"Well, an' what do you think av her?" McLean demanded with an assumption of anxiety as the boy dropped to the ground.
Steve turned and patted the footboard with a proprietary hand. As grave of mien as his questioner he bobbed his head.
"She—she certainly kin git up and step," he volunteered. And then, cocking his head judiciously: "I'll hev to be a-gittin' me one of them fer myself, some day!"
McLean chuckled—he chuckled in deep delight within his white whiskers—and led the way to the mills. But once there the amusement in his eyes rapidly deepened to amazement, for there were few steps in the processes upon which the boy could not talk as fluently and technically as did the mill boss himself. And he knew timber; knew it with the same infallibility which had, even in McLean, always seemed to border upon the uncanny.
It was Allison himself who first called attention to an unsawed log which was being discarded.
"That looks like too good a stick to be wasted, doesn't it, McLean?" he asked.
Before McLean could answer the boy spat gravely into a pile of sawdust, his piping voice rising above the shrill scream of the saws.
"She's holler," he stated succintly. "Dry rotten above the stub!"
And when Allison raised his brows, interrogatively, McLean dropped one hand upon the boy's shoulder, a bit of pride in the gesture.
"Holler she is," he agreed, and he added: "An' I'll be afther knowin' where to find a riverman av the old school, I'm thinkin', some day whin the need arises!"