“Let’s look around the camp,” Greenleaf suggested. “We won’t have time to do anything else before dinner. They eat about half past eleven.”
“Why not let the foreman show us around?” Scott asked. “We’d see more.”
“He’ll do it better if he don’t have to,” Greenleaf answered. “That letter probably told him to do it. A foreman hates that kind of thing unless it is a big lumberman who wants to see things.”
They glanced into the bunkhouse. It was almost dark—for there were only two small windows—and the view was rather hazy. The walls all along both sides and one end were lined with a double row of bunks filled with musty straw and some filthy blankets. A large round-house stove stood in the center of the room and suspended on wires around it were three rows of rusty looking socks. The air was anything but pure.
“That’s what you miss by sleeping in the office,” Greenleaf said, as they backed out. “And you’re missing a lot more that you don’t see. I’ve tried it. It’s not so bad when you get used to it, but it’s no fun getting used to it.”
Scott shuddered as he thought of it. “These lumberjacks must be a tough lot,” he said.
“Wait till you see them. They are not the old time lumberjacks you read about. They’re the scum of Europe. You’ll hear a dozen languages in that cookshack if the cook does not knock them in the head with the rolling pin.”
They had made the round of the stables where they had a long talk with the barn boss on the cost and methods of feeding, and had held a short conference with the saw filer when Scott was startled by a peculiar sound. He found it was the cookee blowing a long tin horn to call the men to dinner. It sounded dismal enough then, but many a time after that when he had been in the woods all day it seemed like the sweetest kind of music.
In a few minutes the men began to stream into camp—Finns, Swedes, Poles, Norwegians, an occasional Austrian and a few of other nationalities. It was certainly a motley crew. Their mackinaws were the only thing about them that presented any appearance of uniformity. That and their shape, for the habit of keeping warm by putting on layer after layer of flannel shirts, gave them all a more or less stout and stubby appearance. Their rubbers, worn over two or three pairs of thick woolen socks, crunched sullenly in the dry snow. They filed silently into the bunkhouse and at another toot of the horn poured out again into the cookshack.
The boys hurried into the cookshack with the rest and were assigned seats next to the foreman. There was no time lost. The men piled their tin plates high and emptied them with astonishing rapidity. The dozen languages that Greenleaf had predicted were certainly there, but were not in evidence, for a sign “No Talking” backed up by a determined-looking cook acted as a damper on conversation. Hardly a word was spoken. In five minutes some of the most expert had emptied their tin plates twice and were filing out.