The sound came from the left, where at once he perceived the tall stacks showing above the lumber piles, and the plume of white steam glittering in the sun.  In a moment the steam fell, and the shriek of the saw fell with it.  He turned to follow the tramway, and in so doing almost bumped into Mason, the mill foreman.

“They’re hustling it in,” said the latter.  “That’s right.  Can’t give me yard room any too soon.  The drive’ll be down next month.  Plenty doing then.  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 front and the lading of the ships.  Soon the trestles widened, the tracks diverging like the fingers of a hand on the broad front to the second story 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 end of the structure.

There Bob’s attention was at once caught by a great water enclosure of logs, lying still and sluggish in the manner of beasts resting.  Rank after rank, tier after tier, in strange patterns they lay, brown and round, with the little strips of blue water showing between like a fantastic pattern.  While Bob looked, a man ran out over them.  He was dressed in short trousers, heavy socks, and spiked boots, and a faded blue shirt.  The young man watched with interest, old memories of his early boyhood thronging back on him, before his people had moved from Monrovia and the “booms.”  The man ran erratically, but with an accurate purpose.  Behind him the big logs bent in dignified reminiscence of his tread, and slowly rolled over; the little logs bobbed frantically in a turmoil of white water, disappearing and reappearing again and again, sleek and wet as seals.  To these the man paid no attention, but leaped easily on, pausing on the timbers heavy enough to support him, barely spurning those too small to sustain his weight.  In a moment he stopped abruptly without the transitorial balancing Bob would have believed necessary, and went calmly to pushing mightily with a long pike-pole.  The log on which he stood rolled under the pressure; the man quite mechanically kept pace with its rolling, treading it in correspondence now one way, now the other.  In a few moments thus he had forced the mass of logs before him toward an inclined plane leading to the second story of the mill.

Up this ran an endless chain armed with teeth.  The man pushed one of the logs against the chain; the teeth bit; at once, shaking itself free of the water, without apparent effort, without haste, calmly and leisurely as befitted the dignity of its bulk, the great timber arose.  The water dripped from it, the surface streamed, a cheerful patter, patter of the falling drops made itself heard beneath the