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Rain or shine, the work drove on. From the peep of day till dusk shrouded the woods, Benton's donkey puffed and groaned, axes thudded, the thin, twanging whine of the saws rose. Log after log slid down the chute to float behind the boomsticks; and at night the loggers trooped home, soaked to the skin, to hang their steaming mackinaws around the bunkhouse stove.
By mid-afternoon Stella noticed an acceleration of numbers in the logs that came hurtling lakeward. Now at shorter intervals arose the grinding sound of their arrival, the ponderous splash as each leaped to the water. It was a good thing, she surmised for Charlie Benton. She could not see where it made much difference to her whether ten logs a day or a hundred came down to the boomsticks.
In the waters beside and lining the beach floated innumerable logs, confined by boomsticks, hundreds of trunks of fir, forty and sixty feet long, four and six feet across the butt, timber enough, when it had passed through the sawmills, to build four such towns as Hopyard. Just back from the shore, amid stumps and littered branches, rose the roofs of divers buildings. One was long and low.
By such imperceptible degrees that she was scarce aware of it, Stella took her place as a cog in her brother's logging machine, a unit in the human mechanism which he operated skilfully and relentlessly at top speed to achieve his desired end one million feet of timber in boomsticks by September the first.
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