About the head of the bay were clustered compactly the numerous portable buildings of the camp,--bunk houses, messhouses, storeroom, isolated small dwellings. A short slope bright with low salal brush dipped to the water. On that gentle pitch numbers of the men often clustered in the evening, sitting on their haunches, lying stretched on their backs, spinning Rabelaisian yarns, Homeric tales out of their woods experience, talking about their work, the war, economics,--all the infinite variety of futile gabble and profound wisdom that is embodied in a group of skilled men following a risky outdoor calling. The Pacific Coast logger is no mere beast of burden. He is master of an intricate technique as applied to the handling of enormous timbers by powerful and complicated machinery. The B.C. woods is no place for the sluggish of brain or hand. Wall himself was heavily interested in timber and had been for years. There were probably fifty men in Rod's crew who had drawn Wall pay checks in their time. And there was not a man there but knew the Wall camps and knew little good of them. They had an evil reputation. Probably Wall himself had never seen the interior of a single one of his camps. He had no personal interest in such matters,--only in results. He got results through superintendents, who in turn passed the buck to logging bosses. And these again, because their jobs depended on high average production, drove without mercy so long as they could hold the job. There was a sardonic saying along the coast that every Wall camp always had three crews: one coming, one going, and one on the job. The loggers frankly hated Wall and all his works. Whereas they liked Rod Norquay. Moreover, now in the third year of Rod's régime, very nearly every man there understood the situation. They were for him, to a man. Rod represented to them the very antithesis of everything John P. Wall stood for. And no mean portion of Rod's crew were intellectually capable and emotionally impelled to make out a very black case against the John P. Walls of industry. A little cluster gathered on this slope between camp and tidemark. The cluster grew till the limited area was black with men in calked boots and mackinaw clothing, men with unshaven stubble on their chins and strong calloused hands. They sat and stood there without the customary shouting and laughter. It seemed as if every man in the camp had been drawn to look silently down on the white yacht. The _Kowloon_ stretched her graceful length along the landing. Her paint was like virgin snow, and from stem to stern she glistened with brass and copper and varnished teak. On her forward deck two or three of her crew in spotless white ducks leaned on the rail, looking at the men ashore. Aft a gramophone exhaled the latest jazz. There were guests present, and now that the fog had gone with the sun, they were on deck, dipping and swaying and gyrating to the music.