his fall Appleton sent Buck Moncrossen into the Blood River
country with orders to put ten million feet of logs into the river by
spring.

So it was that the few remaining inhabitants of Hilarity were aroused
from their habitual apathy one early fall evening by the shrill shrieks
of an engine whistle as Moncrossen's ten-car train, carrying crew and
supplies for the new camp, came to a stop at the rusty switch. There
was something reminiscent in this whistle-sound. It came as a voice
from the past.

Time was, some eight or ten years before, when the old No. 9 and her
companion engine, No. 11, whistled daily and importantly into Hilarity,
pushing long strings of "flats" onto the spurs; and then whistled out
again with each car groaning and creaking under its towering pyramid of
logs.

But that was in the days of Hilarity's prosperity--in the days when the
little town was the chief loading point for two thousand square miles
of timber.

It had been a live town then--work and wages and the spirit to
spend--quick, hot life, and quick, cold death danced hand in hand to
the clink of glasses.

Everything ran wide open, and all night long rough men sinned abysmally
in their hell-envied play, and, crowding the saloons, laughed and
fought and drank red liquor in front of long pine bars, where the
rattle of chips and the click of pool-balls, mingled with lurid
profanity, floated out through the open doors and blended with the
incessant tintinnabulation of the dance-hall pianos.

These were the days of Hilarity's prosperity, when twenty train-loads
of logs were jerked from her spurs by day, and the nights rang loud
with false laughter.

A vanished prosperity--for now the little town stood all but deserted
in its clearing, with the encircling hills denuded of all vegetation
save a tangle of underbrush and a straggling growth of stunted jack
pine.

Even the "pig-iron loggers"--the hardwood men--had gleaned the last
stick from the ridges, and Hilarity had become but a name on the map.

Only those remained who were old or crippled, and a few--a very
few--who had undertaken to grub out tiny farms among the stumps.

Each evening these forlorn remnants were wont to forsake their
stolid-faced wives and yammering offspring and pick their way through
the solitary stump-dotted street, past windowless, deserted buildings
which were the saloons and dance-halls of better days, to foregather
around the huge stove in the rear of Hod B