untie Belle expressed her mind to the
young man.

"Nobody realizes how things are going with those Pollocks," said she.
"George sold his spurs and that Cruces bit of his to get medicine. He
wouldn't take anything from me. They're proud folks, and nobody'd have a
chance to suspect anything. I tell you," said the good lady solemnly,
"it don't matter where that child got the fever; it's Henry Plant, the
old, fat scoundrel, that killed her just as plain as if he'd stuck a gun
to her head. He has a good deal to answer for. There's lots of folks
eating their own beef cattle right now; and that's ruinous. I suppose
Washington ain't going to do anything. We might have known it. I don't
suppose you heard anything outside about it?"

"Only that Thorne had resigned."

"That so!" Auntie Belle ruminated on this a moment. "Well, I'm right
glad to hear it. I'd hate to think I was fooled on him. Reckon 'resign'
means fired for daring to say anything about His High-and-mightiness?"
she guessed.

Bob shook his head. "Couldn't say," said he.

The busy season was beginning. Every day laden teams crawled up the
road bringing supplies for the summer work. Woodsmen came in twos, in
threes, in bunches of a dozen or more. Bob was very busy arranging the
distribution and forwarding, putting into shape the great machinery of
handling, so that when, a few weeks later, the bundles of sawn lumber
should begin to shoot down the flume, they would fall automatically into
a systematic scheme of further transportation. He had done this twice
before, and he knew all the steps of it, and exactly what would be
required of him. Certain complications were likely to arise, requiring
each their individual treatments, but as Bob's experience grew these
were becoming fewer and of lesser importance. The creative necessity was
steadily lessening as the work became more familiar. Often Bob found his
eagerness sinking to a blank; his attention economizing itself to the
bare needs of the occasion. He caught himself at times slipping away
from the closest interest in what he had to do. His spirit, although he
did not know it, was beginning once more to shake itself restlessly, to
demand, as it had always demanded in the past from the time of his toy
printing press in his earliest boyhood, fresh food for the creative
instinct that was his. Bobby Orde, the child, had been thorough. No
superficial knowledge of a subject sufficed. He had worked away at the
mechanical