“Hain’t seen any Red Cedar, but the rest is easy.”

“It has to be thoroughly seasoned winter-cut wood, and cut so as to have heart on one side and sap wood on the other.”

“How’s that?” and Sam pointed to a lot of half-round Hickory sticks on the rafters of the log house.  “Those have been there a couple of years.”

A good one of five feet long was selected and split and hewn with the axe till the boys had the two bow staves, five and one-half feet long and two inches square, with the line of the heart and sap wood down the middle of each.

Guided by his memory of that precious book and some English long bows that he had seen in a shop in town, Yan superintended the manufacture.  Sam was apt with tools, and in time they finished two bows, five feet long and drawing possibly twenty-five pounds each.  In the middle they were one and one-half inches wide and an inch thick (see page 183).  This size they kept for nine inches each way, making an eighteen-inch middle part that did not bend, but their two limbs were shaved down and scraped with glass till they bent evenly and were well within the boys’ strength.

The string was the next difficulty.  All the ordinary string they could get around the house proved too weak, never lasting more than two or three shots, till Si Lee, seeing their trouble, sent them to the cobbler’s for a hank of unbleached linen thread and some shoemaker’s wax.  Of this thread he reeled enough for a strong cord tight around two pegs seven feet apart, then cutting it loose at one end he divided it equally in three parts, and, after slight waxing, he loosely plaited them together.  At Yan’s suggestion he then spliced a loop at one end, and with a fine waxed thread lashed six inches of the middle where the arrow fitted, as well as the splice of the loop.  This last enabled them to unstring the bow when not in use (see page 183).  “There,” said he, “you won’t break that.”  The finishing touch was thinly coating the bows with some varnish found among the paint supplies.

“Makes my old bow look purty sick,” remarked Sam, as he held up the really fine new weapon in contrast with the wretched little hoop that had embodied his early ideas.  “Now what do you know about arrers, mister?” as he tried his old arrow in the new bow.

“I know that that’s no good,” was the reply; “an’ I can tell you that it’s a deal harder to make an arrow than a bow—­that is, a good one.”

“That’s encouraging, considering the trouble we’ve had already.”

“’Tisn’t meant to be, but we ought to have a dozen arrows each.”

“How do the Injuns make them?”

“Mostly they get straight sticks of the Arrow-wood; but I haven’t seen any Arrow-wood here, and they’re not so awfully straight.  You see, an arrow must be straight or it’ll fly crooked.  ‘Straight as an arrow’ means the thing itself.  We can do better than the Indians ’cause we have better tools.  We can split them out of the solid wood.”