“It has happened before,” said somebody, and there was silence for a space.  The men had spent the best years of their life hewing the clearings that grew so slowly farther into the virgin forest, faring sparingly, and only quitting that herculean toil to earn sufficient dollars railroad building or working at the mines to feed them when they continued it again.  They had sown the best that was in them of mind and body, giving all they had, courage that never faltered, as well as the ceaseless effort of over-strained muscle, and as yet their fee was but the right to hope and toil.  And now, they knew, it was once more possible that the full-fleshed taxer of other men’s labours would sweep what was theirs into his garner.

“Yes,” said Alton.  “And what has happened before will happen again—­unless you stir round and stop it.  That’s the only use in remembering things.  Standing alone, Hallam and his crowd will squeeze you out one by one; standing fast together for what is your own, you’re fit to choke off anybody, and what I’ve called you here for is to see whether we can’t fix up a Co-operative Company!”

A man stood up with a light in his eyes.  “Then you’ve hit the thing plumb where you wanted,” he said.  “Whose standing in with Alton of Somasco, boys?”

There was a roar this time, and then a silence as if the assembly felt that they had done an unseemly thing, but it was evident that they were all of them ready.

“I figure you’ve got a programme?” said somebody.

“I have,” said Alton.  “I’ll have a bigger one by and by, but in the meanwhile it includes the selling of timber in place of destroying it, and a doubling right off of the Somasco mill.  It also takes in a gristmill, the recording of more timber rights, and most of you getting in on the ground floor of a new silver mine.  There’s to be an office down in Vancouver, and a desiccated fruit store, and the best men we can get hold of to run them.  Now sit still while I read what might do for a scheme.”

They sat very still, and even Seaforth, who knew his comrade, wondered a little, for that scheme, while crude in one or two directions, was eminently workable.  It provided for a pro rata division of profits and partition of expenses, while each man would retain the control of his own holding, and those who listened nodded now and then as they noted the efficiency of some portion of the plan of co-operation.

“Now,” said Alton quietly, laying down the paper.  “That’s my notion.  I’m willing to listen if any man can bring out a better.”

There was a silence until Horton rose up at the foot of the table, glass in hand.  “I,” he said simply, “don’t think he can.  Every dollar I can raise is going in, and we’re all standing in with Alton.  Here’s the Somasco Consolidated, and to ——­ with Hallam.”

There was a roar louder than the first one, a clink of glasses, and forgetting their reticence for once the big bronzed men thronged about the one who smiled at them from the head of the table.