"The clank of the press and the scream of the saws, The grunt of the grinder that slavers and chaws At the fibre o' pulp-wood, the purr of the plane, Sing only one song to the big woods o' Maine. So here's for a billion down race-way and sluice-- Hell for the hemlock, the pine, and the spruce." --Off for the Woods. John Barrett was first to break the embarrassed silence that fell upon the four men left at the camp. Rodburd Ide's brows were wrinkled, and his lips were parting to ask the questions that his curiosity urged. Britt was wrathfully gazing after the insolent Larry. Dwight Wade had taken up his pack and calipers, and was waiting for Ide with some impatience. "Mr. Wade," began the Umcolcus baron, nervously, "I hope you will understand my position in this matter, and see why it was necessary to make some change in the plan we discussed on Jerusalem." "I sha'n't try to understand it," snapped Wade. "You volunteered promises. I took those promises to the person most interested, and you've seen fit to drop out from under. That ends our business--all the business we had in common, Mr. Barrett." But the baron was anxious to placate. He began guarded explanations, to which Ide was listening intently, but Wade cut them short with a scorn there was no mistaking. "The only sort of interest I took in that unfortunate girl has been maliciously misinterpreted, Mr. Barrett. She was thrown on my hands in a way that you thoroughly understand. Mr. Ide, as a plantation officer, has relieved me of the responsibility. You can talk with him hereafter." "But what--what are you going to say to him?" faltered Barrett, forced to show his anxious fear, since Wade was moving away. In his physical weakness, in the illness that was sapping his nerve, he became wistfully paltering. "Nothing," replied the young man, curtly, but with a decisiveness there was no misunderstanding. "The matter has ceased to be any business of mine. My business hereafter--and I say this to my partner--is concerned wholly and entirely with certain lumbering operations on Enchanted township." He went away, following the crew. Rodburd Ide, eager to be gone, and seeing in the affair thus flatly dropped by Wade only a phase of the older animosity between Britt and the young man--a quarrel that might seek any avenue for expression, even a State pauper--demanded of Barrett: "Do you lay any special claim to the girl?" His tone was that of an official only. "Of course he doesn't," broke in Britt, seeing that his associate was groping for a reply. "We did think of trying to help her, but what's the use? There isn't any more gratitude in that sculch than there is in a pine knot. Send her back to the tribe." The little Castonia magnate looked relieved. "She's all right with my girl till I get home," he said. "Then the affair will take care of itself, like all those things do."