Another three miles brought him to camp. It looked strangely wet and sodden and deserted. In fact, Thorpe found a bare half dozen people in it,--Radway, the cook, and four men who were helping to pack up the movables, and who later would drive out the wagons containing them. The jobber showed strong traces of the strain he had undergone, but greeted Thorpe almost jovially. He seemed able to show more of his real nature now that the necessity of authority had been definitely removed. “Hullo, young man,” he shouted at Thorpe's mud-splashed figure, “come back to view, the remains? All well again, heigh? That's good!” He strode down to grip the young fellow heartily by the hand. It was impossible not to be charmed by the sincere cordiality of his manner. “I didn't know you were through,” explained Thorpe, “I came to see if I could get a job.” “Well now I AM sorry!” cried Radway, “you can turn in and help though, if you want to.” Thorpe greeted the cook and old Jackson Hines, the only two whom he knew, and set to work to tie up bundles of blankets, and to collect axes, peavies, and tools of all descriptions. This was evidently the last wagon-trip, for little remained to be done. “I ought by rights to take the lumber of the roofs and floors,” observed Radway thoughtfully, “but I guess she don't matter.” Thorpe had never seen him in better spirits. He ascribed the older man's hilarity to relief over the completion of a difficult task. That evening the seven dined together at one end of the long table. The big room exhaled already the atmosphere of desertion. “Not much like old times, is she?” laughed Radway. “Can't you just shut your eyes and hear Baptiste say, 'Mak' heem de soup one tam more for me'? She's pretty empty now.” Jackson Hines looked whimsically down the bare board. “More room than God made for geese in Ireland,” was his comment. After supper they even sat outside for a little time to smoke their pipes, chair-tilted against the logs of the cabins, but soon the chill of melting snow drove them indoors. The four teamsters played seven-up in the cook camp by the light of a barn lantern, while Thorpe and the cook wrote letters. Thorpe's was to his sister. “I have been in the hospital for about a month,” he wrote. “Nothing serious--a crack on the head, which is all right now. But I cannot get home this summer, nor, I am afraid, can we arrange about the school this year. I am about seventy dollars ahead of where I was last fall, so you see it is slow business. This summer I am going into a mill, but the wages for green labor are not very high there either,” and so on. When Miss Helen Thorpe, aged seventeen, received this document she stamped her foot almost angrily. “You'd think he was a day-laborer!” she cried. “Why doesn't he try for a clerkship or something in the city where he'd have a chance to use his brains!” The thought of her big, strong, tanned brother chained to a desk rose to her, and she smiled a little sadly.