ng, givin' 'em a
shoulder to lean on same as you would help a cripple. When they're
clean down and done for it ain't more'n a year or two 'fore they got
'em kivered all over with leaves, and then they git tergether and hev a
quiltin' party and purty soon they're all over blankets o' green moss,
and the others jes stand 'round solemn and straight like's if they was
mountin' guard over their graves.

"It's wicked to kill most anything 'less ye got some use--and a good
one, too,--for the meat, but it's a durned sight meaner to cut down a
tree that took so long to grow and that's been so decent all its life,
'less ye can't do without the stuff ye git out'n it."

Joe had listened and had drunk it all in, and his love for the tall
giants away back in the deep wilderness had never left him. It was
these dear old friends more than anything else that had kept him at
home, under plea of helping his father, months after he knew he ought
to be up and doing if he would ever be of any use to the old man in his
later years.

It was Plymouth first, as stable boy, and then down to Nashua and
Boston as teamster and freight handler, and then, by what he considered
at the time a lucky chance--(Katie Murdock, from his own town, and now
a reporter in the same newspaper office with himself, had helped), man
of all work in this whirl where he felt like a fly clinging to a
driving wheel.

Stretching out his stout saw-log legs and settling his big shoulders
into the soft cushions made by the sacks, his mind went back to the old
sawmill,--Baker's Mill,--and the dam backed up alongside the East
Branch. An old kingfisher used to sit on a limb over the still water
and watch for minnows,--a blue and white fellow with a sharp beak. He
had frightened him away many a time. And there was a hole where two big
trout lived. He remembered the willows, too, and the bunch of logs
piled as high as the mill. These would be rolled down and cant-hooked
under its saw when the spring opened, but Baker never ground any one of
them up into wood pulp. It went into clapboards to keep out the cold,
and shingles to keep off the rain, and the "waste" went under the
kettles of the neighbors, the light of the jolly flames dancing round
the room. He had carried many a bundle home himself that the old man
had sent to Jonathan. Most everybody sent Jonathan something,
especially if they thought he needed it.

Then his mind reverted to his own share in the whirl about him.