Bob sized it up.

“No fair looking at the other for comparison,” warned the older man.

“Forty,” hesitated Bob, “and I don’t believe it’s that!” he added.  “Four feet,” he amended when he had measured.

“Climb in,” said Welton; “now you’re in a proper frame of mind to listen to me with respect.  The usual run of tree you see down through here is from five to eight feet in diameter.  They are about all over two hundred feet tall, and some run close to three hundred.”

Bob sighed.  “All right.  Drive on.  I’ll get used to it in time.”  His face lighted up with a grin.  “Say, wouldn’t you like to see Roaring Dick trying to handle one of those logs with a peavie?  As for driving a stream full of them!  Oh, Lord!  You’d have to send ’em down one at a time, fitted out with staterooms for the crew, a rudder and a gasoline engine!”

The ponies jogged cheerfully along the winding road.  Water ran everywhere, or stood in pools.  Under the young spruces were the last snowbanks.  Pushing up through the wet soil, already showed early snowplants, those strange, waxlike towers of crimson.  After a time they came to a sidehill where the woods thinned.  There still stood many trees, but as the buckboard approached, Bob could see that they were cedars, or spruce, or smaller specimens of the pines.  Prone upon the ground, like naked giants, gleamed white and monstrous the peeled bodies of great trees.  A litter of “slash,” beaten down by the winter, cumbered the ground, and retained beneath its faded boughs soggy and melting drifts.

“Had some ‘fallers’ in here last year,” explained Welton briefly.  “Thought we’d have some logs on hand when it came time to start up.”

“Wait a minute,” requested Bob.  He sprang lightly from the vehicle, and scrambled over to stand alongside the nearest of the fallen monsters.  He could just see over it comfortably.  “My good heavens!” said he soberly, resuming his seat.  “How in blazes do you handle them?”

Welton drove on a few paces, then pointed with his whip.  A narrow trough made of small peeled logs laid parallel and pegged and mortised together at the ends, ran straight over the next hill.

“That’s a chute,” he explained briefly.  “We hitch a wire cable to the log and just naturally yank it over to the chute.”

“How yank it?” demanded Bob.

“By a good, husky donkey engine.  Then the chute poles are slushed, we hitch cables on four or five logs, and just tow them over the hill to the mill.”

Bob’s enthusiasm, as always, was growing with the presentation of this new and mighty problem of engineering so succinctly presented.  It sounded simple; but from his two years’ experience he knew better.  He was becoming accustomed to filling in the outlines of pure theory.  At a glance he realized the importance of such things as adequate anchors for the donkey engines; of figuring on straight pulls, horse power and the breaking strain of steel cables; of arranging curves in such manner as to obviate ditching the logs, of selecting grades and routes in such wise as to avoid the lift of the stretched cable; and more dimly he guessed at other accidents, problems and necessities which only the emergency could fully disclose.  All he said was: