"I figured that was about the line they'd take," Andy said. "I simply gave them the facts. Told them it was up to them whether the camp shut down to-morrow--the best camp in the country. And that if it did shut down for any length of time, it might never open again under the same management. Then they barred me out of the meeting, and chewed it over themselves. And there you are." "Isabel came home manifesting unmistakable symptoms," Rod said slowly. "This seems to have been your big day all around, Andy." They shook hands on that. CHAPTER XXIX Through that disastrous autumn of 1920--when the logging camps of B.C. were given over to watchmen and the sawmills were silent storehouses of idle machinery, and the owners of both sat in clubs and homes, cursing labor, the government, that vague entity called the consumer who had mysteriously ceased to consume, raving about confiscatory taxation, bewildered and resentful in the face of a retrograde swing of the commercial pendulum--the Norquay machine functioned without a single creaking joint, on into the winter season through sodden weeks of mist and rain until a deep snow in January buried the gear and froze the water pipes that fed the donkey engines. Then even the hardiest logger was glad to stay indoors. A certain percentage of the younger men, with good money burning their pockets, went to town, victims of the inevitable reaction from the grind of work. But most of the crew followed a wiser counsel and stayed in the camp, played poker in the bunk houses, read books and magazines, organized stag dances. Some of the married men built float houses on rafts which could be moved when the camp changed, and brought their families there to live away from rent and fuel costs in town. Their joint efforts persuaded the provincial government to establish a temporary school. So by degrees the camp began to take on the aspect of a community. The shutdown was comparatively brief,--five weeks. Then rains wiped out the drifts, banished the frost. In the dripping forest where fog wraiths hung like smoke among the tree tops, axes clacked, saws whined, cables hummed, and the logs came down to the sea. Where the logging industry in great part had stopped dead before the barrier of unprofitable operation, Rod did not even slow down. It was not a question of a profit. It was simply a matter of turning trees into cash to replenish the plundered coffers of the Norquay Trust. Every boom that sold in the market lessened somewhat his obligations, once his men agreed cheerfully that a lowered wage was better than idleness. The reddest radical among them believed in him sufficiently to go ahead on the assurance that wages would automatically keep step with prices for the product of their labor.