"Yes. He is going to be my superintendent of works."
"I like him," Mary said. "Apparently so does Isabel."
"Everybody who knows Andy Hall likes him," Rod informed her. "But that little feather-brain is only interested in him as a new specimen. She probably never encountered anybody quite like him."
"Feather-brain? You don't know Isabel," Mary declared.
"I know her better than you do."
"Oh, no," Mary smiled. "You may have known her longer. But not better. Isabel outgrew the fluffy-ruffles stage while you were away at the war."
CHAPTER XXV
Across the channel, in the green bank of timber bisected by the path that ran from Oliver Thorn's old house to the Granite Pool, rose white puffs of steam, intermittent, like sporadic geysers. Those were donkey engines at work. They tooted shrill response to the signal pull. The woods were full of prodigious shudderings and rumblings. The powerful machines snaked fallen trees, sawn to lengths, from where they were felled to the last splashing plunge into the tidal booming ground close by a group of new camp buildings not far from Oliver Thorn's abandoned house. A "sky line" lifted its long, aerial cable far up that hill. Down this logs came at the rate of two hundred a day. The shore was lined with floating logs, new cut, exhaling the odor of pitch, a pleasant pungent smell. The Granite Pool itself echoed the clack of axes and the thin twanging of saws, and mirrored the downward swoop of great trees. The falling crews were stripping the shores about the Pool, destroying its seclusion, shattering its restful silence, obliterating its cool shade. Farther east the Valdez camp, in which Rod had served his apprenticeship, bit deep into these heavy woods. Three hundred and fifty men, a dozen donkey engines, a logging railway in the making, miles of steel cable were chewing the heart out of the forest. Far beyond sight and sound of Hawk's Nest another crew slashed at the last of their timber on Hardwicke Island.
There was no picking of prime trees and care to conserve the younger growth, nor far-sighted culling of the forest crop. It was complete destruction. Within the boundaries of each limit the earth was stripped to its primal nakedness. Sky-line and high-lead gear ripped strings of logs over the surface, plowing deep furrows in the scant soil, tearing up saplings, shouldering aside rotten trunks and small boulders, bursting into dusty clouds the dead snags in the way. When the loggers shifted to a fresh stand they left desolation behind. Timber great and small was money. Every stick landed in tidewater went for something; number one export, number two, the broken cedar for shingles, the poorer grades of spruce and hemlock for pulpwood that the mills chewed up and spat forth in tons of news print.