His errand took him far up into the workings. The daily routine of a logging boss is an active one. The man Rod sought moved always ahead of him, giving his overseeing eye to various spots where separate gangs of men busied themselves with powerful and noisy machinery, devoted to localized and violent struggle with logs of enormous tonnage. A stranger to logging as it proceeds in the forests of the Pacific Coast invariably gets a first impression of desperate effort and grave danger in his approach to a donkey engine at work. The black, round-bellied monster shudders and strains on anchored skids. The inch and a quarter main line reels up on the drums with a grind of gears, a behemothic sputtering of exhaust steam. Continuous vibrations disturb the air and communicate themselves to the earth over a wide radius. The cable runs away into the shadowy places of the forest. It recedes therein, chattering, whining; it comes forth dragging the huge sticks to the base of the sky-line pole; and the logs go thence, dangling, sliding, gouging holes in the hillside: It is all noise, effort, confusion, humming of lines, hiss of steam, bull-blocks screaming; a deafening uproar until a stop signal brings a hush that by contrast is solemn, as if that powerful machinery were a heart that had suddenly stopped beating.
Rod found his man at last and returned. They were living in the old Thorn house, taking their meals in a small room off the main messhouse, where the crew bolted its collective food in occupied silence, putting all its energy into the business of eating, and reserving a free and unrestrained mode of conversation for the ease of the bunkhouse. A steamer had touched and gone while he was absent, passing north through the rapids on the afternoon slack. He found Isabel Wall on the calk-splintered steps, teaching young Roderick a whimsy she had picked up somewhere:
"Poor Robinson Crusoe!
What made the poor man do so?
He was a Robinson I know
But that's no reason he should crow.
I wonder why he Crusoe?"
She was making the boy letter-perfect in this. Andy Hall sat on the step below her, smoking a cigarette in contemplative silence.
"They'll be through at Valdez to-morrow," he informed Rod.
"So soon? I thought they had a week to go."
"They made time," Andy commented tersely.
"Well, better load the working gear on floats and get it up here," Rod told him. "Have 'em begin on the cedar hollow."
"I put the fallers in there this afternoon."
Rod smiled. It was almost unnecessary to tell Andy Hall what should be done. Sometimes it seemed as if Andy had a mysterious prescience. Then Rod would recollect that they had discussed such a move long before. Or it was the logical move which Andy merely anticipated. In either case Andy always knew what he was doing, and why; nor did he ever hesitate to take the initiative.