“I’m mighty sorry, old man,” he whispered, furtively.  “Did you get the G.B.?”

“I’m going up to the mill office,” replied Bob.

“Oh!” the other commiserated him.  Then with an effort to see the best side, “Still you could hardly expect to jump right into the head office at first.  I didn’t much think you could hold down a job here.  You see there’s too much doing here.  Well, good-bye.  Good luck to you, old man.”

There it was again, the insistence on the responsibility, the activity, the importance of that sleepy, stuffy little office with its two men at work, its leisure, its aimlessness.  On his way to the car-line Bob stopped to look in at an open door.  A dozen men were jumping truck loads of boxes here and there.  Another man in a peaked cap and a silesia coat, with a pencil behind his ear and a manifold book sticking out of his pocket shouted orders, consulted a long list, marked boxes and scribbled in a shipping book.  Dim in the background huge freight elevators rose and fell, burdened with the mass of indeterminate things.  Truck horses, great as elephants, magnificently harnessed with brass ornaments, drew drays, big enough to carry a small house, to the loading platform where they were quickly laden and sent away.  From an opened upper window came the busy click of many typewriters.  Order in apparent confusion, immense activity at a white heat, great movement, the clanging of the wheels of commerce, the apparition and embodiment of restless industry—­these appeared and vanished, darted in and out, were plain to be seen and were vague through the murk and gloom.  Bob glanced up at the emblazoned sign.  He read the firm’s name of well-known wholesale grocers.  As he crossed the bridge and proceeded out Lincoln Park Boulevard two figures rose to him and stood side by side.  One was the shipping clerk in his peaked cap and silesia coat, hurried, busy, commanding, full of responsibility; the other was Harvey, with his round, black skull cap, his great, gold-bowed spectacles, entering minutely, painstakingly, deliberately, his neat little figures in a neat, large book.

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,