IV

The train stopped about noon at a small board town. Fox and Bob

descended. The latter drew his lungs full of the sparkling clear air and

felt inclined to shout. The thing that claimed his attention most

strongly was the dull green band of the forest, thick and impenetrable

to the south, fringing into ragged tamaracks on the east, opening into a

charming vista of a narrowing bay to the west. Northward the land ran

down to sandpits and beyond them tossed the vivid white and blue of the

Lake. Then when his interest had detached itself from the predominant

note of the imminent wilderness, predominant less from its physical

size--for it lay in remote perspective--than from a certain indefinable

and psychological right of priority, Bob's eye was at once drawn to the

huge red-painted sawmill, with its very tall smokestacks, its row of

water barrels along the ridge, its uncouth and separate conical sawdust

burner, and its long lines of elevated tramways leading out into the

lumber yard where was piled the white pine held over from the season

before. As Bob looked, a great, black horse appeared on one of these

aerial tramways, silhouetted against the sky. The beast moved

accurately, his head held low against his chest, his feet lifted and

planted with care. Behind him rumbled a whole train of little cars each

laden with planks. On the foremost sat a man, his shoulders bowed,

driving the horse. They proceeded slowly, leisurely, without haste,

against the brightness of the sky. The spider supports below them seemed

strangely inadequate to their mass, so that they appeared in an occult

manner to maintain their elevation by some buoyancy of their own, some

quality that sustained them not only in their distance above the earth

but in a curious, decorative, extra-human world of their own. After a

moment they disappeared behind the tall piles of lumber.

Against the sky, now, the place of the elephantine black horse and the

little tram cars and the man was taken by the masts of ships lying

beyond. They rose straight and tall, their cordage like spider webs, in

a succession of regular spaces until they were lost behind the mill.

From the exhaust of the mill's engine a jet of white steam shot up

sparkling. Close on its apparition sounded the exultant, high-keyed

shriek of the saw. It ceased abruptly. Then Bob became conscious of a

heavy _rud, thud_ of mill machinery.

All this time he and Fox were walking along a narrow board walk,

elevated two or three feet above the sawdust-strewn street. They passed

the mill and entered the cool shade of the big lumber piles. Along their

base lay half-melted snow. Soggy pools soaked the ground in the exposed

places. Bob breathed deep of the clear air, keenly conscious of the

freshness of it after the murky city. A sweet and delicate odour was

abroad, an odour elusive yet pungent, an aroma of the open. The young

man sniffed it eagerly, this essence of fresh sawdust, of new-cut pine,

of sawlogs dripping from the water, of faint old reminiscence of cured

lumber standing in the piles of the year before, and more fancifully of

the balsam and spruce, the hemlock and pine of the distant forest.

"Great!" he cried aloud, "I never knew anything like it! What a country

to train in!"

"All this lumber here is going to be sold within the next two months,"

said Fox with the first approach to enthusiasm Bob had ever observed in

him. "All of it. It's got to be carried down to the docks, and tallied

there, and loaded in those vessels. The mill isn't much--too

old-fashioned. We saw with 'circulars' instead of band-saws. Not like

our Minnesota mills. We bought the plant as it stands. Still we turn

out a pretty good cut every day, and it has to be run out and piled."

They stepped abruptly, without transition, into the town. A double row

of unpainted board shanties led straight to the water's edge. This row

was punctuated by four buildings different from the rest--a huge

rambling structure with a wide porch over which was suspended a large

bell; a neatly painted smaller building labelled "Office"; a trim house

surrounded by what would later be a garden; and a square-fronted store.

The street between was soft and springy with sawdust and finely broken

shingles. Various side streets started out bravely enough, but soon

petered out into stump land. Along one of them were extensive stables.

Bob followed his conductor in silence. After an interval they mounted

short steps and entered the office.

Here Bob found himself at once in a small entry railed off from the main

room by a breast-high line of pickets strong enough to resist a

battering-ram. A man he had seen walking across from the mill was

talking rapidly through a tiny wicket, emphasizing some point on a

soiled memorandum by the indication of a stubby forefinger. He was a

short, active, blue-eyed man, very tanned. Bob looked at him with

interest, for there was something about him the young man did not

recognize, something he liked--a certain independent carriage of the

head, a certain self-reliance in the set of his shoulders, a certain

purposeful directness of his whole personality. When he caught sight of

Fox he turned briskly, extending his hand.

"How are you, Mr. Fox?" he greeted. "Just in?"

"Hullo, Johnny," replied Fox, "how are things? I see you're busy."

"Yes, we're busy," replied the man, "and we'll keep busy."

"Everything going all right?"

"Pretty good. Poor lot of men this year. A good many of the old men

haven't showed up this year--some sort of pull-out to Oregon and

California. I'm having a little trouble with them off and on."

"I'll bet on you to stay on top," replied Fox easily. "I'll be over to

see you pretty soon."

The man nodded to the bookkeeper with whom he had been talking, and

turned to go out. As he passed Bob, that young man was conscious of a

keen, gimlet scrutiny from the blue eyes, a scrutiny instantaneous, but

which seemed to penetrate his very flesh to the soul of him. He

experienced a distinct physical shock as at the encountering of an

elemental force.

He came to himself to hear Fox saying:

"That's Johnny Mason, our mill foreman. He has charge of all the sawing,

and is a mighty good man. You'll see more of him."

The speaker opened a gate in the picket railing and stepped inside.

A long shelf desk, at which were high stools, backed up against the

pickets; a big round stove occupied the centre; a safe crowded one

corner. Blue print maps decorated the walls. Coarse rope matting edged

with tin strips protected the floor. A single step down through a door

led into a painted private office where could be seen a flat table desk.

In the air hung a mingled odour of fresh pine, stale tobacco, and the

closeness of books.

Fox turned at once sharply to the left and entered into earnest

conversation with a pale, hatchet-faced man of thirty-five, whom he

addressed as "Collins." In a moment he turned, beckoning Bob forward.

"Here's a youngster for you, Collins," said he, evidently continuing

former remarks. "Young Mr. Orde. He's been in our home office awhile,

but I brought him up to help you out. He can get busy on your tally

sheets and time checks and tally boards, and sort of ease up the strain

a little."

"I can use him, right now," said Collins, nervously smoothing back a

strand of his pale hair. "Glad to meet you, Mr. Orde. These 'jumpers' ...

and that confounded mixed stuff from _seventeen_ ..." he trailed off, his

eye glazing in the abstraction of some inner calculation, his long,

nervous fingers reaching unconsciously toward the soiled memoranda left

by Mason.

"Well, I'll set you to work," he roused himself, when he perceived that

the two were about to leave him. And almost before they had time to turn

away he was busy at the papers, his pencil, beautifully pointed, running

like lightning down the long columns, pausing at certain places as

though by instinct, hovering the brief instant necessary to calculation,

then racing on as though in pursuit of something elusive.

As they turned away a slow, cool voice addressed them from behind the

stove.

"Hullo, bub!" it drawled.

Fox's face lighted and he extended both hands.

"Well, Tally!" he cried. "You old snoozer!"

The man was upward of sixty years of age, but straight and active. His

features were tanned a deep mahogany, and carved by the years and

exposure into lines of capability and good humour. In contrast to this

brown his sweeping white moustache and bushy eyebrows, blenched flaxen

by the sun, showed strongly. His little blue eyes twinkled, and fine

wrinkles at their corners helped the twinkles. His long figure was so

heavily clothed as to be concealed from any surmise, except that it was

gaunt and wiry. Hands gnarled, twisted, veined, brown, seemed less like

flesh than like some skilful Japanese carving. On his head he wore a

visored cap with an extraordinary high crown; on his back a rather dingy

coat cut from a Mackinaw blanket; on his legs trousers that had been

"stagged" off just below the knees, heavy German socks, and shoes nailed

with sharp spikes at least three-quarters of an inch in length.

"Thought you were up in the woods!" Fox was exclaiming. "Where's

Fagan?"

"He's walkin' white water," replied the old man.

"Things going well?"

"Damn poor," admitted Tally frankly. "That is to say, the Whitefish

branch is off. There's trouble with the men. They're a mixed lot. Then

there's old Meadows. He's assertin' his heaven-born rights some more.

It's all right. We're on their backs. Other branches just about down."

There followed a rapid exchange of which Bob could make little--talk of

flood water, of "plugging" and "pulling," of "winging out," of "white

water." It made no sense, and yet somehow it thrilled him, as at times

the mere roll of Greek names used to arouse in his breast vague emotions

of grandeur and the struggle of mighty forces.

Still talking, the two men began slowly to move toward the inner office.

Suddenly Fox seemed to remember his companion's existence.

"By the way, Jim," he said, "I want you to know one of our new men,

young Mr. Orde. You've worked for his father. This is Jim Tally, and

he's one of the best rivermen, the best woodsman, the best boss of men

old Michigan ever turned out. He walked logs before I was born."

"Glad to know you, Mr. Orde," said Tally, quite unmoved.

V

The two left Bob to his own devices. The old riverman and the

astonishingly thawed and rejuvenated Mr. Fox disappeared in the private

office. Bob proffered a question to the busy Collins, discovered himself

free until afternoon, and so went out through the office and into the

clear open air.

He headed at once across the wide sawdust area toward the mill and the

lake. A great curiosity, a great interest filled him. After a moment he

found himself walking between tall, leaning stacks of lumber, piled

crosswise in such a manner that the sweet currents of air eddied through

the interstices between the boards and in the narrow, alley-like spaces

between the square and separate stacks. A coolness filled these streets,

a coolness born of the shade in which they were cast, the freshness of

still unmelted snow lying in patches, the quality of pine with its faint

aromatic pitch smell and its suggestion of the forest. Bob wandered on

slowly, his hands in his pockets. For the time being his more active

interest was in abeyance, lulled by the subtle, elusive phantom of

grandeur suggested in the aloofness of this narrow street fronted by its

square, skeleton, windowless houses through which the wind rattled.

After a little he glimpsed blue through the alleys between. Then a side

street offered, full of sun. He turned down it a few feet, and found

himself standing over an inlet of the lake.

Then for the first time he realized that he had been walking on "made

ground." The water chugged restlessly against the uneven ends of the

lath-like slabs, thousands of them laid, side by side, down to and below

the water's surface. They formed a substructure on which the sawdust

had been heaped. Deep shadows darted from their shelter and withdrew,

following the play of the little waves. The lower slabs were black with

the wet, and from them, too, crept a spicy odour set free by the

moisture. On a pile head sat an urchin fishing, with a long bamboo pole

many sizes too large for him. As Bob watched, he jerked forth diminutive

flat sunfish.

"Good work!" called Bob in congratulation.

The urchin looked up at the large, good-humoured man and grinned.

Bob retraced his steps to the street on which he had started out. There

he discovered a steep stairway, and by it mounted to the tramway above.

Along this he wandered for what seemed to him an interminable distance,

lost as in a maze among the streets and byways of this tenantless city.

Once he stepped aside to give passage to the great horse, or one like

him, and his train of little cars. The man driving nodded to him. Again

he happened on two men unloading similar cars, and passing the boards

down to other men below, who piled them skilfully, two end planks one

way, and then the next tier the other, in regular alternation. They wore

thick leather aprons, and square leather pieces strapped across the

insides of their hands as a protection against splinters. These, like

all other especial accoutrements, seemed to Bob somehow romantic, to be

desired, infinitely picturesque. He passed on with the clear,

yellow-white of the pine boards lingering back of his retina.

But now suddenly his sauntering brought him to the water front. The

tramway ended in a long platform running parallel to the edge of the

docks below. There were many little cars, both in the process of

unloading and awaiting their turn. The place swarmed with men, all

busily engaged in handing the boards from one to another as buckets are

passed at a fire. At each point where an unending stream of them passed

over the side of each ship, stood a young man with a long, flexible

rule. This he laid rapidly along the width of each board, and then as

rapidly entered a mark in a note-book. The boards seemed to move fairly

of their own volition, like a scutellate monster of many joints,

crawling from the cars, across the dock, over the side of the ship and

into the black hold where presumably it coiled. There were six ships;

six, many-jointed monsters creeping to their appointed places under the

urging of these their masters; six young men absorbed and busy at the

tallying; six crews panoplied in leather guiding the monsters to their

lairs. Here, too, the sun-warmed air arose sluggish with the aroma of

pitch, of lumber, of tar from the ships' cordage, of the wetness of

unpainted wood. Aloft in the rigging, clear against the sky, were

sailors in contrast of peaceful, leisurely industry to those who toiled

and hurried below. The masts swayed gently, describing an arc against

the heavens. The sailors swung easily to the motion. From below came the

quick dull sounds of planks thrown down, the grind of car wheels, the

movement of feet, the varied, complex sound of men working together, the

clapping of waters against the structure. It was confusing, confusing as

the noise of many hammers. Yet two things seemed to steady it, to

confine it, keep it in the bounds of order, to prevent it from usurping

more than its meet and proper proportion. One was the tingling lake

breeze singing through the rigging of the ship; the other was the idle

and intermittent whistling of one of the sailors aloft. And suddenly, as

though it had but just commenced, Bob again became aware of the saw

shrieking in ecstasy as it plunged into a pine log.

The sound came from the left, where at once he perceived the tall stacks

showing above the lumber piles, and the plume of white steam glittering

in the sun. In a moment the steam fell, and the shriek of the saw fell

with it. He turned to follow the tramway, and in so doing almost bumped

into Mason, the mill foreman.

"They're hustling it in," said the latter. "That's right. Can't give me

yard room any too soon. The drive'll be down next month. Plenty doing

then. Damn those Dutchmen!"

He spoke abstractedly, as though voicing his inner thoughts to himself,

unconscious of his companion. Then he roused himself.

"Going to the mill?" he asked. "Come on."

They walked along the high, narrow platform overlooking the water front

and the lading of the ships. Soon the trestles widened, the tracks

diverging like the fingers of a hand on the broad front to the second

story of the mill. Mason said something about seeing the whole of it,

and led the way along a narrow, railed outside passage to the other end

of the structure.

There Bob's attention was at once caught by a great water enclosure of

logs, lying still and sluggish in the manner of beasts resting. Rank

after rank, tier after tier, in strange patterns they lay, brown and

round, with the little strips of blue water showing between like a

fantastic pattern. While Bob looked, a man ran out over them. He was

dressed in short trousers, heavy socks, and spiked boots, and a faded

blue shirt. The young man watched with interest, old memories of his

early boyhood thronging back on him, before his people had moved from

Monrovia and the "booms." The man ran erratically, but with an accurate

purpose. Behind him the big logs bent in dignified reminiscence of his

tread, and slowly rolled over; the little logs bobbed frantically in a

turmoil of white water, disappearing and reappearing again and again,

sleek and wet as seals. To these the man paid no attention, but leaped

easily on, pausing on the timbers heavy enough to support him, barely

spurning those too small to sustain his weight. In a moment he stopped

abruptly without the transitorial balancing Bob would have believed

necessary, and went calmly to pushing mightily with a long pike-pole.

The log on which he stood rolled under the pressure; the man quite

mechanically kept pace with its rolling, treading it in correspondence

now one way, now the other. In a few moments thus he had forced the mass

of logs before him toward an inclined plane leading to the second story

of the mill.

Up this ran an endless chain armed with teeth. The man pushed one of the

logs against the chain; the teeth bit; at once, shaking itself free of

the water, without apparent effort, without haste, calmly and leisurely

as befitted the dignity of its bulk, the great timber arose. The water

dripped from it, the surface streamed, a cheerful _patter, patter_ of

the falling drops made itself heard beneath the mill noises. In a moment

the log disappeared beneath projecting eaves. Another was just behind

it, and behind that yet another, and another, like great patient beasts

rising from the coolness of a stream to follow a leader through the

narrowness, of pasture bars. And in the booms, up the river, as far as

the eye could see, were other logs awaiting their turn. And beyond them

the forest trees, straight and tall and green, dreaming of the time when

they should follow their brothers to the ships and go out into the

world.

Mason was looking up the river.

"I've seen the time when she was piled thirty feet high there, and the

freshet behind her. That was ten year back."

"What?" asked Bob.

"A jam!" explained Mason.

He ducked his head below his shoulders and disappeared beneath the eaves

of the mill. Bob followed.

First it was dusky; then he saw the strip of bright yellow sunlight and

the blue bay in the opening below the eaves; then he caught the glitter

and whirr of the two huge saws, moving silently but with the deadly

menace of great speed on their axes. Against the light in irregular

succession, alternately blotting and clearing the foreground at the end

of the mill, appeared the ends of the logs coming up the incline. For a

moment they poised on the slant, then fell to the level, and glided

forward to a broad platform where they were ravished from the chain and

rolled into line.

Bob's eyes were becoming accustomed to the gloom. He made out pulleys,

belts, machinery, men. While he watched a black, crooked arm shot

vigorously up from the floor, hurried a log to the embrace of two

clamps, rolled it a little this way, a little that, hovered over it as

though in doubt as to whether it was satisfactorily placed, then plunged

to unknown depths as swiftly and silently as it had come. So abrupt and

purposeful were its movements, so detached did it seem from control,

that, just as when he was a youngster, Bob could not rid his mind of the

notion that it was possessed of volition, that it led a mysterious life

of its own down there in the shadows, that it was in the nature of an

intelligent and agile beast trained to apply its powers independently.

Bob remembered it as the "nigger," and looked about for the man standing

by a lever.

A momentary delay seemed to have occurred, owing to some obscure

difficulty. The man at the lever straightened his back. Suddenly all

that part of the floor seemed to start forward with extraordinary

swiftness. The log rushed down on the circular saw. Instantly the wild,

exultant shriek arose. The car went on, burying the saw, all but the

very top, from which a stream of sawdust flew up and back. A long, clean

slab fell to a succession of revolving rollers which carried it, passing

it from one to the other, far into the body of the mill. The car shot

back to its original position in front of the saw. The saw hummed an

undersong of strong vibration. Again it ploughed its way the length of

the timber. This time a plank with bark edges dropped on the rollers.

And when the car had flown back to its starting point the "nigger" rose

from obscurity to turn the log half way around.

They picked their way gingerly on. Bob looked back. Against the light

the two graceful, erect figures, immobile, but carried back and forth

over thirty feet with lightning rapidity; the brute masses of the logs;

the swift decisive forays of the "nigger," the unobtrusive figures of

the other men handling the logs far in the background; and the bright,

smooth, glittering, dangerous saws, clear-cut in outline by their very

speed, humming in anticipation, or shrieking like demons as they

bit--these seemed to him to swell in the dim light to the proportions of

something gigantic, primeval--to become forces beyond the experience of

to-day, typical of the tremendous power that must be invoked to subdue

the equally tremendous power of the wilderness.

He and Mason together examined the industriously working gang-saws, long

steel blades with the up-and-down motion of cutting cord-wood. They

passed the small trimming saws, where men push the boards between little

round saws to trim their edges. Bob noticed how the sawdust was carried

away automatically, and where the waste slabs went. They turned through

a small side room, strangely silent by contrast to the rest, where the

filer did his minute work. He was an old man, the filer, with

steel-rimmed, round spectacles, and he held Bob some time explaining how

important his position was.

They emerged finally to the broad, open platform with the radiating

tram-car tracks. Here Bob saw the finished boards trundled out on the

moving rollers to be transferred to the cars.

Mason left him. He made his way slowly back toward the office, noticing

on the way the curious pairs of huge wheels beneath which were slung the

heavy timbers or piles of boards for transportation at the level of the

ground.

At the edge of the lumber piles Bob looked back. The noises of industry

were in his ears; the blur of industry before his eyes; the clean, sweet

smell of pine in his nostrils. He saw clearly the row of ships and the

many-jointed serpent of boards making its way to the hold, the sailors

swinging aloft; the miles of ruminating brown logs, and the alert little

man zigzagging across them; the shadow of the mill darkening the water,

and the brown leviathan timbers rising dripping in regular succession

from them; the whirr of the deadly circular saws, and the calm, erect

men dominating the cars that darted back and forth; and finally the

sparkling white steam spraying suddenly against the intense blue of the

sky. Here was activity, business, industry, the clash of forces. He

admired the quick, compact alertness of Johnny Mason; he joyed in the

absorbed, interested activity of the brown young men with the scaler's

rules; he envied a trifle the muscle-stretching, physical labour of the

men with the leather aprons and hand-guards, piling the lumber. It was

good to draw in deep breaths of this air, to smell deeply of he

aromatic odours of the north.

Suddenly the mill whistle began to blow. Beneath the noise he could hear

the machinery beginning to run down. From all directions men came. They

converged in the central alley, hundreds of them. In a moment Bob was

caught up in their stream, and borne with them toward the

weather-stained shanty town.