Christmas was almost come—the second Christmas since Scott had left his quiet New England home—and the boy longed to go back there to see the old folks. He had at one time made up his mind to go, but on more mature reflection decided that it could not be. He knew that he would better go to the woods and put in all the time he could in the lumber camps.
Scott realized that most of the men had more woods experience than he. Moreover, the men in his class would spend the month of January in the lumber camps while he, on account of irregularities in his course, could not leave the college at that time. If he was to see anything of the lumbering operations in that section he must do it in the Christmas vacation.
Thus it happened that the Saturday before Christmas found Scott traveling northward towards the logging camps with no other companion than Greenleaf who had decided to accompany him.
It was really a long trip. It did not seem long, however, till they alighted on a short platform where the train left them, the only living creatures in sight.
“Prosperous looking place,” Greenleaf commented, as he looked out over a broad expanse of brush-dotted snow to where a line of timber loomed against the sky.
“Pleasant place to be put off at night,” Scott said. “I wonder where that mail carrier is the old man told us about?”
As though the question had called him to view, a tall gaunt pacer whisked out of a tamarack swamp on the other side of the track, jerking a light cutter over the bumpy trail at a tremendous pace. He seemed to be going wherever he liked and it required quite a stretch of the imagination to conceive that the man in the sleigh was driving him.
“You from camp No. 11?” Greenleaf asked, when the gaunt horse had consented to stop for a minute.
“Yes,” the man growled between his teeth, as he tried to hold the horse.
“Mr. Grafton told us to go out with you,” Greenleaf said, throwing in the mail sack and climbing in after it. Scott jumped in the back and the horse started with a plunge.