Wade, not wholly at ease in the presence, for he had come with a petition like the others, gazed about the reception-room of the Umcolcus Lumbering and Log-driving Association, the incorporators' more decorous title for King Spruce. It occurred to him that the wall-adornments were not reassuring. A brightly polished circular-saw hung between two windows. It was crossed by two axes, and a double-handled saw was the base for this suggestive coat of arms. The framed photographs displayed loaded log-sleds and piles of logs heaped at landings and similar portraiture of destruction in the woods. Everything seemed to accentuate the dominion of the edge of steel. The other wall-decorations were the heads of moose and deer, further suggestion of slaughter in the forest. A stuffed porcupine on the mantel above the great fireplace mutely suggested that the timber-owners would brook no rivalry in their campaign against the forest; they had asked the State to offer a bounty for the slaughter of this tree-girdler, and a card propped against the "quill-pig" instructed the reader that the State had already spent more than fifty thousand dollars in bounties. The deification of the cutting-edge appealed to Wade's abundant fancy. He had noticed, when he came past the windows of the lumber company's outfitting store on the first floor of the building, that the window displays consisted mostly of cutting tools. When the door of the inner office opened and one of those big and awkward giants came out, Wade discovered that King Spruce had evidently placed in the hands of the Honorable John Davis Barrett something sharp with which to slash human feelings, also. The man's face was flushed and his teeth were set down over his lower lip with manifest effort to dam back language. "Didn't he renew?" inquired one of the waiting group, solicitously. "He turned me down!" muttered the other, scarcely releasing the clutch on his lip. "I've wondered sometimes why 'Stumpage John' hasn't been over his own timber lands in all these years. If he has backed many out of that office feelin' like I do, I reckon there's a good reason why he doesn't trust himself up in the woods." He struck his soft hat across his palm. He did not raise his voice. But the venom in his tone was convincing. "By God, I'd relish bein' the man that mistook him for a bear!" "Give any good reason for not renewin'?" asked a man whose face showed his anxiety for himself. "Any one who has been over my operation on Lunksoos," declared the lumberman, answering the question in his own way--"any fair man knows I haven't devilled: I've left short stumps and I 'ain't topped off under eight inches, though you all know that their damnable scale-system puts a man to the bad when he's square on tops. But I 'ain't left tops to rot on the ground. I've been square!" Wade did not understand clearly, but the sincerity of the man's distress appealed to him.