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The boss and the scaler came out and met them, and after introductions they went into the shanty to dinner. The cook was a deft young Norwegian a clean, quick, gentlemanly young fellow with a fine brown mustache. He cleared a place for them at one end of the long table, and they sat down. It was a large camp, but much like the others. Basins of brown sugar stood about. "Good gracious!
"They've kicked over th' stove again," said FitzPatrick, seating himself on a stump. His eyes blazed with wrath and bitterness. "What yo' goin' to do?" asked the cook. "Sit here," replied FitzPatrick, grimly. The cook started forward. "Stop!" shouted the scaler, fiercely; "if you move a step, I'll break your back!" The cook stared at him through saucer eyes.
"I ought to have been surer about the ice." "Eight inches is a little light, with so much snow atop," remarked the scaler carelessly. By virtue of that same careless remark, however, Radway was so confirmed in his belief as to his own culpability that he quite overlooked Fabian's just contention that the mere thinness of the ice was in reality no excuse for the losing of the horses.
The last of these, evidently the foreman, was joined by the two scalers. "What's that outfit?" he inquired with the sharpness of suspicion. "Old Injin Charley you remember, the old boy that tanned that buck for you down on Cedar Creek." "Yes, but the other fellow." "Oh, a hunter," replied the scaler carelessly. "Sure?" The man laughed. "Couldn't be nothin' else," he asserted with confidence.
The cookee continued his occupations. "I suppose the men got out to the marsh on time," suggested Dyer, still easily. The cook laid aside his paper and looked the scaler in the eye. "You're the foreman; I'm the cook," said he. "You ought to know." The cookee had paused, the paste brush in his hand. Dyer was no weakling. The problem presenting, he rose to the emergency.
The first man meant that the white pine tree he was measuring was forty-three inches in diameter breast-high and would make five standard logs, each sixteen feet long. The second scaler had measured a hemlock twenty-eight inches in diameter and long enough for four logs. They were measuring the timber on a few acres, so as to form an estimate of the amount for sale.
The scaler, whose name was Dyer, slouched back in the shadow, watching his great honest superior as a crafty, dainty cat might watch the blunderings of a St. Bernard. When he spoke, it was with a mockery so subtle as quite to escape the perceptions of the lumberman.
The sight of Radway's old scaler somehow filled him with a quiet but dangerous anger, especially since that official, on whom rested a portion at least of the responsibility of the jobber's failure, was now found in the employ of the very company which had attempted that failure. It looked suspicious. "Catch this line!" sung out the mate, hurling the coil of a handline on the wharf.
He saw an unkempt row of hard-faced men along the deacon-seat, reckless in bearing, with the light of the dare-devil in their eyes. "Where is the boss?" asked FitzPatrick, steadily. The Rough Red lurched his huge form toward the intruder. "I am your scaler," explained the latter. "Where is the office?" "You can have the bunk beyand," indicated the Rough Red, surlily. "You have no office then?"
"Good-mornin' to ye, Jimmy Bourke," said he each morning, and after that uttered no word until the evening, when it was, "Good-night to ye, Jimmy Bourke," with a final rap, rap, rap of his pipe. The cook, a thin-faced, sly man, with a penchant for the Police Gazette, secretly admired him. "Luk' out for th' Rough Red; he'll do ye!" he would whisper hoarsely when he passed the silent scaler.
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