was shut off suddenly, as is meet and proper in such ticklish
business. He turned and walked back, and Jenny, like a dog, without
the necessity of command, followed him in slow patience.

Now came Dyer, the scaler, rapidly down the logging road, a small
slender man with a little, turned-up mustache. The men disliked
him because of his affectation of a city smartness, and because he
never ate with them, even when there was plenty of room. Radway
had confidence in him because he lived in the same shanty with him.
This one fact a good deal explains Radway's character. The scaler's
duty at present was to measure the diameter of the logs in each
skidway, and so compute the number of board feet. At the office he
tended van, kept the books, and looked after supplies.

He approached the skidway swiftly, laid his flexible rule across the
face of each log, made a mark on his pine tablets in the column to
which the log belonged, thrust the tablet in the pocket of his coat,
seized a blue crayon, in a long holder, with which he made an 8 as
indication that the log had been scaled, and finally tapped several
times strongly with a sledge hammer. On the face of the hammer in
relief was an M inside of a delta. This was the Company's brand,
and so the log was branded as belonging to them. He swarmed all
over the skidway, rapid and absorbed, in strange contrast of
activity to the slower power of the actual skidding. In a moment
he moved on to the next scene of operations without having said a
word to any of the men.

"A fine t'ing!" said Mike, spitting.

So day after day the work went on. Radway spent his time tramping