V
The two left Bob to his own devices. The old riverman and theastonishingly thawed and rejuvenated Mr. Fox disappeared in the privateoffice. Bob proffered a question to the busy Collins, discovered himselffree until afternoon, and so went out through the office and into theclear open air.
He headed at once across the wide sawdust area toward the mill and thelake. A great curiosity, a great interest filled him. After a moment hefound himself walking between tall, leaning stacks of lumber, piledcrosswise in such a manner that the sweet currents of air eddied throughthe interstices between the boards and in the narrow, alley-like spacesbetween the square and separate stacks. A coolness filled these streets,a coolness born of the shade in which they were cast, the freshness ofstill unmelted snow lying in patches, the quality of pine with its faintaromatic pitch smell and its suggestion of the forest. Bob wandered onslowly, his hands in his pockets. For the time being his more activeinterest was in abeyance, lulled by the subtle, elusive phantom ofgrandeur suggested in the aloofness of this narrow street fronted by itssquare, skeleton, windowless houses through which the wind rattled.After a little he glimpsed blue through the alleys between. Then a sidestreet offered, full of sun. He turned down it a few feet, and foundhimself standing over an inlet of the lake.
Then for the first time he realized that he had been walking on "madeground." The water chugged restlessly against the uneven ends of thelath-like slabs, thousands of them laid, side by side, down to and belowthe water's surface. They formed a substructure on which the sawdusthad been heaped. Deep shadows darted from their shelter and withdrew,following the play of the little waves. The lower slabs were black withthe wet, and from them, too, crept a spicy odour set free by themoisture. On a pile head sat an urchin fishing, with a long bamboo polemany sizes too large for him. As Bob watched, he jerked forth diminutiveflat 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. Therehe 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 likehim, and his train of little cars. The man driving nodded to him. Againhe happened on two men unloading similar cars, and passing the boardsdown to other men below, who piled them skilfully, two end planks oneway, and then the next tier the other, in regular alternation. They worethick leather aprons, and square leather pieces strapped across theinsides of their hands as a protection against splinters. These, likeall other especial accoutrements, seemed to Bob somehow romantic, to bedesired, 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. Thetramway ended in a long platform running parallel to the edge of thedocks below. There were many little cars, both in the process ofunloading and awaiting their turn. The place swarmed with men, allbusily engaged in handing the boards from one to another as buckets arepassed at a fire. At each point where an unending stream of them passedover the side of each ship, stood a young man with a long, flexiblerule. This he laid rapidly along the width of each board, and then asrapidly entered a mark in a note-book. The boards seemed to move fairlyof their own volition, like a scutellate monster of many joints,crawling from the cars, across the dock, over the side of the ship andinto the black hold where presumably it coiled. There were six ships;six, many-jointed monsters creeping to their appointed places under theurging of these their masters; six young men absorbed and busy at thetallying; six crews panoplied in leather guiding the monsters to theirlairs. Here, too, the sun-warmed air arose sluggish with the aroma ofpitch, of lumber, of tar from the ships' cordage, of the wetness ofunpainted wood. Aloft in the rigging, clear against the sky, weresailors in contrast of peaceful, leisurely industry to those who toiledand hurried below. The masts swayed gently, describing an arc againstthe heavens. The sailors swung easily to the motion. From below came thequick dull sounds of planks thrown down, the grind of car wheels, themovement of feet, the varied, complex sound of men working together, theclapping of waters against the structure. It was confusing, confusing asthe noise of many hammers. Yet two things seemed to steady it, toconfine it, keep it in the bounds of order, to prevent it from usurpingmore than its meet and proper proportion. One was the tingling lakebreeze singing through the rigging of the ship; the other was the idleand intermittent whistling of one of the sailors aloft. And suddenly, asthough it had but just commenced, Bob again became aware of the sawshrieking in ecstasy as it plunged into a pine log.
The sound came from the left, where at once he perceived the tall stacksshowing above the lumber piles, and the plume of white steam glitteringin the sun. In a moment the steam fell, and the shriek of the saw fellwith it. He turned to follow the tramway, and in so doing almost bumpedinto Mason, the mill foreman.
"They're hustling it in," said the latter. "That's right. Can't give meyard room any too soon. The drive'll be down next month. Plenty doingthen. 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 frontand the lading of the ships. Soon the trestles widened, the tracksdiverging like the fingers of a hand on the broad front to the secondstory 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 endof the structure.
There Bob's attention was at once caught by a great water enclosure oflogs, lying still and sluggish in the manner of beasts resting. Rankafter rank, tier after tier, in strange patterns they lay, brown andround, with the little strips of blue water showing between like afantastic pattern. While Bob looked, a man ran out over them. He wasdressed in short trousers, heavy socks, and spiked boots, and a fadedblue shirt. The young man watched with interest, old memories of hisearly boyhood thronging back on him, before his people had moved fromMonrovia and the "booms." The man ran erratically, but with an accuratepurpose. Behind him the big logs bent in dignified reminiscence of histread, and slowly rolled over; the little logs bobbed frantically in aturmoil of white water, disappearing and reappearing again and again,sleek and wet as seals. To these the man paid no attention, but leapedeasily on, pausing on the timbers heavy enough to support him, barelyspurning those too small to sustain his weight. In a moment he stoppedabruptly without the transitorial balancing Bob would have believednecessary, and went calmly to pushing mightily with a long pike-pole.The log on which he stood rolled under the pressure; the man quitemechanically kept pace with its rolling, treading it in correspondencenow one way, now the other. In a few moments thus he had forced the massof logs before him toward an inclined plane leading to the second storyof the mill.
Up this ran an endless chain armed with teeth. The man pushed one of thelogs against the chain; the teeth bit; at once, shaking itself free ofthe water, without apparent effort, without haste, calmly and leisurelyas befitted the dignity of its bulk, the great timber arose. The waterdripped from it, the surface streamed, a cheerful _patter, patter_ ofthe falling drops made itself heard beneath the mill noises. In a momentthe log disappeared beneath projecting eaves. Another was just behindit, and behind that yet another, and another, like great patient beastsrising from the coolness of a stream to follow a leader through thenarrowness, of pasture bars. And in the booms, up the river, as far asthe eye could see, were other logs awaiting their turn. And beyond themthe forest trees, straight and tall and green, dreaming of the time whenthey should follow their brothers to the ships and go out into theworld.
Mason was looking up the river.
"I've seen the time when she was piled th
irty feet high there, and thefreshet 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 eavesof the mill. Bob followed.
First it was dusky; then he saw the strip of bright yellow sunlight andthe blue bay in the opening below the eaves; then he caught the glitterand whirr of the two huge saws, moving silently but with the deadlymenace of great speed on their axes. Against the light in irregularsuccession, alternately blotting and clearing the foreground at the endof the mill, appeared the ends of the logs coming up the incline. For amoment they poised on the slant, then fell to the level, and glidedforward to a broad platform where they were ravished from the chain androlled 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 shotvigorously up from the floor, hurried a log to the embrace of twoclamps, rolled it a little this way, a little that, hovered over it asthough in doubt as to whether it was satisfactorily placed, then plungedto unknown depths as swiftly and silently as it had come. So abrupt andpurposeful 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 thenotion that it was possessed of volition, that it led a mysterious lifeof its own down there in the shadows, that it was in the nature of anintelligent and agile beast trained to apply its powers independently.
Bob remembered it as the "nigger," and looked about for the man standingby a lever.
A momentary delay seemed to have occurred, owing to some obscuredifficulty. The man at the lever straightened his back. Suddenly allthat part of the floor seemed to start forward with extraordinaryswiftness. The log rushed down on the circular saw. Instantly the wild,exultant shriek arose. The car went on, burying the saw, all but thevery top, from which a stream of sawdust flew up and back. A long, cleanslab fell to a succession of revolving rollers which carried it, passingit from one to the other, far into the body of the mill. The car shotback to its original position in front of the saw. The saw hummed anundersong of strong vibration. Again it ploughed its way the length ofthe 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" rosefrom obscurity to turn the log half way around.
They picked their way gingerly on. Bob looked back. Against the lightthe two graceful, erect figures, immobile, but carried back and forthover thirty feet with lightning rapidity; the brute masses of the logs;the swift decisive forays of the "nigger," the unobtrusive figures ofthe other men handling the logs far in the background; and the bright,smooth, glittering, dangerous saws, clear-cut in outline by their veryspeed, humming in anticipation, or shrieking like demons as theybit--these seemed to him to swell in the dim light to the proportions ofsomething gigantic, primeval--to become forces beyond the experience ofto-day, typical of the tremendous power that must be invoked to subduethe equally tremendous power of the wilderness.
He and Mason together examined the industriously working gang-saws, longsteel blades with the up-and-down motion of cutting cord-wood. Theypassed the small trimming saws, where men push the boards between littleround saws to trim their edges. Bob noticed how the sawdust was carriedaway automatically, and where the waste slabs went. They turned througha small side room, strangely silent by contrast to the rest, where thefiler did his minute work. He was an old man, the filer, withsteel-rimmed, round spectacles, and he held Bob some time explaining howimportant his position was.
They emerged finally to the broad, open platform with the radiatingtram-car tracks. Here Bob saw the finished boards trundled out on themoving rollers to be transferred to the cars.
Mason left him. He made his way slowly back toward the office, noticingon the way the curious pairs of huge wheels beneath which were slung theheavy timbers or piles of boards for transportation at the level of theground.
At the edge of the lumber piles Bob looked back. The noises of industrywere in his ears; the blur of industry before his eyes; the clean, sweetsmell of pine in his nostrils. He saw clearly the row of ships and themany-jointed serpent of boards making its way to the hold, the sailorsswinging aloft; the miles of ruminating brown logs, and the alert littleman zigzagging across them; the shadow of the mill darkening the water,and the brown leviathan timbers rising dripping in regular successionfrom them; the whirr of the deadly circular saws, and the calm, erectmen dominating the cars that darted back and forth; and finally thesparkling white steam spraying suddenly against the intense blue of thesky. Here was activity, business, industry, the clash of forces. Headmired the quick, compact alertness of Johnny Mason; he joyed in theabsorbed, interested activity of the brown young men with the scaler'srules; he envied a trifle the muscle-stretching, physical labour of themen with the leather aprons and hand-guards, piling the lumber. It wasgood to draw in deep breaths of this air, to smell deeply of hearomatic odours of the north.
Suddenly the mill whistle began to blow. Beneath the noise he could hearthe machinery beginning to run down. From all directions men came. Theyconverged in the central alley, hundreds of them. In a moment Bob wascaught up in their stream, and borne with them toward theweather-stained shanty town.