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Muggles looked around the circle and sent interrogatory Marconigrams with his eyebrows. In response Podvine said he’d go, and so did Billy Salters. Bender thought he could come a day or two later–the earning of their daily bread was not an absorbing task with these young gentlemen–their fathers had done that years before.

Muggles ran over in his mind the list of his engagements: he was due at Gravesend on the tenth for a week, to play golf; at his aunt’s country-seat in Westchester on the eleventh for the same length of time, and on the twelfth he was expected to meet a yacht at Cold Spring Harbor for a cruise up the coast. He had accepted these invitations and had fully intended to keep each and every one. Monteith’s letter, however, seemed to come at a time when he really needed a more virile and bracing life than was offered by the others. Here was a chance to redeem his reputation. Lumber camps meant big men doing big things–things reeking with danger, such as falling trees, forest fires and log jams. There might also be hair-breadth escapes in the hunting of big game and the tramping of the vast wilderness. This dressing three times a day and spending the intermediate hours hitting wooden balls, or lounging in a straw chair under a deck awning, had become tiresome. What he needed was to get down to Nature and hug the sod, and if there wasn’t any sod then he would grapple with whatever took its place.

Muggles dropped his legs to the floor, straightened his back, beckoned to a servant, motioned for a telegraph blank–exertion is tabooed at the Magnolia–untelescoped a gold pencil hooked to his watch-chain and wrote as follows:

“Thanks. Coming Tuesday.”

II

Wabacog covers a shaved place in a primeval forest which slopes to a lake of the same name. Covering this bare spot are huge piles of sawed lumber–Monteith’s axe-razors did the shaving–surrounding an enormous mill surmounted by a smokestack of wrought iron topped with a bird-cage spark arrester, the whole flanked by a runway emerging from the lake, up which climb in mournful procession the stately bodies of fallen monarchs awaiting the cutting irony of the saw. Farther along, on another clearing, stands a square building labelled “Office,” and still farther on, guarded by sentinel trees and encircled by wide piazzas, sprawls a low-roofed bungalow, its main entrance level with a boardwalk ending in the lake. This was Monteith’s home. Here during the winter’s logging he housed himself in complete seclusion, and here in summer he kept open house for whoever would answer in person his welcoming letters.

Anything so rude and primeval, or so comforting and inviting, was beyond the experience of Muggles and his friends. This became apparent before they had shed their coats and unpacked their bags. There was a darky who answered to the name of Jackson who could not only crisp trout to a turn, but who could compound cocktails, rub down muscular backs shivering from morning plunges in the lake, make beds, clean guns, wait on the table, and in an emergency row a canoe. There were easy chairs and low-pitched divans overspread with Turkey rugs and heaped with piles of silk cushions; there were wooden lockers, all open, and each one filled with drinkables and smokables–drinkables with white labels, and smokables six inches long with cuffs halfway down their length; there was an ice-chest sampling a larger house in the rear; there was a big, wide, all-embracing fireplace that burst its sides laughing over the good time it was having (the air was cool at night), and outside, redolent with perfume and glistening in the sunshine, there was a bed of mint protected by a curbing of plank which rivalled in its sweet freshness those covering the last resting-places of the most hospitable of Virginians.

And there was Monteith!

Some men are born rich; some inherit a pair of scissors fitted to strong thumbs and forefingers, some have to lie awake nights wondering what they will do next to help their surplus run to waste, and some pass sleepless hours devising plans by which they can catch in their empty pockets the clippings and drippings of all three. Muggles’s host was none of these. What he possessed he had worked for–early, late and all the time. His father had stood by and seen the old homestead in his native Southern State topple into ashes, Only the gaunt chimney left; the son had worked his way through college, and then with diploma in one hand and his courage in the other–all he owned–had shaken the dust of civilization from his shoes and had struck out for the Northern wilds: Wabacog was the result.