“I mean it,” said Bob; “any time—­any place.”

On the way back to Sycamore Flats Auntie Belle expressed her mind to the young man.

“Nobody realizes how things are going with those Pollocks,” said she.  “George sold his spurs and that Cruces bit of his to get medicine.  He wouldn’t take anything from me.  They’re proud folks, and nobody’d have a chance to suspect anything.  I tell you,” said the good lady solemnly, “it don’t matter where that child got the fever; it’s Henry Plant, the old, fat scoundrel, that killed her just as plain as if he’d stuck a gun to her head.  He has a good deal to answer for.  There’s lots of folks eating their own beef cattle right now; and that’s ruinous.  I suppose Washington ain’t going to do anything.  We might have known it.  I don’t suppose you heard anything outside about it?”

“Only that Thorne had resigned.”

“That so!” Auntie Belle ruminated on this a moment.  “Well, I’m right glad to hear it.  I’d hate to think I was fooled on him.  Reckon ‘resign’ means fired for daring to say anything about His High-and-mightiness?” she guessed.

Bob shook his head.  “Couldn’t say,” said he.

The busy season was beginning.  Every day laden teams crawled up the road bringing supplies for the summer work.  Woodsmen came in twos, in threes, in bunches of a dozen or more.  Bob was very busy arranging the distribution and forwarding, putting into shape the great machinery of handling, so that when, a few weeks later, the bundles of sawn lumber should begin to shoot down the flume, they would fall automatically into a systematic scheme of further transportation.  He had done this twice before, and he knew all the steps of it, and exactly what would be required of him.  Certain complications were likely to arise, requiring each their individual treatments, but as Bob’s experience grew these were becoming fewer and of lesser importance.  The creative necessity was steadily lessening as the work became more familiar.  Often Bob found his eagerness sinking to a blank; his attention economizing itself to the bare needs of the occasion.  He caught himself at times slipping away from the closest interest in what he had to do.  His spirit, although he did not know it, was beginning once more to shake itself restlessly, to demand, as it had always demanded in the past from the time of his toy printing press in his earliest boyhood, fresh food for the creative instinct that was his.  Bobby Orde, the child, had been thorough.  No superficial knowledge of a subject sufficed.  He had worked away at the mechanical difficulties of the cheap toy press after Johnny English, his partner in enterprise, had given up in disgust.  By worrying the problem like a terrier, Bobby had shaken it into shape.  Then when the commercial possibilities of job printing for parents had drawn Johnny back ablaze with enthusiasm, Bobby had, to his partner’s amazement, lost completely all interest in printing presses.  The subject had been exhausted; he had no desire for repetitions.