Burned Bridges

An hour or so later Sam Carr came trudging home with a rod in his hand

and a creel slung 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 aëroplane 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 the

donkey had skidded out the logs. And there was the engine puffing and

straining, and the steel cables running away among the trees, spooling

up on the drums, whining and whistling in the iron sheaves. It was like

war, Thompson thought, that purposeful activity, the tremendous forces

harnessed and obedient to man--only these were forces yoked to man's

needs, not to his destruction.