ty routine work.
He sat to his desk at eight o'clock and began the perusal of a sheaf of
letters, comprising a certain correspondence, which Collins brought him.
The first three he read carefully; the following two rather hurriedly;
of the next one he seized only the salient and essential points; the
seventh and eighth he skimmed; the remainder of the bundle he thrust
aside in uncontrollable impatience. Next day he returned to the woods.

The incident of the letters had aroused to the full his old fighting
spirit, before which no mere instincts could stand. He clamped the
iron to his actions and forced them to the way appointed. Once more his
mental processes became clear and incisive, his commands direct and to
the point. To all outward appearance Thorpe was as before.

He opened Camp One, and the Fighting Forty came back from distant
drinking joints. This was in early September, when the raspberries were
entirely done and the blackberries fairly in the way of vanishing. That
able-bodied and devoted band of men was on hand when needed. Shearer,
in some subtle manner of his own, had let them feel that this year meant
thirty million or "bust." They tightened their leather belts and stood
ready for commands. Thorpe set them to work near the river, cutting
roads along the lines he had blazed to the inland timber on seventeen
and nineteen. After much discussion with Shearer the young man decided
to take out the logs from eleven by driving them down French Creek.

To this end a gang was put to clearing the creekbed. It was a tremendous
job. Centuries of forest life had choked the little stream nearly to
the level of its banks. Old snags and stumps lay imbedded in the ooze;
decayed trunks, moss-grown, blocked the current; leaning tamaracks,
fallen timber, tangled vines, dense thickets gave to its course more the
appearance of a tropical jungle than of a north country brook-bed. All
these things had to be removed, one by one, and either piled to one
side or burnt. In the end, however, it would pay. French Creek was not
a large stream, but it could be driven during the time of the spring
freshets.

Each night the men returned in the beautiful dreamlike twilight to the
camp. There they sat, after eating, smoking their pipes in the open air.
Much of the time they sang, while Phil, crouching wolf-like over his
violin, rasped out an accompaniment of dissonances. From a distance it
softened and fitted pleasantly into the framewor