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.