local industry demanding a large population of workmen, combined with
first-class railroad transportation, may plant an electric-lighted,
saloon-lined, brick-hoteled city in the middle of the wilderness.
Lumber, mines--especially of the baser metals or commercial
minerals--fisheries, a terminus of water freightage, may one or all
call into existence a community a hundred years in advance of its
environment. Then you lose the savour of the jump-off. Nothing can
quite take the place of the instant plunge into the wilderness, for you
must travel three or four days from such a place before you sense the
forest in its vastness, even though deer may eat the cabbages at the
edge of town. Occasionally, however, by force of crude contrast to the
brick-heated atmosphere, the breath of the woods reaches your cheek,
and always you own a very tender feeling for the cause of it.

Dick and myself were caught in such a place. It was an unfinished
little town, with brick-fronted stores, arc-lights swaying over
fathomless mud, big superintendent's and millowner's houses of bastard
architecture in a blatant superiority of hill location, a hotel whose
office chairs supported a variety of cheap drummers, and stores
screeching in an attempt at metropolitan smartness. We inspected the
standpipe and the docks, walked a careless mile of board walk, kicked a
dozen pugnacious dogs from our setter, Deuce, and found ourselves at
the end of our resources. As a crowd seemed to be gathering about the
wooden railway station, we joined it in sheer idleness.

It seemed that an election had taken place the day before, that one
Smith had been chosen to the Assembly, and that, though this district
had gone anti-Smith, the candidate was expected to stop off an hour on
his way to a more westerly point. Consequently the town was on hand to
receive him.