he
smallest pay that they ever did on this Michigan Peninsula. I'm much
obliged to you, Josh, for telling me. I never go after trouble, as you
fellows all know; but I sha'n't try to dodge it, either."

He picked up his knife and fork and went quietly on with his breakfast.
But Nan could not eat any more at all.

It seemed to the gently nurtured girl from Tillbury as though she had
fallen in with people from another globe. Even the mill-hands, whom Bess
Harley so scorned, were not like these great, rough fellows whose minds
seemed continually to be fixed upon battle. At least, she had never seen
or heard such talk as had just now come to her ears.

The men began, one by one, to push back the benches and go out. There
was a great bustle of getting under way as the teams started for the
woods, and the choppers, too, went away. Tom hurried to start his big
pair of dapple grays, and Nan was glad to bundle up again and run out to
watch the exodus.

They were a mighty crew. As Uncle Henry had said, the Big Woods did not
breed runts.

Remembering the stunted, quick-moving, chattering French Canadians, and
the scattering of American-born employees among them, who worked in the
Tillbury mills, Nan was the more amazed by the average size of
these workmen. The woodsmen were a race of giants beside the
narrow-shouldered, flat-chested pygmies who toiled in the mills.

Tom strode by with his timber sled. Rafe leaped on to ride and Tom
playfully snapped his whiplash at him. Nan was glad to see that the
two brothers smiled again at each other. Their recent tiff seemed to be
forgotten.

Some of the choppers had already gone on ahead to the part of the tract
where the marked trees were being felled. Now the pluck, pluck, pluck of
the axe blows laid against the forest monarchs, reached the girl's ears.
She thought the flat stuttering sound of the axes said "pluck" very
plainly, and that that was just the word they should say.

"For it does take lots of pluck to do work of this kind," Nan
confided to her uncle, who walked up and down on the porch smoking an
after-breakfast pipe.

"Yes. No softies allowed on the job," said he, cheerfully. "Some of the
boys may be rough and hard nuts to crack; but it is necessary to have
just such boys or we couldn't get out the timber."

"But they want to fight so much!" gasped Nan.

"Sho!" said her uncle, slowly. "It's mostly talk. They feel the itch
for hard work and hard play, that's all. Yo