.

"One more!" sang out Jim to the driver. He poised, stepped lightly up
and over, and avoided by the safe hair's breadth being crushed when the
log rolled. But it did not lie quite straight and even. So Mike cut a
short thick block, and all three stirred the heavy timber sufficiently
to admit of the billet's insertion.

Then the chain was thrown down for another.

Jenny, harnessed only to a straight short bar with a hook in it, leaned
to her collar and dug in her hoofs at the word of command. The driver,
close to her tail, held fast the slender steel chain by an ingenious
hitch about the ever-useful swamp-hook. When Jim shouted "whoa!"
from the top of the skidway, the driver did not trouble to stop the
horse,--he merely let go the hook. So the power was shut off suddenly,
as is meet and proper in such ticklish business. He turned and walked
back, and Jenny, like a dog, without the necessity of command, followed
him in slow patience.

Now came Dyer, the scaler, rapidly down the logging road, a small
slender man with a little, turned-up mustache. The men disliked him
because of his affectation of a city smartness, and because he never ate
with them, even when there was plenty of room. Radway had confidence in
him because he lived in the same shanty with him. This one fact a good
deal explains Radway's character. The scaler's duty at present was to
measure the diameter of the logs in each skidway, and so compute the
number of board feet. At the office he tended van, kept the books, and
looked after supplies.

He approached the skidway swiftly, laid his flexible rule across the
face of each log, made a mark on his pine tablets in the column to which
the log belonged, thrust the tablet in the pocket of his coat, seized
a blue crayon, in a long holder, with which he made an 8 as indication
that the log had been scaled, and finally tapped several times strongly
with a sledge hammer. On the face of the hammer in relief was an M
inside of a delta. This was the Company's brand, and so the log was
branded as belonging to them. He swarmed all over the skidway, rapid
and absorbed, in strange contrast of activity to the slower power of the
actual skidding. In a moment he moved on to the next scene of operations
without having said a word to any of the men.

"A fine t'ing!" said Mike, spitting.

So day after day the work went on. Radway spent his time tramping
through the woods, figuring on new work, showing the men how to do