The manager invited them to spend the evening at his home, but they had not spent a night in a town since they started and resolved not to do so. They thanked him heartily and took to their canoes.
There were very few obstructions in the river below Little Falls and by putting in long hours they made wonderful time. On the evening of the second day they sighted the lights of Minneapolis.
“The town looks good to us now, fellows,” Merton said, “but we have left the best summer of our lives behind us.”
“You bet we have,” was the answering chorus, and for a moment the little group looked silently and wistfully at each other before they scattered their several ways.
CHAPTER XX
Two weeks later the old Itasca crowd was assembled on the campus and beginning the routine of the classroom once again. It was easy to pick them out anywhere among the students. Their sunburned faces and the independent, self-reliant air drilled into them by the life of the camp, together with the strong bond of fellowship which made them flock together, work together and loaf together made them the natural leaders.
They had done things and knew what they could do; they had borne responsibility and were unfrightened by it; they had worked out the problem of governing themselves all summer and readily applied their experience to the governing of others. In addition to all that they were the senior class. It was only natural that they should control all the politics in the college and be the nucleus around which all the college activities formed. They neither dictated nor grabbed, but their influence was irresistible.
The new semester brought them new courses of study: forest management, lumbering, forest by-products, wood preservation and forest law. The work was practically all technical now. Among these studies Scott found in lumbering an all-absorbing interest. The other subjects he liked well enough, but of the lumbering he could not get too much.
Scott was sorely disappointed to find that Johnson had not returned to college. With his usual luck that young man had gained the confidence of a big lumberman with whom he had come in contact in the course of his duties as patrolman and had been given charge of the logging inspection in some of the northern camps. He was staying out a year for the experience. The greater Scott’s success became, the more keenly he felt his debt to Johnson. It seemed as though fate were spitefully keeping them apart. Several times he had thought of writing but somehow that seemed cowardly and he had decided to wait.
The weeks slipped by comparatively uneventfully. The seniors had struck their stride and felt that they were coming down the home stretch of a professional course; the outside events which had formerly meant so much to them were incidental now, and their real interest lay in the work.