straight cut
from collar to bottom seam. A quarter of an inch nearer would have split
the fellow's backbone. As it was, he escaped without even a scratch.

Dan commandeered two bottles of whisky, and, gory and wounded as he was,
took up the six-mile tramp home, bearing the knife over his shoulder as
a banner of triumph.

Next morning, weak from the combined effects of war and whisky, he
reported to headquarters.

"What is it, Dan?" asked the Old Fellow without turning.

"I come to get my time," replied the riverman humbly.

"What for?" inquired the lumberman.

"I have been over to Howard City," confessed Dan.

The owner turned and looked him over.

"They sort of got ahead of me a little," explained Dan sheepishly.

The lumberman took stock of the old man's cuts and bruises, and turned
away to hide a smile.

"I guess I'll let you off this trip," said he. "Go to work--when you
can. I don't believe you'll go back there again."

"No, sir," replied Dan humbly.

And so the life of alternate work and pleasure, both full of personal
danger, develops in time a class of men whose like is to be found only
among the cowboys, scouts, trappers, and Indian fighters of our other
frontiers. The moralists will always hold up the hands of horror at such
types; the philosopher will admire them as the last incarnation of the
heroic age, when the man is bigger than his work. Soon the factories,
the machines, the mechanical structures and constructions, the various
branches of co-operation will produce quasi-automatically institutions
evidently more important than the genius or force of any one human
being. The personal element will have become nearly eliminated. In the
woods and on the frontier still are many whose powers are greater than
their works; whose fame is greater than their deeds. They are men,
powerful, virile, even brutal at times; but magnificent with the
strength of courage and resource.

All this may seem a digression from the thread of our tale, but as a
matter of fact it is necessary that you understand the conditions of
the time and place in which Harry Thorpe had set himself the duty of
success.

He had seen too much of incompetent labor to be satisfied with anything
but the best. Although his ideas were not as yet formulated, he hoped
to be able to pick up a crew of first-class men from those who had come
down with the advance, or "jam," of the spring's drive. They should
have finished their orgies by no