With the June rains came the drive, thousand after thousand of glistening logs that weltered in the slow rise and fall of the lake, crowding, rolling, blundering against each other, pounding along shore on the rocks, and shouldering incessantly at the chain-linked booms that sagged across the upper end of the conglomeration of timbers. Rain-dappled spaces appeared here and there in that undulating floor of uneasy logs, round which two floating windlasses were slowly worming another boom from shore to shore. Round and round the capstans stepped red-shirt, blue-shirt, gray-shirt, their calked boots gnawing a splintered, circular path on the windlass rafts.

Below the three cabins, and close to the river, stood the smoking wangan of weathered tents, flopping in the wind that whipped the open fireplace smoke across the swinging pots, and on down the gorge, where it hung eddying in the lee of rain-blackened cliffs.

Peaveys stood like patient sentinels, their square steel points thrust in stranded logs. Pike-poles lay here and there, their sharp screw-ends rusting in the rain. They seemed slight and ineffectual compared with the stout peaveys, whose dangling steel fingers hung suggestively ready to grasp with biting spur the slippery timber; and Y-hey! from the men, and the log would grumble over the shingle and plunge in the lake with a surly rolling from side to side. But the peavey’s attenuated brother, the pike-pole, was a worker of miracles in the hands of his master, the driver.

Ross, who had been watching with keen interest the manoeuvres of the rivermen, stood with his shoulders against a buttress of the dam, muffled in sou’wester and oilskins. Logs were shooting from the apron of the sluiceway and leaping to the lift of the foaming back-water, like lean hunters taking the billowy top of a wind-tossed hedge. A figure came toward where he stood and called to him, but the roar of the water through the sluiceway drowned his voice. Then Harrigan, brushing the rain from his face, stood before him.

“Here you! get a roll on that log there, or—”

He pointed to where two of the crew were standing, knee-deep in the backwash of the stream, tugging at a balky timber that threatened to hang up the logs that charged at it and swung off in the current again.

“No, you won’t,” said David, turning his face to Harrigan. “Thought I was one of the crew loafing?” A faint twinkle shone beneath his half-closed lids. It vanished as he leveled his clear gray eyes on Harrigan’s. “That’s the fourth mistake you’ve made regarding me. Aren’t you getting tired of it? I am.”

Harrigan had not seen Ross since the shooting, and, taken aback by suddenly coming upon him, he stared at David a little longer than the occasion seemed to warrant.

Coolly the younger man lifted his sou’wester and ran his fingers through his hair. “It’s on this side,” he said, disclosing a red seam above his ear, “if that’s what you are looking for. Shot any deer lately?”

“You go to hell!”

Ross stepped up to him and pointed across the opposite hill to where the dim crest of Timberland Mountain loomed in the rain.

“Bascomb & Company haven’t bid high enough for the raw material, including you. That’s all.”

Harrigan’s loose, heavy features hardened to a cold mask of hate as the full meaning of David’s words struck home. Then the sluggish blood leaped to his face and he stooped for the peavey at his feet, but David’s foot was on it like a flash. “None of that!”

They faced each other, shoulder to shoulder, David’s eyes measuring the distance to Harrigan’s jaw. In the intense silence the patter of rain on their oilskins sounded like the roll of kettledrums.

“Hey, Denny!” Up on the dam a dripping figure waved its arms.

“I’ll git you yit, you—”

“Swallow it!” David’s voice rang out imperiously. The wound above his ear tingled with the heat of blood that swept his face.

Harrigan drew back and turned toward the beckoning figure.

“Go ahead,” said David; “I don’t carry a gun.”

As Fisty swung heavily along the shore, Avery came from down river with one of the men.

“They’re pilin’ up at the ‘Elbow,’” he said, as he approached. “They’s a full head of water comin’ through the gates, but she’s a-goin’ to tie up.”

“That means the outfit will be here indefinitely,” said David.

“Reckon it do. Comin’ up to the house?”

“No; I think I’ll go over and see if Smoke is all right.”

“Thet’s right: I’ll send Swickey over with some grub fur him,” said Avery, as he moved on up the slope.

“Well, it’s pretty tough on old Smoke, chained up and worrying himself out of appetite, because he can’t understand it all,” thought David, as he climbed the easy slope to the stable.

The clink and rustle of a chain in the straw came to him as he unlocked the rusty padlock and opened the door. Smoke stood blinking and sniffling. Then on his hind legs, chain taut from collar to manger, he strained toward his master, whimpering and half strangled by his effort to break loose. David drew an empty box to the stall and sat down.

“Smoke,” he said playfully, “we’re going back to Boston pretty soon. Then no more hikes down the trail; no more rabbits and squirrels to chase; and no more Swickey to spoil you. Just Wallie and the horses and maybe a cat or two to chase.”

The dog sat on his haunches, tongue lolling, but eyes fixed unwaveringly on David’s face. He whined when Swickey’s name was mentioned, and while David listlessly picked a straw to pieces, he turned and gnawed savagely at his chain. Surely they had made a mistake to shut him away from the good sun and the wind and the rain. The consciousness of unseen presences stamping past his door, strange voices, new man-smells, the rumbling of logs in the river, the scent of smoke from the wangan, all combined to irritate him, redoubling his sense of impotency as a champion and guardian of his adopted household.

The door of the main camp opened and closed. With the slant of the rain beating against her came Swickey, a quaint figure in her father’s cap and gay-colored mackinaw. She had a bowl of table scraps for Smoke, who ceased whining and stood watching her approach. David took the basin from her hands and gravely offered her a seat on the box; but she declined with a quick smile and dropped on her knees beside Smoke, caressing his short, pointed ears and muscular fore-shoulders. The dog sniffed at his food disdainfully. What did meat and bones amount to compared with prospective liberty? With many words and much crooning she cajoled him into a pretense of eating, but his little red eyes sought her face constantly as he crunched a bone or nosed out the more appetizing morsels from the pan.

“Dave,” she said, addressing him with the innocent familiarity of the backwoods, “you’re goin’ to take Smoke to his real home again, ain’t you?”

“Yes, I’ll have to, I think. But this is as much his real home as Boston was.”

“Are you comin’ back again?”

“I think so, Swickey. Why?”

“Are you goin’ to bring Smoke back when you come?”

“I’m afraid not. You see he belongs to Mr. Bascomb the surveyor. He was coming up here to get Smoke and—and talk with me about certain things, but he was called home by wire. Had to leave immediately.”

“What’s it mean—‘called home by wire’?”

“By telegraph. You remember the telegraph wires in the station at Tramworth?”

“Yip. Hundreds of ’em.”

“Well, people call telegraphing, ‘wiring,’ and a telegram a ‘wire.’”

“Ain’t telegraph its real name?”

“Yes; but wire is shorter—easier to say.”

“Is thet why you said it?”

“Not exactly. But why?”

“Oh, nothin’; only when Pop had a cold and I said to you he could sca’cely talk ’cause he had frost in his pipes, you said it was wrong to say thet, and to say ‘my father has a sore throat.’ Ain’t ‘frost in your pipes’ quicker than sayin’ ‘my father has a sore throat’?”

She looked up from Smoke as David laughed, her gravely smiling lips vivid in contrast with the clear, healthy brown of her rounded young cheek.

He gazed at her a moment, and the pert, shabbily-clad Swickey of a year ago returned his gaze for a fleeting instant. Then a new Swickey, with full, brown eyes and the rich coloring of abundant health, pushed back the frayed cap from her smooth, girlish forehead, and laughed, laughed with the buoyant melody of youth and happiness.

“You’re actually pretty, Swickey.”

She grasped the import of his words with a slow realization of the compliment, perhaps the first that had ever been paid her, and a sudden consciousness of self overwhelmed her throat and cheek with rushing color. She pulled her skirt, that Smoke had disarranged, closer about her knees.

“Pop says my mother was pretty—awful pretty. I never seen her, ’cept in her picture. Pop’s got it with all gold on the edges of the box and a cover thet goes ‘snap’ when he shets it.”

“Yes,” replied David absently.

He was thinking of the pale beauty of another and older girl, a tall, slender woman, whose every feature bespoke ancestral breeding. He could not imagine her as a part of this picture, with its squalid setting, nor even as a part of the splendid vista of glistening spring foliage sprinkled upon the background of the hillside conifers that climbed the height of land opposite. Palms and roses, the heavy warm air of the conservatory, sensuous, soothing, enervating.... Wallie Bascomb’s sister ... Elizabeth Bascomb. “Well, it had been a mistake.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Bascomb senior will sit up straight when I name our price,” he muttered. “Strange how this thing has worked out ... and Bessie won’t understand....”

Smoke, nuzzling his hand, recalled him to his surroundings. He did not realize that he had been speaking, but Swickey sat with eyes intently fixed on his face.

“I thought—” he began.

“I unhitched the chain when you was talkin’ to yourself like Pop does,” explained Swickey.

David stooped and patted the dog, who jumped from him to Swickey and back again, overjoyed and impartially affectionate.

“Be careful not to let him out alone,” said David. “Smoke isn’t popular with the men.”

“Pop says they’ll be”—(“There’ll be,” corrected David)—“there’ll be suthin’ doin’ if any of the crew tetches Smoke!”

“Well, you and I will look after him for a while, Swickey. Then no one will touch him.”

Together they walked leisurely toward the cabin, hand in hand, Swickey swinging the empty bowl, all unconscious of Smoke’s capering and rushing in circles round his liberators. He quieted down and trotted silently behind them when his first joy had evaporated. They didn’t seem to enter into the spirit of the thing.

David, unlike his usual self in Swickey’s presence, was silent to taciturnity. Boston, of which he was thinking, seemed vague and unreal, a place he once knew. His surroundings were the only realities, and now that he was going away they seemed to hold him with a subtle force he could not analyze. Was he really growing fonder of his life here, of Swickey and her father, than he cared to acknowledge?

“’Fraid Dave’d get lost in the long grass?” said Avery, who stood in the doorway, grinning as they came up.

David stopped and turned toward Swickey. She slowly withdrew her fingers from his.

“I reckon Dave’s sick,” she replied.

“How sick?” queried her father, with undisguised solicitude.

“Sick of us as don’t know nothin’,” she answered, her cheeks flaming. And she pushed past the figure in the doorway and disappeared into her room.

“Wal, sweatin’ catfish! What ails the gal? She was puffin’ like a hen drawin’ rails when she went past me. Huh!”

The old man fumbled in his pocket for tobacco, oblivious to Smoke’s appeal for notice. Then the dog trotted quietly after Swickey, who in the sanctuary of her own tiny bedroom was crying her heart out. Smoke was sympathetic from his cold, friendly nose to the tip of his querulous tail, which wagged in an embarrassed way; and he licked her chin at intervals when it was visible, with dumb solicitude for the sorrow of his idol, a sorrow wholly incomprehensible to him, and vague even to Swickey, but more emotionally potent, perhaps, for that very reason.