"Dear friends, I wish to announce my engagement to Mr. Andrew Hall," she said with adorable whimsicality. "Wedding gifts of articles useful in housekeeping on a small scale will be appreciated." Then quite suddenly in the midst of her smiles a bright wetness welled up in her eyes. Her lips quivered. Mary put both arms around her. "I'm gladder than any Pollyanna that ever blithered gladness," Isabel blubbered from this shelter. "And I don't care who knows it. Say, Mary, did it affect you this way?" The two women disappeared within. Young Rod climbed on his father's knee and demanded to be told the story of Paul Bunyan and his famous camp in Michigan where the loggers were ninety feet high and twenty-four feet across the shoulders, and the cook coasted over the top of his kitchen range on roller skates of a morning to fry acres of hot cakes for the breakfast of these lusty men. Young Rod grew heavy-eyed listening to this gorgeous embroidery of fertile fancy on commonplace facts and presently went his way to bed. Rod sat alone on the porch in a twilight that filled his eyes with a vista of pearl sky and purple hills, his ears with the song of the rapids that had crooned him to sleep when he was little like his son. There was a grateful hush, as if the mountains said their evening prayers, and the smell of the forest mingled with the dank kelp smell as the falling tide bared a weedy shore. Andy's voice called to him in the dusk. "Come on over to the office. There's a delegation to talk to you." In the plain room where during working hours the bookkeeper cast up the camp accounts four men sat at a table. They greeted Rod pleasantly and came at once to the point. "We've talked this over," one said. "Hall's told us how things stand. We don't want a shutdown. We want to keep workin'. For pretty near two years now we've set wages and hours. Whatever we asked we got without any argument. Now that times are bad again, we're willin' to leave it to you. We figure that eight hours is a long enough day. You set the pay." "That's good enough," Rod answered. "But the cut may jar you. Things are at rock bottom. Nothing that we use, food, supplies, machinery parts, has come down a nickel. It seems a shame to cut wages, but unless timber prices go up, there's no choice." "Uh-huh," one grunted. "How much of a cut do you figure will let you get by?" "Twenty per cent," Rod told them bluntly. "Well, that _is_ pretty stiff," the chief spokesman commented. "Still--we won't go back on our word. Times _are_ bad." "I want to keep the outfit running," Rod said. "I can't do it on a losing scale. I'll post up a new wage schedule to-morrow. If a turn for the better comes, wages will go up again. I can't go any farther than that." "That's fair enough. Guess that's all. Good night." They nodded and filed out. Andy and Rod stood looking at each other.