commerce, the apparition and embodiment of restless industry--these
appeared and vanished, darted in and out, were plain to be seen and were
vague through the murk and gloom. Bob glanced up at the emblazoned sign.
He read the firm's name of well-known wholesale grocers. As he crossed
the bridge and proceeded out Lincoln Park Boulevard two figures rose to
him and stood side by side. One was the shipping clerk in his peaked cap
and silesia coat, hurried, busy, commanding, full of responsibility; the
other was Harvey, with his round, black skull cap, his great, gold-bowed
spectacles, entering minutely, painstakingly, deliberately, his neat
little figures in a neat, large book.




IV


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