me to the music. And the music! Thorpe
unconsciously shuddered; then sighed in pity. It was atrocious. It was
not even in tune. Two out of three of the notes were either sharp or
flat, not so flagrantly as to produce absolute disharmony, but just
enough to set the teeth on edge. And the rendition was as colorless as
that of a poor hand-organ.

The performer seemed to grind out his fearful stuff with a fierce
delight, in which appeared little of the esthetic pleasure of the
artist. Thorpe was at a loss to define it.

"Poor Phil," he said to himself. "He has the musical soul without even
the musical ear!"

Next day, while passing out of the cook camp he addressed one of the
men:

"Well, Billy," he inquired, "how do you like your fiddler?"

"All RIGHT!" replied Billy with emphasis. "She's got some go to her."

In the woods the work proceeded finely. From the travoy sledges and the
short roads a constant stream of logs emptied itself on the bank.
There long parallel skidways had been laid the whole width of the river
valley. Each log as it came was dragged across those monster andirons
and rolled to the bank of the river. The cant-hook men dug their
implements into the rough bark, leaned, lifted, or clung to the
projecting stocks until slowly the log moved, rolling with gradually
increasing momentum. Then they attacked it with fury lest the momentum
be lost. Whenever it began to deviate from the straight rolling
necessary to keep it on the center of the skids, one of the workers
thrust the shoe of his cant-hook under one end of the log. That end
promptly stopped; the other, still rolling, soon caught up; and the log
moved on evenly, as was fitting.

At the end of the rollway the log collided with other logs and stopped
with the impact of one bowling ball against another. The men knew
that being caught between the two meant death or crippling for life.
Nevertheless they escaped from the narrowing interval at the latest
possible moment, for it is easier to keep a log rolling than to start
it.

Then other men piled them by means of long steel chains and horses, just
as they would have skidded them in the woods. Only now the logs mounted
up and up until the skidways were thirty or forty feet high. Eventually
the pile of logs would fill the banking ground utterly, burying the
landing under a nearly continuous carpet of timber as thick as a
two-story house is tall. The work is dangerous. A saw log containing
six hundre