Two weeks later the old Itasca crowd was assembled on the campus and beginning the routine of the classroom once again. It was easy to pick them out anywhere among the students. Their sunburned faces and the independent, self-reliant air drilled into them by the life of the camp, together with the strong bond of fellowship which made them flock together, work together and loaf together made them the natural leaders.

They had done things and knew what they could do; they had borne responsibility and were unfrightened by it; they had worked out the problem of governing themselves all summer and readily applied their experience to the governing of others. In addition to all that they were the senior class. It was only natural that they should control all the politics in the college and be the nucleus around which all the college activities formed. They neither dictated nor grabbed, but their influence was irresistible.

The new semester brought them new courses of study: forest management, lumbering, forest by-products, wood preservation and forest law. The work was practically all technical now. Among these studies Scott found in lumbering an all-absorbing interest. The other subjects he liked well enough, but of the lumbering he could not get too much.

Scott was sorely disappointed to find that Johnson had not returned to college. With his usual luck that young man had gained the confidence of a big lumberman with whom he had come in contact in the course of his duties as patrolman and had been given charge of the logging inspection in some of the northern camps. He was staying out a year for the experience. The greater Scott’s success became, the more keenly he felt his debt to Johnson. It seemed as though fate were spitefully keeping them apart. Several times he had thought of writing but somehow that seemed cowardly and he had decided to wait.

The weeks slipped by comparatively uneventfully. The seniors had struck their stride and felt that they were coming down the home stretch of a professional course; the outside events which had formerly meant so much to them were incidental now, and their real interest lay in the work.

Christmas was almost come—the second Christmas since Scott had left his quiet New England home—and the boy longed to go back there to see the old folks. He had at one time made up his mind to go, but on more mature reflection decided that it could not be. He knew that he would better go to the woods and put in all the time he could in the lumber camps.

Scott realized that most of the men had more woods experience than he. Moreover, the men in his class would spend the month of January in the lumber camps while he, on account of irregularities in his course, could not leave the college at that time. If he was to see anything of the lumbering operations in that section he must do it in the Christmas vacation.

Thus it happened that the Saturday before Christmas found Scott traveling northward towards the logging camps with no other companion than Greenleaf who had decided to accompany him.

It was really a long trip. It did not seem long, however, till they alighted on a short platform where the train left them, the only living creatures in sight.

“Prosperous looking place,” Greenleaf commented, as he looked out over a broad expanse of brush-dotted snow to where a line of timber loomed against the sky.

“Pleasant place to be put off at night,” Scott said. “I wonder where that mail carrier is the old man told us about?”

As though the question had called him to view, a tall gaunt pacer whisked out of a tamarack swamp on the other side of the track, jerking a light cutter over the bumpy trail at a tremendous pace. He seemed to be going wherever he liked and it required quite a stretch of the imagination to conceive that the man in the sleigh was driving him.

“You from camp No. 11?” Greenleaf asked, when the gaunt horse had consented to stop for a minute.

“Yes,” the man growled between his teeth, as he tried to hold the horse.

“Mr. Grafton told us to go out with you,” Greenleaf said, throwing in the mail sack and climbing in after it. Scott jumped in the back and the horse started with a plunge.

“Seems like a lively horse,” Scott said, as he hung on for dear life while the horse jerked the sleigh along in a series of lunges over the poorly covered corduroy.

“He ain’t goin’ none yet,” the man growled; “wait till we get off this corduroy.”

At last the bumping ceased and the sleigh slid lightly over a smooth road. “Now git, if you must,” the driver said, slackening his hold on the lines. The plunging ceased instantly as the big horse stretched himself to a steady, swinging pace and shot up the road like an arrow. The snowballs from his hoofs pelted them in a shower and the zero wind cut like a knife. For a good mile the pace never slackened or faltered. From there on the road was bad and they had to go slowly but there was no more plunging. The big fellow had had his go and was satisfied.

“Gee,” Greenleaf said admiringly, “that’s some horse.”

“That’s the fastest I’ve ever traveled behind a horse,” Scott said, as he rubbed his chilled hands and face.

“The boss keeps him here in the winter,” the man said proudly; “he’s a racer.”

The praise of the horse had mellowed the surly driver and the remainder of the five miles to camp passed pleasantly enough.

To Scott the low lying, snow-covered huts of the camp were a revelation. He felt completely at a loss. Stables, bunkhouses, cookshack, office and shops; they all looked alike with the single exception of size. None of them looked like a house.

“Where’s the foreman?” Greenleaf asked.

“In the office, probably,” the man said.

Greenleaf started for the office as though he had been in that camp all his life. The office, as in all camps, was a combination of wanigan, or store, and office. In there they found the foreman patching up some torn harness. He did not seem to see them come in, and paid not the slightest attention to them; he still busied himself with the harness. Greenleaf leaned carelessly against the counter watching the operation. When this had continued for about five minutes Scott began to wonder why Greenleaf did not present the letter they had brought, but he waited patiently, feeling his greenness.

At the end of about ten minutes the foreman straightened up to have a look at them. Greenleaf, who knew the breed perfectly, continued to look at the harness in silence as though it were the most interesting thing he had ever seen. The foreman looked him quietly over for several minutes before he gruffly demanded,

“What do you want?”

“I have a letter for you from the boss,” Greenleaf said, handing it over.

The foreman read it carefully, and then without looking up, “Go over to the cookshack and get lunch.”

The boys went out. “I thought I could make him talk first,” Greenleaf chuckled.

“What were you waiting for?” Scott asked.

“Never speak to one of those fellows first,” Greenleaf admonished him. “If we had piped right up as soon as we went in there he would have kept us waiting an hour before he read that letter. Now he knows we’re not greenhorns and respects us.”

Going into the cookshack was a good deal like going down a cellar. There were only four small windows which shed a very dim light over the big room. Down the center were two long oilcloth-covered tables set with about a hundred tin cups and tin plates with knives and forks to match. Sugar and spoons were found in tomato cans at intervals. About every six feet there was an immense salt shaker, a bottle of vinegar and a bottle of catsup.

At the end of these tables under a skylight was an enormous kitchen range with two barrels rigged up for hot water boilers and flanked by a big sink and a sort of serving counter. On one side was a giant breadboard built in over the flour bin. It was the strangest looking dining-room Scott had ever seen.

Greenleaf nodded to the cook, a fat man in a white apron who was leaning against one of the tables.

“Can we get a hand-out?” he asked.

A grunt was the only response, but Greenleaf walked familiarly to the counter, pulled a box out from under it and selected some cookies. He unearthed another box containing some doughnuts, bread from another and soon had quite a collection. As soon as the cook saw they knew the ropes he warmed up immediately. “You’ll find the coffee and tea on the back of the stove, boys, and there’s some pie on the shelf. Beans are in the oven and some meat in the safe.” On the whole they had a pretty good lunch.

When they returned to the office they found the foreman waiting for them. The fact that they had not been thrown out by the cook increased his respect for them—for the cook is the real autocrat of the logging camp.

“The boss says to give you fellows whatever you want. What is it?”

“Board and lodging for two weeks,” Greenleaf answered promptly. “We want to look over the work here and see how things are done.”

“Want me to show you around?” the foreman asked tentatively. Those were the instructions in the letter, and he did not like the prospect.

“No,” Greenleaf said, “we can take care of ourselves.”

The foreman looked relieved. “You can get your meals at the cookshack and sleep here in the office in that upper bunk; you’d get full of varmints in the bunkhouse.”

With that he left them, glad to get away.

“Let’s look around the camp,” Greenleaf suggested. “We won’t have time to do anything else before dinner. They eat about half past eleven.”

“Why not let the foreman show us around?” Scott asked. “We’d see more.”

“He’ll do it better if he don’t have to,” Greenleaf answered. “That letter probably told him to do it. A foreman hates that kind of thing unless it is a big lumberman who wants to see things.”

They glanced into the bunkhouse. It was almost dark—for there were only two small windows—and the view was rather hazy. The walls all along both sides and one end were lined with a double row of bunks filled with musty straw and some filthy blankets. A large round-house stove stood in the center of the room and suspended on wires around it were three rows of rusty looking socks. The air was anything but pure.

“That’s what you miss by sleeping in the office,” Greenleaf said, as they backed out. “And you’re missing a lot more that you don’t see. I’ve tried it. It’s not so bad when you get used to it, but it’s no fun getting used to it.”

Scott shuddered as he thought of it. “These lumberjacks must be a tough lot,” he said.

“Wait till you see them. They are not the old time lumberjacks you read about. They’re the scum of Europe. You’ll hear a dozen languages in that cookshack if the cook does not knock them in the head with the rolling pin.”

They had made the round of the stables where they had a long talk with the barn boss on the cost and methods of feeding, and had held a short conference with the saw filer when Scott was startled by a peculiar sound. He found it was the cookee blowing a long tin horn to call the men to dinner. It sounded dismal enough then, but many a time after that when he had been in the woods all day it seemed like the sweetest kind of music.

In a few minutes the men began to stream into camp—Finns, Swedes, Poles, Norwegians, an occasional Austrian and a few of other nationalities. It was certainly a motley crew. Their mackinaws were the only thing about them that presented any appearance of uniformity. That and their shape, for the habit of keeping warm by putting on layer after layer of flannel shirts, gave them all a more or less stout and stubby appearance. Their rubbers, worn over two or three pairs of thick woolen socks, crunched sullenly in the dry snow. They filed silently into the bunkhouse and at another toot of the horn poured out again into the cookshack.

The boys hurried into the cookshack with the rest and were assigned seats next to the foreman. There was no time lost. The men piled their tin plates high and emptied them with astonishing rapidity. The dozen languages that Greenleaf had predicted were certainly there, but were not in evidence, for a sign “No Talking” backed up by a determined-looking cook acted as a damper on conversation. Hardly a word was spoken. In five minutes some of the most expert had emptied their tin plates twice and were filing out.

In the afternoon they went to the woods and followed the operation, from the stump to the landing. They watched the great towering pines, sawed off the stump and wedged over, come smashing down wherever the sawyers willed them to fall. They saw them cut into logs and the logs rolled onto little single sleds, with the back ends dragging in the snow and saw them hauled over the skidroads to the ice-coated logging road and piled on the skidways. They saw those skidways dwindle as the logs were piled high on the broad bunks of the logging sleds and hauled away, forty tons at a load, over the ice road to the river bank where they were rolled on the ice to await the spring floods which would carry them away to the mills hundreds of miles down the river, or, as in another part of the tract, hauled to the railroad track to be carried directly to the mill by rail.

It was on the last day of their stay that Scott suddenly and unexpectedly blossomed out into the hero of the whole camp. He and Greenleaf walked five miles over to the next camp to see the steam log loader, or jammer, which was working there. It was located on a steep side hill where the logs, piled high on the upper side of the track, were swung across onto the cars. On the other side of the track the ground sloped away steeply.

While they were watching the big machine Scott thought he recognized something familiar about a man who was working further down the slope locating a new skidroad. He knew he had seen those quick, cat-like motions before. He left Greenleaf and started down there. Before he had gone half way he recognized Johnson.

Suddenly there was a shout from the jammer, a cry of warning. Johnson was evidently so accustomed to the general clamor that he did not look around, but Scott, who was a little nervous in these strange surroundings, turned instantly.

An enormous log which was being swung onto the car had broken loose from the iron clutches of the jammer, dropped over the down-hill side of the car and was sweeping sideways with the speed of an arrow directly toward Johnson. It was almost on him. An instant’s delay meant sure death. The men on the jammer stood horrified and helpless.

Scott saw that Johnson could not be made to understand in time to jump. Shouting at him would do no good; before he could comprehend it would be too late. Scott took the only chance left to him, poor as it seemed. To the horror of the workmen he jumped directly in the course of the log and striking Johnson full in the chest with all the power of his practiced right arm, he jumped wildly straight in the air. The huge log swished under him, striking his feet as it went and bringing him down heavily on his head.

Scott struggled quickly to his feet and looked half-dazed toward Johnson. Before he could see what had happened he felt himself in Greenleaf’s arms and knew from the cheers of the men on the jammer that his blow had carried Johnson out of danger. He needed Greenleaf’s support for his knees kept doubling up under him and a cold sweat had broken out all over his body.

Johnson rose slowly and looked down the slope after the log. Then he turned and recognized Scott.

“By George, Scotty,” he cried, grasping Scott’s hand warmly, “how did you come here? You surely saved my life that time and risked your own to do it. Hello, Greenleaf.”

“Are you hurt?” Scott asked anxiously.

“Only in the chest,” Johnson answered with a grin. “I see my training did you some good.”

“We are making a lumber report on camp 11,” Scott said, “and came over to see the jammer. I did not know you were here, but thought I recognized you and came down to see.”

“Good thing for me that you did.”

“I found out long ago what a mucker I made of myself last fall and have been longing for a chance to apologize, but something always interfered. Now I am going to get it out before anything stops me. I have made good ever since you called me down, and I owe it all to you. I was ashamed of myself at the time, but was too big a coward to tell you so.”

“And now,” Johnson laughed, “you have far more than squared the account by knocking me down and probably breaking two or three ribs. Forget it. I acted only for your good, knew what I would get from the start and was never sore about it. Let’s go to the camp.”

They talked until late in the afternoon, when Scott and Greenleaf had to return to camp 11. They said good-bye to Johnson with many regrets and left in the minds of the lumberjacks a feeling of respect such as they had never before felt for a college man. The news of the rescue had reached camp 11 ahead of them and Scott was flattered at every turn. This flattery meant little to him, for he knew from experience how little it was worth, but he was delighted over his reconciliation with Johnson. He had not realized what a burden he had been carrying.

The next morning they went to the train behind the old pacer feeling well repaid for their trip. The foreman himself had come out to bid them good-bye.

The journey home was a pleasant one for Scott. He had carried out one of his resolutions and placed himself once more on an honest footing with Johnson. Moreover, he felt convinced that he had picked responsible companions. Merton, Greenleaf and Johnson, he thought, were certainly above reproach. The only thing that worried him was whether the sterling qualities which he knew so well would appeal to his father’s Eastern viewpoint. He remembered how he had regarded them when he first came West, and he had some misgivings.