"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.
They lingered awhile watching the crew work, chatted with them in spare moments. Then Carr led Thompson away through the woods again, and presently took him across another stretch of stumps where men were drilling and blasting out the roots of the ravished trees, on to fields where grain and grass and root crops were ripening in the September sun, and at last by another cluster of houses to the bank of the river again. Here Carr sat down on a log, and began to fill a pipe.