brupt and
purposeful were its movements, so detached did it seem from control,
that, just as when he was a youngster, Bob could not rid his mind of the
notion that it was possessed of volition, that it led a mysterious life
of its own down there in the shadows, that it was in the nature of an
intelligent and agile beast trained to apply its powers independently.
Bob remembered it as the "nigger," and looked about for the man standing
by a lever.
A momentary delay seemed to have occurred, owing to some obscure
difficulty. The man at the lever straightened his back. Suddenly all
that part of the floor seemed to start forward with extraordinary
swiftness. The log rushed down on the circular saw. Instantly the wild,
exultant shriek arose. The car went on, burying the saw, all but the
very top, from which a stream of sawdust flew up and back. A long, clean
slab fell to a succession of revolving rollers which carried it, passing
it from one to the other, far into the body of the mill. The car shot
back to its original position in front of the saw. The saw hummed an
undersong of strong vibration. Again it ploughed its way the length of
the timber. This time a plank with bark edges dropped on the rollers.
And when the car had flown back to its starting point the "nigger" rose
from obscurity to turn the log half way around.
They picked their way gingerly on. Bob looked back. Against the light
the two graceful, erect figures, immobile, but carried back and forth
over thirty feet with lightning rapidity; the brute masses of the logs;
the swift decisive forays of the "nigger," the unobtrusive figures of
the other men handling the logs far in the background; and the bright,
smooth, glittering, dangerous saws, clear-cut in outline by their very
speed, humming in anticipation, or shrieking like demons as they
bit--these seemed to him to swell in the dim light to the proportions of
something gigantic, primeval--to become forces beyond the experience of
to-day, typical of the tremendous power that must be invoked to subdue
the equally tremendous power of the wilderness.
He and Mason together examined the industriously working gang-saws, long
steel blades with the up-and-down motion of cutting cord-wood. They
passed the small trimming saws, where men push the boards between little
round saws to trim their edges. Bob noticed how the sawdust was carried
away automatically, and where the waste slabs went. They turned through
a small
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