in time to see men crushed and mangled in a hundred ingenious ways
by the saw log, knocked into space and a violent death by the butts
of trees, ground to powder in the mill of a jam, but never would he
be more deeply impressed than by this ruthless silent taking of a
life. The forces of nature are so tame, so simple, so obedient;
and in the next instant so absolutely beyond human control or
direction, so whirlingly contemptuous of puny human effort, that
in time the wilderness shrouds itself to our eyes in the same
impenetrable mystery as the sea.

That evening the camp was unusually quiet. Tellier let his
fiddle hang. After supper Thorpe was approached by Purdy, the
reptilian red-head with whom he had had the row some evenings
before.

"You in, chummy?" he asked in a quiet voice. "It's a five apiece
for Hank's woman."

"Yes," said Thorpe.

The men were earning from twenty to thirty dollars a month. They
had, most of them, never seen Hank Paul before this autumn. He
had not, mainly because of his modest disposition, enjoyed any
extraordinary degree of popularity. Yet these strangers cheerfully,
as a matter of course, gave up the proceeds of a week's hard work,
and that without expecting the slightest personal credit. The money
was sent "from the boys." Thorpe later read a heart-broken letter
of thanks to the unknown benefactors. It touched him deeply, and
he suspected the other men of the same emotions, but by that time
they had regained the independent, self-contained poise of the