“By Jove, what a fine bunch of timber!” was his first thought on entering a particularly imposing grove.

Where another man would catch merely a general effect, his more practised eye would estimate heights, diameters, the growth of the limbs, the probable straightness of the grain.  His eye almost unconsciously sought the possibilities of location—­whether a road could be brought in easily, whether the grades could run right.  A fine tree gave him the complicated pleasure that comes to any expert on analytical contemplation of any object.  It meant timber, good or bad, as well as beauty.

Just so opposition meant antagonism.  Bob was naturally of a partisan temperament.  He played the game fairly, but he played it hard.  Games imply rules, and any infraction of the rules is unfair and to be punished.  Bob could not be expected to reflect that while rules are generally imposed by a third party on both contestants alike, in this game the rules with which he was acquainted had been made by his side; that perhaps the other fellow might have another set of rules.  All he saw was that the antagonists were perpetrating a series of contemptible, petty, mean tricks or a succession of dastardly outrages.  His loyalty and anger were both thoroughly aroused, and he plunged into his little fights with entire whole-heartedness.  As his side of the question meant getting out the logs, the combination went far toward efficiency.  When the drive was down in the spring, Bob looked back on his mossback campaign with a little grieved surprise that men could think it worth their self-respect to try to take such contemptible advantage of quibbles for the purpose of defeating what was certainly customary and fair, even if it might not be technically legal.  What the mossbacks thought about it we can safely leave to the crossroad stores.

In other respects Bob had the good sense to depend absolutely on his subordinates.

“How long do you think it ought to take to cut the rest of Eight?” he would ask Tally.

“About two weeks.”

Bob said nothing more, but next day he ruminated long in the snow-still forest at Eight, trying to apportion in his own mind the twelve days’ work.  If it did not go at a two weeks’ gait, he speedily wanted to know why.

When the sleighs failed to return up the ice road with expected regularity, Bob tramped down to the “banks” to see what the trouble was.  When he returned, he remarked casually to Jim Tally: 

“I fired Powell off the job as foreman, and put in Downy.”

“Why?” asked Tally.  “I put Powell in there because I thought he was an almighty good worker.”

“He is,” said Bob; “too good.  I found them a little short-handed down there, and getting discouraged.  The sleighs were coming in on them faster than they could unload.  The men couldn’t see how they were going to catch up, so they’d slacked down a little, which made it worse.  Powell had his jacket off and was working like the devil with a canthook.  He does about the quickest and hardest yank with a canthook I ever saw,” mused Bob.