Watchful eyes had already seen her from the cottages near the beach; and as man after man hurried over to the yards to get an early place in the lines, the news spread through Wauchung. These men did not know what it meant--Bigelow was a myth to them, known, if at all, merely as an employer of labour twenty miles up the lake--but there was the steamer, bringing in a cargo of lumber that must be discharged and piled, and this meant work. Soon she was entering the channel; and they could see her Captain standing on the wheel-house roof with a hand resting on the bell-pull. And while Halloran went over to the wharf to direct the work, Crosman was kept busy giving out time-checks and cant-hooks and sending man after man across the yards. Then she was in the harbour, was slipping up to the wharf; the engine-room bell jingled, and the propeller churned the water; the lines were thrown out and caught by eager hands, and the _Higginson No. 2_ lay motionless at the wharf, her deck piled high with yellow hemlock and pine. The labourers swarmed over the rail and went at the work with the spirit of men who know what hunger means. The donkey-engines at each end of the deck rattled and clanked as the hoisting-spars were lowered over the cargo. And not a man on the ground, from Halloran down, but felt the impetus that the arrival of this first load of lumber had given to all Wauchung. Some of the men showed it by laughing easily, others by swearing easily, and now and then they would all break out into a song that would almost have shocked Jimmie McGinnis himself if he had been there to hear it--to the immortal air of “My father and mother were Irish, And I was Irish, too.”