The train stopped about noon at a small board town. Fox and Bob
descended. The latter drew his lungs full of the sparkling clear air and
felt inclined to shout. The thing that claimed his attention most
strongly was the dull green band of the forest, thick and impenetrable
to the south, fringing into ragged tamaracks on the east, opening into a
charming vista of a narrowing bay to the west. Northward the land ran
down to sandpits and beyond them tossed the vivid white and blue of the
Lake. Then when his interest had detached itself from the predominant
note of the imminent wilderness, predominant less from its physical
size--for it lay in remote perspective--than from a certain indefinable
and psychological right of priority, Bob's eye was at once drawn to the
huge red-painted sawmill, with its very tall smokestacks, its row of
water barrels along the ridge, its uncouth and separate conical sawdust
burner, and its long lines of elevated tramways leading out into the
lumber yard where was piled the white pine held over from the season
before. As Bob looked, a great, black horse appeared on one of these
aerial tramways, silhouetted against the sky. The beast moved
accurately, his head held low against his chest, his feet lifted and
planted with care. Behind him rumbled a whole train of little cars each
laden with planks. On the foremost sat a man, his shoulders bowed,
driving the horse. They proceeded slowly, leisurely, without haste,
against the brightness of the sky. The spider supports below them seemed
strangely inadequate to their mass, so that they appeared in an occult
manner to maintain their elevation by some buoyancy of their own, some
quality that sustained them not only in their distance above the earth
but in a curious, decorative, extra-human world of their own. After a
moment they disappeared behind the tall piles of lumber.
Against the sky, now, the place of the elephantine black horse and the
little tram cars and the man was taken by the masts of ships lying
beyond. They rose straight and tall, their cordage like spider webs, in
a succession of regular spaces until they were lost behind the mill.
From the exhaust of the mill's engine a jet of white steam shot up
sparkling. Close on its apparition sounded the exultant, high-keyed
shriek of the saw. It ceased abruptly. Then Bob became conscious of a
heavy _rud, thud_ of mill machinery.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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