"It was only Tommy Eye, Miss Nina," explained MacLeod, his voice trembling, his abashed admiration shining in his face. "He's just out of jail, you know." He looked at Wade and then at the old man of the grizzled whiskers, and raised his voice as though to gain a self-possession he did not feel. "Tommy always gets into jail after the drive is down. He's spent seventeen summers in jail, and is proud of it." "But there ain't no better teamster ever pushed on the webbin's," said the old man, admiration for all the folks of the woods still unflagging. The girl did not display the same enthusiasm, either for Tommy Eye's mishaps or for the bashful giant who stood shifting from foot to foot beside her seat. "Crews going into the woods ought to be nailed up in box-cars, that's what father says. And when they go through Castonia settlement I wish they were in crates, the same as they ship bears." "How is your father since spring?" asked the young boss, stammeringly, trying to appear unconscious of her scorn. "Oh, he's all right," she returned, carelessly, patting her hand on her lips to repress a yawn. "And is every one in Castonia all right?" "You can ask them when you get there," she replied, a bit ungraciously. "I tell you, I was pretty surprised to see you get aboard the train down here at Bomazeen. I--" She canted her head suddenly, and looked sidewise at him with an expression half satiric, half indignant. "Do you think that all the folks who ever go anywhere in this world are river drivers and"--she shot a quick and disparaging glance at the still glowering Wade--"drummers?" MacLeod noticed the look and its scorn with delight, and grasped at this opportunity to get outside the platitudes of conversation. But in his eagerness to be news-monger he did not soften his "out-door voice," deepened by many years of bellowing above the roar of white water. "Oh, that ain't a drummer! That's Britt's new chaney man--the time-keeper and the wangan store clerk." MacLeod knew that a girl born and bred in Castonia settlement, on the edge of the great forest, needed no explanation of "chaney man," the only man in a logging crew who could sleep till daylight, and didn't come out in the spring with callous marks on his hands as big as dimes. But he seemed to be hungry for an excuse to stay beside her, where he could gaze down on the brown hair looped over her forehead and her radiantly fair face, and could catch a glimpse of the white teeth. "Britt was tellin' me on the side that he's been teachin' school or something like that, and--say, you've heard of old Barrett, who controls all the stumpage on the Chamberlain waters--that rich old feller? Well, Britt, being hitched up with Barrett more or less, and knowin' all about it--" Wade was now upright in his seat, but the absorbed foreman, catching at last a gleam of interest in the gray eyes upraised to his, did not notice.