n, whin she gets to r-rollin'?"

Steve's eyes were like bits of polished steel, so bright they were. It
was a struggle for him to take them, even for a moment, from the engine
before him.

"I cal'late I kin," he quavered.

"Well, thin, we'll see." McLean looked up and winked at the engineer
in the diminutive cab. "It's car-reful you'll be, Misther engineer,"
he cautioned, "an' watch your steerin' on the cur-rves!"

He leaned over to lift the boy to the running-board, but Steve, with
one foot upraised, hung back. He faced toward Caleb and, without a
glance in the girl's direction, said:

"Mebby she--mebby she'd like to go, too?"

Barbara Allison, chin lifted a little higher, half wheeled and slipped
her hand within that of her father.

"Thank you, but I don't care to," she refused.

Steve caught the little toss of her head from the corner of his eye,
and his face went pink. Without another word he clambered up beside
the driver and the engine rolled out of the yard and went clanking down
the uneven, crooked track, leaving a dissolving trail of steam behind.
When it returned the little face at the cab window was tense and
somewhat pale beneath its tan, but the hand upon the throttle beside
the engineer's lay steady as a little pine knot.

"Well, an' what do you think av her?" McLean demanded with an
assumption of anxiety as the boy dropped to the ground.

Steve turned and patted the footboard with a proprietary hand. As
grave of mien as his questioner he bobbed his head.

"She--she certainly kin git up and step," he volunteered. And then,
cocking his head judiciously: "I'll hev to be a-gittin' me one of them
fer myself, some day!"

McLean chuckled--he chuckled in deep delight within his white
whiskers--and led the way to the mills. But once there the amusement
in his eyes rapidly deepened to amazement, for there were few steps in
the processes upon which the boy could not talk as fluently and
technically as did the mill boss himself. And he knew timber; knew it
with the same infallibility which had, even in McLean, always seemed to
border upon the uncanny.

It was Allison himself who first called attention to an unsawed log
which was being discarded.

"That looks like too good a stick to be wasted, doesn't it, McLean?" he
asked.

Before McLean could answer the boy spat gravely into a pile of sawdust,
his piping voice rising above the shrill scream of the saws.

"She's holler," he stated succi