“I’ve sure struck the right job!” he repeated aloud with conviction.

And this, could he have known it, was the outward and visible and only sign of the things spiritual that had been veiled.

III

When Saturday evening came the men washed and shaved and put on clean garments.  Bob, dog tired after a hard day, was more inclined to lie on his back.

“Ain’t you-all goin’ over to-night?” asked Jack Pollock.

“Over where?”

“Why,” explained the younger man, “always after supper Saturdays all the boys who are in camp go over to spend the evenin’ at headquarters.”

Aggressively sleek and scrubbed, the little group marched down through the woods in the twilight.  At headquarters Amy Thorne and her brother welcomed them and ushered them into the big room, with the stone fireplace.  In this latter a fire of shake-bolts leaped and roared.  The men crowded in, a trifle bashfully, found boxes and home-made chairs, and perched about talking occasionally in very low tones to the nearest neighbour.  Amy sat in a rocking chair by the table lamp, sewing on something, paying little attention to the rangers, save to throw out an occasional random remark.  Thorne had not yet entered.  Finally Amy dropped the sewing in her lap.

“You’re all as solemn as a camp-meeting,” she told them severely.  “How many times must I tell you to smoke up and be agreeable?  Here, Mr. Ware, set them a good example.”

She pushed a cigar box toward the older man.  Bob saw it to be half full of the fine-flaked tobacco so much used in the West.  Thus encouraged, Ware rolled himself a cigarette.  Others followed suit.  Still others produced and filled black old pipes.  A formidable haze eddied through the apartment.  Amy, still sewing, said, without looking up: 

“One of you boys go rummage the store room for the corn popper.  The corn’s in a corn-meal sack on the far shelf.”

Just then Thorne came in, bringing a draft of cold air with him.

“Well,” said he, “this is a pretty full house for this time of year.”

He walked directly to the rough, board shelf and from it took down a book.

“This man Kipling will do again for to-night,” he remarked.  “He knows more about our kind of fellow than most.  I’ve sent for one or two other things you ought to know, but just now I want to read you a story that may remind you of something you’ve run against yourself.  We’ve a few wild, red-headed Irishmen ourselves in these hills.”

He walked briskly to the lamp, opened the volume, and at once began to read.  Every once in a while he looked up from the book to explain a phrase in terms the men would understand, or to comment pithily on some similarity in their own experience.  When he had finished, he looked about at them, challenging.

“There; what did I tell you?  Isn’t that just about the way they hand it out to us here?  And this story took place the other side of the world!  It’s quite wonderful when you stop to think about it, isn’t it?  Listen to this—­”