umbling something profane.

"If you hanker for trouble so much," drawled the unexpected voice of old
Jackson from the corner, "mebbe you could put on th' gloves."

The idea was acclaimed. Somebody tossed out a dirty torn old set of
buckskin boxing gloves.

The rest was farce. Thorpe was built on the true athletic lines, broad,
straight shoulders, narrow flanks, long, clean, smooth muscles.
He possessed, besides, that hereditary toughness and bulk which no
gymnasium training will ever quite supply. The other man, while powerful
and ugly in his rushes, was clumsy and did not use his head. Thorpe
planted his hard straight blows at will. In this game he was as
manifestly superior as his opponent would probably have been had the
rules permitted kicking, gouging, and wrestling. Finally he saw his
opening and let out with a swinging pivot blow. The other picked himself
out of a corner, and drew off the gloves. Thorpe's status was assured.

A Frenchman took down his fiddle and began to squeak. In the course of
the dance old Jackson and old Heath found themselves together, smoking
their pipes of Peerless.

"The young feller's all right," observed Heath; "he cuffed Ben up to a
peak all right."

"Went down like a peck of wet fish-nets," replied Jackson tranquilly.

Chapter VII

In the office shanty one evening about a week later, Radway and his
scaler happened to be talking over the situation. The scaler, whose
name was Dyer, slouched back in the shadow, watching his great honest
superior as a crafty, dainty cat might watch the blunderings of a St.
Bernard. When he spoke, it was with a mockery so subtle as quite to
escape the perceptions of the lumberman. Dyer had a precise little
black mustache whose ends he was constantly twisting into points, black
eyebrows, and long effeminate black lashes. You would have expected his
dress in the city to be just a trifle flashy, not enough so to be loud,
but sinning as to the trifles of good taste. The two men conversed in
short elliptical sentences, using many technical terms.

"That 'seventeen' white pine is going to underrun," said Dyer. "It won't
skid over three hundred thousand."

"It's small stuff," agreed Radway, "and so much the worse for us; but
the Company'll stand in on it because small stuff like that always
over-runs on the mill-cut."

The scaler nodded comprehension.

"When you going to dray-haul that Norway across Pike Lake?"

"To-morrow. She's springy, bu