The Rules of the Game | Page 8

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