more than three times as many electric cars as all the rest of the world combined, the new system is still in its infancy, even here. There are twenty thousand miles of electric road to two hundred thousand miles of steam road. The trolley lines might be multiplied by ten with great advantage to the steam roads, which would find them incomparable feeders, bringing freight and passengers from regions in which the locomotive's whistle was never heard. But electricity will not be content

with that humble position. It is creating a system of its own, self-centered and independent, and that system contains such a vigorous principle of growth that it will not be surprising to see it swallow up its older rivals. Certainly the locomotive is doomed on local lines; its finish is plainly visible on mountain railroads, where water power is cheaper than coal; and the question whether it can hold its own anywhere is the most hotly debated problem now agitating the transportation world.

Ob

NCE Morrison and Daly, of Saginaw, but then lumbering at Beeson Lake, lent some money to a man named Crothers, taking in return a mortgage on what was known as the Crothers Tract of white pine. In due time, as Crothers did not liquidate, the firm became possessed of this tract. They hardly knew what to do with it.

The timber was situated some fifty miles from the railroad in a country that threw all sorts of difficulties across the logger's path, and had to be hauled from nine to fifteen miles to the river. Both Morrison and Daly groaned in spirit. Supplies would have to be toted in to last the entire winter, for when the snow came, communication over fifty miles of forest road would be as good as cut off. Whom could they trust among the lesser foremen of their woods force? Whom could they spare among the greater?

At this juncture they called to them Tim Shearer, their walking boss and the great est riverman in the state.

"You'll have to 'job' her," said Tim promptly.

"Who would be hired at any price to go up in that country on a ten-mile haul?" demanded Daly sceptically.

"Jest one man," replied Tim, “an' I know where to find him."

He returned with an individual at the sight of whom the partners glanced towards each other in doubt and dismay. But there seemed no help for it. A contract was drawn up in which the firm agreed to pay six dollars a thousand, merchantable scale, for all saw-logs banked at a rollway to be situated a given number of miles from the forks of Cass Branch; while on his side James Bourke, better known as the Rough Red, agreed to put in at least three and one-half million feet. After the latter had scrawled his signature he lurched from the office, softly rubbing his hairy freckled hand where the pen had touched it.

"That means a crew of wild Irishmen," said Morrison.

"And that means they'll just slaughter the pine," added Daly. "They'll saw high and crooked, they'll chuck the topswho are we going to send to scale for 'em?"

Morrison sighed. "I hate to do it; there's only Fitz can make it go."

So then they called to them another of their best men, named Fitz Patrick, and sent him away alone to protect the firm's interests in the depths of the wilderness.

The Rough Red was a big broadfaced man, with eyes far apart and a bushy red

performances would have meant slight accomplishment, but these wild Irishmen, with their bloodshot eyes, their ready jests, their equally ready fists, plunged into the business of banking logs with all the abandon of a carouse-and the work was done.

Law in that wilderness was not, saving that which the Rough Red chose to administer. Except in one instance, penalty more severe than a beating there was none, for the men could not equal their leader in breaking the greater and lesser laws of morality. The one instance was that of young Barney Mallan who, while drunk, mishandled a horse so severely as to lame it. Him the Rough Red called to formal account.

"Don't ye know that horses can't be had?" he demanded, singularly enough, without an oath. "Come here."

The man approached. With a single powerful blow of a starting bar the Rough Red broke his tibia.

"Try th' lameness yerself," said the Rough Red grimly. He glared about through the dimness at his silent men, then stalked through the door into the cook camp. Had he killed Barney Mallan outright, it would have been the same. No one in the towns would have been a word the wiser.

On Thanksgiving day the entire place went on a prolonged drunk. The Rough Red distinguished himself by rolling the round stove through the door into the snow. He was badly burned in accomplishing this delicate jest, but minded the smart no more than he did the admiring cheers of his maudlin but emulative mates. Fitz Patrick extinguished a dozen little fires that the coals had started, shifted the intoxicated Mallan's leg out of the danger of some one's falling on it, and departed from that roaring hell-hole to the fringe of the solemn forest. And this brings us to Fitz Patrick.

Fitz Patrick was a tall, slow man, with a face built square. The lines of his brows, his mouth, and his jaw ran straight across; those of his temples, cheeks, and nose straight up and down. His eye was very quiet and his speech rare. When he did talk, it was with deliberation. For days, sometimes, he would ejaculate nothing but monosyllables, looking steadily on the things about him.

a cook

He had walked in ahead of the toteteam late one evening in the autumn, after the Rough Red and his devils had been at work a fortnight. The camp consisted quite simply of three buildings, which might have been identified as camp, a sleeping camp, and a stable. Fitz Patrick entered the sleeping camp, stood his slender scaling rule in the corner, and peered about him through the dusk of a single lamp.

He saw a round stove in the center, a littered and dirty floor, bunks filled with horrible straw and worse blankets jumbled here and there, old and dirty clothes drying fetidly. 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 Fitz Patrick steadily.

The Rough Red lurched his huge form toward the intruder.

"I am your scaler," explained the latter. "Where is the office?"

"You kin have the bunk beyand," indicated the Rough Red surlily.

"You have no office, then?"

"What's good enough fer th' men is good enough fer a boss; and what's good enough fer th' boss is good fer any blank blanked scaler."

"It is not good enough for this one," replied Fitz Patrick calmly. "I have no notion of sleepin' and workin' in no such noise an' dirt. I need an office to keep me books and th' van. Not a log do I scale for ye, Jimmy Bourke, till yeze give me a fit place to tally in."

And so it came about, though the struggle lasted three days. The Rough Red stormed restlessly between the woods and the camp, delivering tremendous broadsides of oaths and threats. Fitz Patrick sat absolutely imperturbable on the deacon seat looking straight in front of him, his legs stretched comfortably aslant, one hand supporting the elbow of the other, which in turn held his short brier pipe.

"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. .

"Luke out for th' Rough Red; he'll do ye!" he would whisper hoarsely when he passed the silent scaler.

But in the three days the Rough Red put his men to work on a little cabin. Fitz Patrick at once took his scaling rule from the corner and set out into the forest.

His business was, by measuring the diameter of each log, to ascertain and tabulate the number of board feet put in by the contractor. On the basis of his single report James Bourke would be paid for the season's work. Inevitably he at once became James Bourke's natural enemy, and so of every man in the crew with the possible exception of the cook.

Suppose you log a knoll which your eye tells you must grow at least half a million; suppose you work conscientiously for twelve days; suppose your average has always been between forty and fifty thousand a day. And then suppose the scaler's sheets credit you with only a little over the four hundred thousand! What would you think of it? Would you not be inclined to suspect that the scaler had cheated you in favor of his master? that you had been compelled by false figures to work a day or so for nothing?

Fitz Patrick scaled honestly, for he was a just man, but exactitude and optimism of estimate never have approximated, and they did not in this case. The Rough Red grumbled, accused, swore, threatened. Fitz Patrick smoked "Peerless " and said nothing. Still it was not pleasant for him, alone there in the dark wilderness fifty miles from the nearest settlement, without a human being with whom to exchange a friendly word.

The two men early came to a clash over the methods of cutting. The Rough Red and his crew cut anywhere, everywhere, anyhow. The easiest way was theirs. Small timber they skipped, large timber they sawed high, tops they left rather than trim them into logs. Fitz Patrick would not have the pine "slaughtered."

"Ye'll bend your backs a little, Jimmy Bourke," said he, "and cut th' stumps lower to th' ground. There's a bunch of shingles at least in every stump ye've left. And you must saw straighter. And th' contract calls for eight inches and over, mind ye that. Don't go to skippin' th' little ones because they won't scale ye high. "Tis in the contract so. And I won't have

th' tops left. There's many a good log in them, an' ye trim them fair and clean." shouted the Rough

"Go to hell, you

Red. "Where the blazes did ye learn so much of loggin'? I log th' way me father logged, an' I'm not to be taught by a highbanker from th' Muskegon!"

Never would he acknowledge the wrong nor promise the improvement, but both were there, and both he and Fitz Patrick knew it. The Rough Red chafed frightfully, but in a way his hands were tied. He could do nothing without the report; and it was too far out to send for another scaler, even if Daly would have given him

Why ain't that log marked ?" "I culled it."

"Ain't it sound and good? Is there a mark on it? A streak of punk or rot? Ain't it good timber? What th' blank's th' matter with it? You tried to do me out of that, you blank skunk."

A log is culled, or thrown out, when for any reason it will not make good timber. 'I'll tell you, Jimmy Bourke," replied Fitz Patrick calmly. "Th' stick is sound and good, or was before your murderin' crew got hold of it, but if ye'll take a squint at the butt of it, ye'll see that your gang has sawed her on a six-inch slant. They've wasted a good foot of th' log. I spoke of that afore; an' now I give ye warnin' that I cull every log, big or little, punk or sound, that ain't sawed square and true across th' butt."

"Th' log is sound an' good, an ye'll scale it, or I'll know th' reason why!" "I will not," replied Fitz Patrick.

The following day he culled a log in another and distant skidway whose butt showed a slant of a good six inches. The