He then unrolled his blanket, and revealed to the astonished gaze of his companions several pounds of horse shoe nails.
"What on earth are you goin' to do with them horse shoe nails ?" asked Hilly Bowlegs, looking up from the cedar arrow on which he was working.
"I'm going to make arrow heads out of them," answered Sam, thrusting several of them into the bed of coals.
With the side of an axe for an anvil, and the hatchet for a hammer, Sam was soon very busy forging his wrought nails into sharp arrow points, holding the hot iron in his wooden pincers.

Among the things that Sam had thought it worth while to learn something about, was blacksmithing, and he was really expert in the simpler arts of the smith.

He could shoe a horse, "point" a plow, or weld iron or steel, very well indeed.
He had learned this as he had learned a good many other things, merely because he thought that every young man should know how to do tolerably well whatever he might sometime need to do, and in a new country where shops are scarce and workmen are not always to be found, there is no mechanical art which it is not sometimes very convenient to know something about.
Sam wrought now so expertly that within less than an hour he had made six arrow points.

These he fitted to six of the arrows, and then he suspended work for the evening, and marked progress on his map; that is to say, he pricked on his map with a pin the course followed during the afternoon, estimating the distance travelled as accurately as he could..