stakes to start with. If you
want to be my foreman on those terms, just say so, and I'll be tickled
to death to have you."

For the first time the lumberman's face lost, during a single instant,
its mask of immobility. His steel-blue eyes flashed, his mouth twitched
with some strong emotion. For the first time, too, he spoke without his
contemplative pause of preparation.

"That's th' way to talk!" he cried. "Go with you? Well I should rise to
remark! You're the boss; and I always said it. I'll get you a gang of
bully boys that will roll logs till there's skating in hell!"

Thorpe left, after making an appointment at his own hotel for the
following day, more than pleased with his luck. Although he had by now
fairly good and practical ideas in regard to the logging of a bunch of
pine, he felt himself to be very deficient in the details. In fact, he
anticipated his next step with shaky confidence. He would now be called
upon to buy four or five teams of horses, and enough feed to last them
the entire winter; he would have to arrange for provisions in abundance
and variety for his men; he would have to figure on blankets, harness,
cook-camp utensils, stoves, blacksmith tools, iron, axes, chains,
cant-hooks, van-goods, pails, lamps, oil, matches, all sorts of
hardware,--in short, all the thousand and one things, from needles to
court-plaster, of which a self-sufficing community might come in need.
And he would have to figure out his requirements for the entire winter.
After navigation closed, he could import nothing more.

How could he know what to buy,--how many barrels of flour, how much
coffee, raisins, baking powder, soda, pork, beans, dried apples, sugar,
nutmeg, pepper, salt, crackers, molasses, ginger, lard, tea, corned
beef, catsup, mustard,--to last twenty men five or six months? How could
he be expected to think of each item of a list of two hundred, the
lack of which meant measureless bother, and the desirability of which
suggested itself only when the necessity arose? It is easy, when the
mind is occupied with multitudinous detail, to forget simple things,
like brooms or iron shovels. With Tim Shearer to help his inexperience,
he felt easy. He knew he could attend to advantageous buying, and to
making arrangements with the steamship line to Marquette for the landing
of his goods at the mouth of the Ossawinamakee.

Deep in these thoughts, he wandered on at random. He suddenly came to
himself in the toughest