ed a lumber mill--and where he ran
it himself and everything connected with it from stumpage to scantling.
"There is a broad stream that runs into the lake, ... and above the
mill there are bass weighing ten pounds, ... and back in the primeval
forest bears, ... and now and then a moose--" So ran the letter.
Muggles had spread it wide open by this time and was reading it
aloud--everybody knowing Monteith--and the group never having any
secrets of this kind from each other.

"Come up, old chap," the letter continued, "and stay a week--two, if
you can work it--and bring Bender, and little Billy and Poddy, and
three or four more. The bungalow holds ten. Wire when--I'm now putting
things on ice."

Muggles looked around the circle and sent interrogatory Marconigrams
with his eyebrows. In response Podvine said he'd go, and so did Billy
Salters. Bender thought he could come a day or two later--the earning
of their daily bread was not an absorbing task with these young
gentlemen--their fathers had done that years before.

Muggles ran over in his mind the list of his engagements: he was due at
Gravesend on the tenth for a week, to play golf; at his aunt's
country-seat in Westchester on the eleventh for the same length of
time, and on the twelfth he was expected to meet a yacht at Cold Spring
Harbor for a cruise up the coast. He had accepted these invitations and
had fully intended to keep each and every one. Monteith's letter,
however, seemed to come at a time when he really needed a more virile
and bracing life than was offered by the others. Here was a chance to
redeem his reputation. Lumber camps meant big men doing big
things--things reeking with danger, such as falling trees, forest fires
and log jams. There might also be hair-breadth escapes in the hunting
of big game and the tramping of the vast wilderness. This dressing
three times a day and spending the intermediate hours hitting wooden
balls, or lounging in a straw chair under a deck awning, had become
tiresome. What he needed was to get down to Nature and hug the sod, and
if there wasn't any sod then he would grapple with whatever took its
place.

Muggles dropped his legs to the floor, straightened his back, beckoned
to a servant, motioned for a telegraph blank--exertion is tabooed at
the Magnolia--untelescoped a gold pencil hooked to his watch-chain and
wrote as follows:

"Thanks. Coming Tuesday."

II

Wabacog covers a shaved place in a primeval forest