“Who’s that guy in the tweed pea-jacket an’ looks like a city man?” he asked his host in an undertone, pointing at one of the tables where a stranger sat surrounded by four of the forest men.

Abe’s powerful arms were folded as he leant on the counter.

“Blew in about noon,” he said.  “Filled his belly with good hash an’ sat around since.”

“He’s a bunch o’ the boys about him now, anyway.  An’ I guess he’s talking quite a lot, an’ they’re doing most o’ the listening.  Seems like he’s mostly enjoying hisself.”

Abe shrugged.  But the glance he flung at the man sitting at the far-off table was without approval.

“It’s mostly that way now,” he said, with an air of indifference his thoughtful eyes denied.  “There’s too many guys come along an’ sell truck, an’ set around, an’ talk, an’ then pass along.  Things are changing around this lay out, an’ I don’t get its meanin’.  Time was I had a bunch of boys ready most all the time to hand me the news going round.  Time was you’d see a stranger once in a month come along in an’ buy our food.  Time was they mostly had faces we knew by heart, and we knew their business, and where they came from.  Tain’t that way now.  You couldn’t open the boys’ faces fer news of the forest with a can-opener.  These darn guys are always about now.  They come, an’ feed the boys’ drink, an’ talk with ’em most all the time.  An’ they’re mostly strangers, an’ the boys mostly sit around with their faces open like fool men listenin’ to fairy tales.  How’s the cut goin’?”

Porson laughed.  There was no light in his hard eyes.

“At a gait you couldn’t change with a trail whip.”

The other nodded.

’"That’s how ‘nigger’ Pilling said.  He guessed the cut was down by fifty.  What is it?  A buck?  Wages?”

Porson’s hand was fingering one of the guns in his pocket.  His eyes were snapping.

“Curse ’em,” he cried at last.  “I just don’t get it.  They’re goin’ slow.”

He pushed his empty glass at the suttler who promptly re-filled it.

“Young Pete Cust,” Abe went on confidentially, “handed me a good guess only this mornin’.  He’d had his sixth Rye before startin’ out to work.  Maybe he was rattled and didn’t figger the things he said.  He was astin’ fer word up from the mills.  I didn’t worry to think, and just said I hadn’t got.  I ast ‘why’?  The boy took a quick look round, kind o’ scared.  He said, ‘jest nothin’.’  He reckoned he’d a dame somewhere around Sachigo.  She’d wrote him things wer’ kind of bad with the mills.  They were beat fer dollars, and looked like a crash.  He’d heard the same right there, an’ it had him rattled.  He thought of quittin’ and goin’ over to the Skandinavia.  Maybe it’s the sort o’ talk that’s got ’em all rattled.  Maybe they’re goin’ slow on the cut, worryin’ for their pay-roll.  You can’t tell.  They don’t say a thing.  Seems to me we want Sternford right here to queer these yarns.  Father Adam’s around an’ talked some.  But—­”