mill noises.  In a moment the log disappeared beneath projecting eaves.  Another was just behind it, and behind that yet another, and another, like great patient beasts rising from the coolness of a stream to follow a leader through the narrowness, of pasture bars.  And in the booms, up the river, as far as the eye could see, were other logs awaiting their turn.  And beyond them the forest trees, straight and tall and green, dreaming of the time when they should follow their brothers to the ships and go out into the world.

Mason was looking up the river.

“I’ve seen the time when she was piled thirty feet high there, and the freshet 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 eaves of the mill.  Bob followed.

First it was dusky; then he saw the strip of bright yellow sunlight and the blue bay in the opening below the eaves; then he caught the glitter and whirr of the two huge saws, moving silently but with the deadly menace of great speed on their axes.  Against the light in irregular succession, alternately blotting and clearing the foreground at the end of the mill, appeared the ends of the logs coming up the incline.  For a moment they poised on the slant, then fell to the level, and glided forward to a broad platform where they were ravished from the chain and rolled 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 shot vigorously up from the floor, hurried a log to the embrace of two clamps, rolled it a little this way, a little that, hovered over it as though in doubt as to whether it was satisfactorily placed, then plunged to unknown depths as swiftly and silently as it had come.  So abrupt and purposeful 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 the notion that it was possessed of volition, that it led a mysterious life of its own down there in the shadows, that it was in the nature of an intelligent and agile beast trained to apply its powers independently.

Bob remembered it as the “nigger,” and looked about for the man standing by a lever.

A momentary delay seemed to have occurred, owing to some obscure difficulty.  The man at the lever straightened his back.  Suddenly all that part of the floor seemed to start forward with extraordinary swiftness.  The log rushed down on the circular saw.  Instantly the wild, exultant shriek arose.  The car went on, burying the saw, all but the very top, from which a stream of sawdust flew up and back.  A long, clean slab fell to a succession of revolving rollers which carried it, passing it from one to the other, far into the body of the mill.  The car shot back to its original position in front of the saw.  The saw hummed an undersong of strong vibration.  Again it ploughed its way the length of the 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” rose from obscurity to turn the log half way around.