"Well, that is pretty stiff," the chief spokesman commented. "Still—we won't go back on our word. Times are bad."
"I want to keep the outfit running," Rod said. "I can't do it on a losing scale. I'll post up a new wage schedule to-morrow. If a turn for the better comes, wages will go up again. I can't go any farther than that."
"That's fair enough. Guess that's all. Good night."
They nodded and filed out. Andy and Rod stood looking at each other.
"I figured that was about the line they'd take," Andy said. "I simply gave them the facts. Told them it was up to them whether the camp shut down to-morrow—the best camp in the country. And that if it did shut down for any length of time, it might never open again under the same management. Then they barred me out of the meeting, and chewed it over themselves. And there you are."
"Isabel came home manifesting unmistakable symptoms," Rod said slowly. "This seems to have been your big day all around, Andy."
They shook hands on that.
CHAPTER XXIX
Through that disastrous autumn of 1920—when the logging camps of B.C. were given over to watchmen and the sawmills were silent storehouses of idle machinery, and the owners of both sat in clubs and homes, cursing labor, the government, that vague entity called the consumer who had mysteriously ceased to consume, raving about confiscatory taxation, bewildered and resentful in the face of a retrograde swing of the commercial pendulum—the Norquay machine functioned without a single creaking joint, on into the winter season through sodden weeks of mist and rain until a deep snow in January buried the gear and froze the water pipes that fed the donkey engines. Then even the hardiest logger was glad to stay indoors.