to the advance guard, whether he
wears buckskin, mackinaw, sombrero, or broadcloth. The woods are there,
the plains, the rivers. Snow is there, and the line of the prairie.
Mountain peaks and still pine forests have impressed themselves subtly;
so that when we turn to admire his unconsciously graceful swing, we seem
to hear the ax biting the pine, or the prospector's pick tapping the
rock. And in his eye is the capability of quiet humor, which is just the
quality that the surmounting of many difficulties will give a man.

Like the nature he has fought until he understands, his disposition is
at once kindly and terrible. Outside the subtleties of his calling, he
sees only red. Relieved of the strenuousness of his occupation, he turns
all the force of the wonderful energies that have carried him far where
other men would have halted, to channels in which a gentle current
makes flood enough. It is the mountain torrent and the canal. Instead
of pleasure, he seeks orgies. He runs to wild excesses of drinking,
fighting, and carousing--which would frighten most men to sobriety--with
a happy, reckless spirit that carries him beyond the limits of even his
extraordinary forces.

This is not the moment to judge him. And yet one cannot help admiring
the magnificently picturesque spectacle of such energies running riot.
The power is still in evidence, though beyond its proper application.

Chapter II

In the network of streams draining the eastern portion of Michigan and
known as the Saginaw waters, the great firm of Morrison & Daly had for
many years carried on extensive logging operations in the wilderness.
The number of their camps was legion, of their employees a multitude.
Each spring they had gathered in their capacious booms from thirty to
fifty million feet of pine logs.

Now at last, in the early eighties, they reached the end of their
holdings. Another winter would finish the cut. Two summers would see
the great mills at Beeson Lake dismantled or sold, while Mr. Daly, the
"woods partner" of the combination, would flit away to the scenes of new
and perhaps more extensive operations. At this juncture Mr. Daly called
to him John Radway, a man whom he knew to possess extensive experience,
a little capital, and a desire for more of both.

"Radway," said he, when the two found themselves alone in the mill
office, "we expect to cut this year some fifty millions, which will
finish our pine holdings in the Saginaw wate