They picked their way gingerly on.  Bob looked back.  Against the light the two graceful, erect figures, immobile, but carried back and forth over thirty feet with lightning rapidity; the brute masses of the logs; the swift decisive forays of the “nigger,” the unobtrusive figures of the other men handling the logs far in the background; and the bright, smooth, glittering, dangerous saws, clear-cut in outline by their very speed, humming in anticipation, or shrieking like demons as they bit—­these seemed to him to swell in the dim light to the proportions of something gigantic, primeval—­to become forces beyond the experience of to-day, typical of the tremendous power that must be invoked to subdue the equally tremendous power of the wilderness.

He and Mason together examined the industriously working gang-saws, long steel blades with the up-and-down motion of cutting cord-wood.  They passed the small trimming saws, where men push the boards between little round saws to trim their edges.  Bob noticed how the sawdust was carried away automatically, and where the waste slabs went.  They turned through a small side room, strangely silent by contrast to the rest, where the filer did his minute work.  He was an old man, the filer, with steel-rimmed, round spectacles, and he held Bob some time explaining how important his position was.

They emerged finally to the broad, open platform with the radiating tram-car tracks.  Here Bob saw the finished boards trundled out on the moving rollers to be transferred to the cars.

Mason left him.  He made his way slowly back toward the office, noticing on the way the curious pairs of huge wheels beneath which were slung the heavy timbers or piles of boards for transportation at the level of the ground.

At the edge of the lumber piles Bob looked back.  The noises of industry were in his ears; the blur of industry before his eyes; the clean, sweet smell of pine in his nostrils.  He saw clearly the row of ships and the many-jointed serpent of boards making its way to the hold, the sailors swinging aloft; the miles of ruminating brown logs, and the alert little man zigzagging across them; the shadow of the mill darkening the water, and the brown leviathan timbers rising dripping in regular succession from them; the whirr of the deadly circular saws, and the calm, erect men dominating the cars that darted back and forth; and finally the sparkling white steam spraying suddenly against the intense blue of the sky.  Here was activity, business, industry, the clash of forces.  He admired the quick, compact alertness of Johnny Mason; he joyed in the absorbed, interested activity of the brown young men with the scaler’s rules; he envied a trifle the muscle-stretching, physical labour of the men with the leather aprons and hand-guards, piling the lumber.  It was good to draw in deep breaths of this air, to smell deeply of he aromatic odours of the north.

Suddenly the mill whistle began to blow.  Beneath the noise he could hear the machinery beginning to run down.  From all directions men came.  They converged in the central alley, hundreds of them.  In a moment Bob was caught up in their stream, and borne with them toward the weather-stained shanty town.