ung from his shoulder, in which creel reposed a half dozen
silver-sided trout on a bed of grass.

"Well, well, well," he said, at sight of Thompson, and looked earnestly
at the two of them, until at last a slow smile began to play about his
thin lips. "Now, like the ancient Roman, I can wrap my toga about me and
die in peace."

"Oh, Dad, what a thing to say," Sophie protested.

"Figuratively, my dear, figuratively," he assured her. "Merely my way of
saying that I am glad your man has come home from the war, and that you
can smile again."

He tweaked her ear playfully, when Sophie blushed. They went into the
house, and the trout disappeared kitchenward in charge of a bland
Chinaman, to reappear later on the luncheon table in a state of
delicious brown crispness. After that Carr smoked a cigar and Thompson a
cigarette, and Sophie sat between them with the old, quizzical twinkle
in her eyes and a smile hovering about the corners of her mouth.

"Come out and let's make the round of the works, you two," Carr
suggested at last.

"You go, Wes," Sophie said. "I have promised to help a struggling young
housewife with some sewing this afternoon."

So they set forth, Carr and Thompson, on a path through the woods toward
where the donkey engines filled the valley with their shrill tootings
and the shudder of their mighty labor. And as they went, Carr talked.

"All this was virgin forest when you went away," said he. "The first axe
was laid to the timber a year ago last spring. I want you to take
particular notice of this timber. Isn't it magnificent stuff? We are
sending out a little aeroplane spruce, too. Not a great deal, but every
little helps."

It was a splendid forest that they traversed, a level area clothed with
cedar and spruce and fir, lifting brown trunks of six and seven-foot
girth to a great height. And in a few minutes they came upon a falling
gang at work. Two men on their springboards, six feet above the ground,
plying an eight-foot saw. They stood to watch. Presently the saw ate
through to the undercut, a deep notch on the leaning side, and the top
swayed, moved slowly earthward. The sawyers leaped from their narrow
footing. One cried "Tim-b-r-r-r." And the tree swept in a great arc,
smiting the earth with a crash of breaking boughs and the thud of an
arrested landslide.

Beyond that there was a logged space, littered with broken branches,
stumps, tops, cut with troughs plowed deep in the soil, where th