of Big Lena,
Miss Penny, and Chloe; and numerous three-room cabins for the housing of
whole families of Indians, which the girl fondly pictured as flocking in
from the wilderness to have the errors of their heathenish religion