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Updated: June 4, 2025
"Hello, Dix; Martha Sims and me are invited to spend the day over at Treadwell's. You know the new lumber-camp is there, and there's some dandy fellows working at it. They are going to give a dance, an' told us to send Ned Jones over with his fiddle. Oh, we are going to have a rattling time. We agreed to get up early. It seems funny, don't it? It's been many a day since I saw the sun rise."
I set out to see the lumber-camp, and although I stepped forth boldly, the truth was that with all my love for the Wild West I would have liked to be at home. But here I was, and I determined not to show the white feather. I passed a row of cook-shacks like the one I had been in, and several stores and saloons. The lumber-camp was a little town.
Yet from the beginning he enjoyed it to the full. Being what he was, the constant movement pleased him, the out-of-doors life, the occasional sorties from the railroad by horse to some remote mining camp, or to a stock ranch or lumber-camp. He had been away for six years, and it pleased him to note that he was treated by the people he met with a genuine respect and liking as the son of his father.
He stowed his camp-stuff and bedding in a dry-goods box, and leaving his tent with the farmer, he purchased a ticket to a place on the edge of the wilderness. He put up at a village-hotel, and the next day drove fifteen miles by a stage, and five more by a wagon, and spent the night at a lumber-camp far in the wilderness.
Even now the ghost of a smile played at his lips, as he recalled the surprise of the old habitants and of Father Roche when he was chosen for this responsible post; for to run a great lumber-camp well, hundreds of miles from civilisation, where there is no visible law, no restraints of ordinary organised life, and where men, for seven months together, never saw a woman or a child, and ate pork and beans, and drank white whisky, was a task of administration as difficult as managing a small republic new-created out of violent elements of society.
We went down to breakfast, and sat at a table with Jim and Hiram. It seemed to me that I could not answer any questions till I had asked a thousand. What news had they for me? Buell had escaped, after firing the slash. His sawmill and lumber-camp and fifty thousand acres of timber had been burned. The fire had in some way been confined to the foot-hills.
It was his lumber-camp rig corduroy trousers, big boots and overshoes, red flannel shirt, canvas pea-jacket and fur cap. He came marching up the walk like the hero in a moving-picture show and we thought he was alone till he reached the door. Then we saw Miss Spencer. She was seated in state behind him on one of those hand-sledges the farmers use for hauling cordwood.
The talk was lively enough, about two new cases that had arrived that afternoon, the deer-hunting season that had just closed, bear tracks discovered on Bolton Hill near the lumber-camp, and a new piano that a friend had sent for the convalescent or "dotty" ward, as they called it.
My friend, by the way, is the foreman of a lumber-camp. He has served in the British army, has hunted whales off the coast of Greenland, married a wife in Grand Rapids, and run a street-car in Chicago; and now he is snaking logs out of the Michigan woods.
So he wandered about for hours; and in the end had to decide by the toss of a penny whether he should get out to the main road, or wander off into twenty miles of trackless wilderness, without either food or matches. Fortunately the penny fell right; and he spent the night at a farmhouse, and the next day got back to the lumber-camp. And there was a letter from Ethelynda Lewis!
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