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And then the bull boats and the mackinaws and the packets. And all these flashed out; and still it stood unmoved. And I came and I too would flash out, and all men after me and all life. I viewed the colossal watcher with something like terror the aspect of death about its base and that cynical glimmer of sunlight at its top. I flung the throttle open, and we leaped forward through the river hush.
There were a few men lounging about, men of the type he was accustomed to seeing in Wrangel, miners, prospectors and the like, clad in mackinaws and heavy laced boots. Thompson, habitually diffident, asked no questions, struck up no conversations after the free and easy manner of the North.
The man recognized him, despite his beard and his threadbare mackinaws and they had a drink together. "I s'pose you heard about that Third Beach Line?" the new-comer inquired. Folsom nodded. "Well, they've opened it up for miles, and it's just a boulevard of solid gold. 'Cap' Carter's into it big, and so are the O'Brien boys and Old Man Hendricks. They're lousy with pay."
The travellers pushed open a frosted door, and looked into a long, low, smoke-veiled room, hung with many kerosene lamps, and heated by a great red-hot iron stove. "Hello!" said a middle-aged man in mackinaws, smoking near the door-end of the bar. "Hello! Is Blandford Keith here? There are some letters for him."
Every lad was in uniform and most of them wore mackinaws or sweaters to keep out the early morning chill. Also each carried the family ax, and over his shoulder blanket roll and haversack.
The frames of their buck-saws were cherry-red, the blades blued steel, and the fresh cut ends of the sticks poplar, maple, iron-wood, birch were marked with engraved rings of growth. The boys wore shoe-packs, blue flannel shirts with enormous pearl buttons, and mackinaws of crimson, lemon yellow, and foxy brown.
"Ask Hy to tell you about that. He knew Brady." The tall man looked thoughtfully at the crested shape. "That's it," he said. "That's where Brady was murdered." And then he told the story: "It was quite a while back in the 30's, and the free trappers and mountain men brought their pelts down in bull boats and mackinaws to St. Louis.
The Mackinaws were flecked far and wide over the lake, and a dirty smudge on the blue showed where the Far Harbor and Beaverton boat had gone over the horizon. But there, over the point and dangerously close to the land, hung another smudge, gradually pushing its way like a writhing, black serpent, lakewards.
"And yet," thought I, as we set out rapidly for the village in the valley, "the difference between the poetry of mackinaws and Great Northern locomotives is merely a matter of perspective.
That feller there." "Did she?" Frona whispered. "Yes," St. Vincent whispered back, "she did. But I cannot imagine what prompted her. She must have been out of her head." The warm-faced man in the faded mackinaws then put the witness through a searching examination, which Frona followed closely, but which elicited little new.
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