"Shouldn't wonder from your looks that you'd made time," suggested the cook, cheerfully, as the warden stumbled up to the door. "From here to the Attean telephone-line and back before eleven is what I call humpin'. You've been to Attean, hey?" "Yes," snapped the old man. "I've reported that fire and done my duty." "In that case, you've prob'ly got a better appetite than you had this mornin'," remarked "Beans," hospitably. He started to ladle from the steaming kettle of "smother" on the stove. "Nothing to eat for me!" broke in Lane, sullenly. "Are Withee and John Barrett back yet?" "Oh, they'll stay out till dark all right. Barrett will want to count trees as long as he can see." "I'll wait, then!" Lane started towards the men's camp, but the cook stopped him. "If you're reck'nin' to lie down for a nap, warden, don't get into them bunks. Them Quedaws have brought in the usual assortment of 'travellers' this season, and I don't want to see a neat man like you accumulate a menagerie. Now you just go right across there into Withee's private camp. He'd say so if he was here. I'll do that much honors when he ain't here. You won't wake up scratchin'." Without a word Lane turned and strode across to the office camp, went in, and slammed the door shut after him. "He's about as sour and crabbed an old cuss to do a favor for as I ever see," remarked the cook, fiddling a smutty finger under his nose. "But a man never ought to git discouraged in this world about bein' polite." He caught sight of the advance-guard of returning choppers up the road, and whirled on the cookee. "You freckle-faced, hump-backed, dead-and-alive son of a clam fritter, here come them empty nail-kags! Get to goin', now, or I'll pour a dish of hot water down your back." "Is that what you call bein' polite?" growled the cookee. The cook kicked at him as he fled into the meal camp with a pan of biscuits. "They don't use politeness on cookees any more than they put bay-winders onto pig-pens!" he shouted. There were two bunks in the little office camp, one above the other. "Ladder" Lane curled his long legs and tucked himself into the gloom of the lower bunk. His eyes, red-rimmed and glowing with strange fire under their knots of gray brow, noted a rifle lying on wooden braces against a log of the camp wall. He rose, clutched it eagerly, and "broke it down." Its magazine was full. He jacked in a cartridge, laid the rifle on the bunk between himself and the wall, and lay down again. Most men, after the vigil of a night and bitter struggle of the day, would have slept. Lane lay with eyes wide-propped. His mind seemed to be wrestling with a mighty problem. Once in awhile he groaned. At other times his teeth ground together. Twice he put the rifle back on the wall, shuddering as though it were some fearsome object. Twice he got up and retook it, and the last time muttered as though his resolution were clinched.