The Rules of the Game Part 3

"You must see you're not fair to Harvey," he announced. "That man carries the details of four businesses in his head, he practically does the clerical work for them all, and he never seems to hurry. Also, he can put his hand without hesitation on any one of these doc.u.ments," he waved his hand about the room. "I can't."

He stopped to light the stub of a long-extinct cigar.

"I can't make it hard for that sort of man. So I guess we'll have to take you out of the office. Still, I promised Welton to give you a good try-out. Then, too, I'm not satisfied in my own mind. I can see you are trying. Either you're a d.a.m.n fool or this college education racket has had the same effect on you as on most other young cubs. If you're the son of your father, you can't be entirely a d.a.m.n fool. If it's the college education, that will probably wear off in time. Anyhow, I think I'll take you up to the mill. You can try the office there. Collins is easy to get on with, and of course there isn't the same responsibility there."

In the buffeting of humiliation Bob could not avoid a fleeting inner smile over this last remark. Responsibility! In this sleepy, quiet backwater of a tenth-floor office, full of infinite little statistics that led nowhere, that came to no conclusion except to be engulfed in dark files with hundreds of their own kind, aimless, useless, annoying as so many gadflies! Then he set his face for the further remarks.

"Navigation will open this week," Fox's incisive tones went on, "and our hold-overs will be moved now. It will be busy there. We shall take the eight o'clock train to-night." He glanced sharply at Bob's lean, set face. "I a.s.sume you'll go?"

Bob was remembering certain trying afternoons on the field when as captain, and later as coach, he had told some very high-spirited boys what he considered some wholesome truths. He was remembering the various ways in which they had taken his remarks.

"Yes, sir," he replied.

"Well, you can go home now and pack up," said Fox. "Jim!" he shot out in his penetrating voice; then to Harvey, "Make out Orde's check."

Bob closed his desk, and went into the outer office to receive his check. Harvey handed it to him without comment, and at once turned back to his books. Bob stood irresolute a moment, then turned away without farewell.

But Archie followed him into the hall.

"I'm mighty sorry, old man," he whispered, furtively. "Did you get the G.B.?"

"I'm going up to the mill office," replied Bob.

"Oh!" the other commiserated him. Then with an effort to see the best side, "Still you could hardly expect to jump right into the head office at first. I didn't much think you could hold down a job here. You see there's too much doing here. Well, good-bye. Good luck to you, old man."

There it was again, the insistence on the responsibility, the activity, the importance of that sleepy, stuffy little office with its two men at work, its leisure, its aimlessness. On his way to the car-line Bob stopped to look in at an open door. A dozen men were jumping truck loads of boxes here and there. Another man in a peaked cap and a silesia coat, with a pencil behind his ear and a manifold book sticking out of his pocket shouted orders, consulted a long list, marked boxes and scribbled in a shipping book. Dim in the background huge freight elevators rose and fell, burdened with the ma.s.s of indeterminate things. Truck horses, great as elephants, magnificently harnessed with bra.s.s ornaments, drew drays, big enough to carry a small house, to the loading platform where they were quickly laden and sent away. From an opened upper window came the busy click of many typewriters. Order in apparent confusion, immense activity at a white heat, great movement, the clanging of the wheels of commerce, the apparition and embodiment of restless industry--these appeared and vanished, darted in and out, were plain to be seen and were vague through the murk and gloom. Bob glanced up at the emblazoned sign.

He read the firm's name of well-known wholesale grocers. As he crossed the bridge and proceeded out Lincoln Park Boulevard two figures rose to him and stood side by side. One was the shipping clerk in his peaked cap and silesia coat, hurried, busy, commanding, full of responsibility; the other was Harvey, with his round, black skull cap, his great, gold-bowed spectacles, entering minutely, painstakingly, deliberately, his neat little figures in a neat, large book.

IV

The train stopped about noon at a small board town. Fox and Bob descended. The latter drew his lungs full of the sparkling clear air and felt inclined to shout. The thing that claimed his attention most strongly was the dull green band of the forest, thick and impenetrable to the south, fringing into ragged tamaracks on the east, opening into a charming vista of a narrowing bay to the west. Northward the land ran down to sandpits and beyond them tossed the vivid white and blue of the Lake. Then when his interest had detached itself from the predominant note of the imminent wilderness, predominant less from its physical size--for it lay in remote perspective--than from a certain indefinable and psychological right of priority, Bob's eye was at once drawn to the huge red-painted sawmill, with its very tall smokestacks, its row of water barrels along the ridge, its uncouth and separate conical sawdust burner, and its long lines of elevated tramways leading out into the lumber yard where was piled the white pine held over from the season before. As Bob looked, a great, black horse appeared on one of these aerial tramways, silhouetted against the sky. The beast moved accurately, his head held low against his chest, his feet lifted and planted with care. Behind him rumbled a whole train of little cars each laden with planks. On the foremost sat a man, his shoulders bowed, driving the horse. They proceeded slowly, leisurely, without haste, against the brightness of the sky. The spider supports below them seemed strangely inadequate to their ma.s.s, so that they appeared in an occult manner to maintain their elevation by some buoyancy of their own, some quality that sustained them not only in their distance above the earth but in a curious, decorative, extra-human world of their own. After a moment they disappeared behind the tall piles of lumber.

Against the sky, now, the place of the elephantine black horse and the little tram cars and the man was taken by the masts of ships lying beyond. They rose straight and tall, their cordage like spider webs, in a succession of regular s.p.a.ces until they were lost behind the mill.

From the exhaust of the mill's engine a jet of white steam shot up sparkling. Close on its apparition sounded the exultant, high-keyed shriek of the saw. It ceased abruptly. Then Bob became conscious of a heavy _rud, thud_ of mill machinery.

All this time he and Fox were walking along a narrow board walk, elevated two or three feet above the sawdust-strewn street. They pa.s.sed the mill and entered the cool shade of the big lumber piles. Along their base lay half-melted snow. Soggy pools soaked the ground in the exposed places. Bob breathed deep of the clear air, keenly conscious of the freshness of it after the murky city. A sweet and delicate odour was abroad, an odour elusive yet pungent, an aroma of the open. The young man sniffed it eagerly, this essence of fresh sawdust, of new-cut pine, of sawlogs dripping from the water, of faint old reminiscence of cured lumber standing in the piles of the year before, and more fancifully of the balsam and spruce, the hemlock and pine of the distant forest.

"Great!" he cried aloud, "I never knew anything like it! What a country to train in!"

"All this lumber here is going to be sold within the next two months,"

said Fox with the first approach to enthusiasm Bob had ever observed in him. "All of it. It's got to be carried down to the docks, and tallied there, and loaded in those vessels. The mill isn't much--too old-fashioned. We saw with 'circulars' instead of band-saws. Not like our Minnesota mills. We bought the plant as it stands. Still we turn out a pretty good cut every day, and it has to be run out and piled."

They stepped abruptly, without transition, into the town. A double row of unpainted board shanties led straight to the water's edge. This row was punctuated by four buildings different from the rest--a huge rambling structure with a wide porch over which was suspended a large bell; a neatly painted smaller building labelled "Office"; a trim house surrounded by what would later be a garden; and a square-fronted store.

The street between was soft and springy with sawdust and finely broken shingles. Various side streets started out bravely enough, but soon petered out into stump land. Along one of them were extensive stables.

Bob followed his conductor in silence. After an interval they mounted short steps and entered the office.

Here Bob found himself at once in a small entry railed off from the main room by a breast-high line of pickets strong enough to resist a battering-ram. A man he had seen walking across from the mill was talking rapidly through a tiny wicket, emphasizing some point on a soiled memorandum by the indication of a stubby forefinger. He was a short, active, blue-eyed man, very tanned. Bob looked at him with interest, for there was something about him the young man did not recognize, something he liked--a certain independent carriage of the head, a certain self-reliance in the set of his shoulders, a certain purposeful directness of his whole personality. When he caught sight of Fox he turned briskly, extending his hand.

"How are you, Mr. Fox?" he greeted. "Just in?"

"Hullo, Johnny," replied Fox, "how are things? I see you're busy."

"Yes, we're busy," replied the man, "and we'll keep busy."

"Everything going all right?"

"Pretty good. Poor lot of men this year. A good many of the old men haven't showed up this year--some sort of pull-out to Oregon and California. I'm having a little trouble with them off and on."

"I'll bet on you to stay on top," replied Fox easily. "I'll be over to see you pretty soon."

The man nodded to the bookkeeper with whom he had been talking, and turned to go out. As he pa.s.sed Bob, that young man was conscious of a keen, gimlet scrutiny from the blue eyes, a scrutiny instantaneous, but which seemed to penetrate his very flesh to the soul of him. He experienced a distinct physical shock as at the encountering of an elemental force.

He came to himself to hear Fox saying:

"That's Johnny Mason, our mill foreman. He has charge of all the sawing, and is a mighty good man. You'll see more of him."

The speaker opened a gate in the picket railing and stepped inside.

A long shelf desk, at which were high stools, backed up against the pickets; a big round stove occupied the centre; a safe crowded one corner. Blue print maps decorated the walls. Coa.r.s.e rope matting edged with tin strips protected the floor. A single step down through a door led into a painted private office where could be seen a flat table desk.

In the air hung a mingled odour of fresh pine, stale tobacco, and the closeness of books.

Fox turned at once sharply to the left and entered into earnest conversation with a pale, hatchet-faced man of thirty-five, whom he addressed as "Collins." In a moment he turned, beckoning Bob forward.

"Here's a youngster for you, Collins," said he, evidently continuing former remarks. "Young Mr. Orde. He's been in our home office awhile, but I brought him up to help you out. He can get busy on your tally sheets and time checks and tally boards, and sort of ease up the strain a little."

"I can use him, right now," said Collins, nervously smoothing back a strand of his pale hair. "Glad to meet you, Mr. Orde. These 'jumpers' ...

and that confounded mixed stuff from _seventeen_ ..." he trailed off, his eye glazing in the abstraction of some inner calculation, his long, nervous fingers reaching unconsciously toward the soiled memoranda left by Mason.

"Well, I'll set you to work," he roused himself, when he perceived that the two were about to leave him. And almost before they had time to turn away he was busy at the papers, his pencil, beautifully pointed, running like lightning down the long columns, pausing at certain places as though by instinct, hovering the brief instant necessary to calculation, then racing on as though in pursuit of something elusive.

As they turned away a slow, cool voice addressed them from behind the stove.

"Hullo, bub!" it drawled.

Fox's face lighted and he extended both hands.

"Well, Tally!" he cried. "You old snoozer!"

The man was upward of sixty years of age, but straight and active. His features were tanned a deep mahogany, and carved by the years and exposure into lines of capability and good humour. In contrast to this brown his sweeping white moustache and bushy eyebrows, blenched flaxen by the sun, showed strongly. His little blue eyes twinkled, and fine wrinkles at their corners helped the twinkles. His long figure was so heavily clothed as to be concealed from any surmise, except that it was gaunt and wiry. Hands gnarled, twisted, veined, brown, seemed less like flesh than like some skilful j.a.panese carving. On his head he wore a visored cap with an extraordinary high crown; on his back a rather dingy coat cut from a Mackinaw blanket; on his legs trousers that had been "stagged" off just below the knees, heavy German socks, and shoes nailed with sharp spikes at least three-quarters of an inch in length.

"Thought you were up in the woods!" Fox was exclaiming. "Where's f.a.gan?"

"He's walkin' white water," replied the old man.