"You mean you'd like a fishing trip as an excuse to go back north, don't you, Dexter?" Caleb badgered him.
Allison was smiling blandly, for Caleb's joke over his round-about methods was an old, old joke, when Stephen O'Mara spoke.
"It's goin' to rain," said the boy.
Allison turned toward him, his eyes again quizzical.
"I suppose so," he admitted. "In the general course of things it'll come, no doubt, but——"
The boy interrupted him, shaking his head.
"It's goin' to come before mornin'," he stated inflectionlessly, "and it's comin' to stay fer a spell, too!"
And Allison did not try to hide his broad grin of amusement.
"You think so, do you, sonny?" he dismissed the matter not unkindly. "Well, at that, your guess when it comes to the weather, is about as good as the next man's."
Once more the boy shook his head.
"I ain't guessin'," he finished unabashed. "Ner I ain't thinkin' it will. It'll jest be rainin', come sun-up, and it'll be good for 'til Wednesday, fer sure!"
Caleb, watching the boy's face, was on the point of offering to wager two bits with Allison that the prophecy held good, but Sarah's well-known attitude toward the vice of gambling checked him in the rash offer. Besides, he wondered how he could make sound anything but foolish an offer to back the certainty of a weather forecast which was based upon nothing but the unassuming and quiet finality of the prophet.
Barbara Allison insisted upon joining the excursion down to the mill that morning; she developed a sudden and unshakable resolve to be one of the party, and after his remonstrances had finally brought stormy tears to her eyes, Allison surrendered in perplexity to her whim.
"All right, then," he gave in. "If you want to come as much as all that, but—but you—now run along, then, with Stephen."
On the way down the hill he voiced his perplexity to Caleb.
"When it comes to dealing with men," he said, "I pride myself upon being able to go back, rather incisively, to first motives. But the other sex is beyond me! She's always turned up her dainty nose at the noise and dirt before, and—and now she's ready to cry because I suggest that she wait with Miss Sarah until we return!"
Caleb's eyes rested upon the oddly matched little couple ahead in the road. The boy was carrying his battered hat in his hand, but Barbara walked with small head up, without a single glance for her escort. Caleb, noting that Steve's head was forward-thrust, knew that his eyes must be fastened hungrily upon the town in the valley; and he understood the reason for the disdainful tilt of the little girl's chin. For even at the age of ten Barbara Allison was not accustomed to inattention. Caleb smiled, rather covertly for him.
"I never knew but one woman whose motives were absolutely transparent," he mused. "And she—she was the most uninteresting, unsuccessful female person I ever did know."
As Allison had promised they found McLean, the white-haired mill superintendent, only too eager at the prospect of an audience for one of his voluble tours of the premises. But when Caleb had explained the main errand upon which they had come, after a long, keen scrutiny of the boy's face, the burly river-man led the way, without a word, to a wheezing old two-wheeler in the piling yard.
"So you'll be wantin' to take a spin in one av me ingines, is it?" he asked then. And, after a moment: "An' do you think you'll be able to hang on, whin she gets to r-rollin'?"
Steve's eyes were like bits of polished steel, so bright they were. It was a struggle for him to take them, even for a moment, from the engine before him.
"I cal'late I kin," he quavered.
"Well, thin, we'll see." McLean looked up and winked at the engineer in the diminutive cab. "It's car-reful you'll be, Misther engineer," he cautioned, "an' watch your steerin' on the cur-rves!"
He leaned over to lift the boy to the running-board, but Steve, with one foot upraised, hung back. He faced toward Caleb and, without a glance in the girl's direction, said:
"Mebby she—mebby she'd like to go, too?"
Barbara Allison, chin lifted a little higher, half wheeled and slipped her hand within that of her father.
"Thank you, but I don't care to," she refused.
Steve caught the little toss of her head from the corner of his eye, and his face went pink. Without another word he clambered up beside the driver and the engine rolled out of the yard and went clanking down the uneven, crooked track, leaving a dissolving trail of steam behind. When it returned the little face at the cab window was tense and somewhat pale beneath its tan, but the hand upon the throttle beside the engineer's lay steady as a little pine knot.
"Well, an' what do you think av her?" McLean demanded with an assumption of anxiety as the boy dropped to the ground.
Steve turned and patted the footboard with a proprietary hand. As grave of mien as his questioner he bobbed his head.
"She—she certainly kin git up and step," he volunteered. And then, cocking his head judiciously: "I'll hev to be a-gittin' me one of them fer myself, some day!"
McLean chuckled—he chuckled in deep delight within his white whiskers—and led the way to the mills. But once there the amusement in his eyes rapidly deepened to amazement, for there were few steps in the processes upon which the boy could not talk as fluently and technically as did the mill boss himself. And he knew timber; knew it with the same infallibility which had, even in McLean, always seemed to border upon the uncanny.
It was Allison himself who first called attention to an unsawed log which was being discarded.
"That looks like too good a stick to be wasted, doesn't it, McLean?" he asked.
Before McLean could answer the boy spat gravely into a pile of sawdust, his piping voice rising above the shrill scream of the saws.
"She's holler," he stated succintly. "Dry rotten above the stub!"
And when Allison raised his brows, interrogatively, McLean dropped one hand upon the boy's shoulder, a bit of pride in the gesture.
"Holler she is," he agreed, and he added: "An' I'll be afther knowin' where to find a riverman av the old school, I'm thinkin', some day whin the need arises!"
A man came hunting for McLean at that moment with news that the tram which carried the logs up from the basin to the saws needed his attention. They followed him out, Steve hard at his heels, and Barbara Allison, lips pouted, tight to her father's side. After a brief examination of the trouble McLean gave a half dozen hurried orders; then turned to the boy beside him and jerked one thumb over his shoulder.
"Run down to the smithy shop, lad," he directed, "an' tell the smith that I'll be wantin' a strip av str-rap iron, two feet in lingth, av quarter inch stuff—and three-quarters av an inch wide."
The boy was off like a deer and back again in a twinkling, empty-handed, but with an astounding bit of news.
"The blacksmith says he ain't got no—no iron three-quarters of an inch wide," he said, and the words were broken by his panting breaths. "But he says he's got plenty that's six-eighths. Shall I—shall I git some o' that?"
He waited the word, poised to go.
McLean had been kneeling upon the saw-dust strewn ground. Now he rose and stood, feet apart, gazing down into that face, afire with eagerness, uplifted to his. Quiet endured for a long time, and then, at a chuckle from Allison, Steve wheeled—he wheeled just in time to see Barbara Allison's brows arch and her lips curl in a queer little smile. And suddenly Allison burst into a loud guffaw.
Caleb had never seen a change so swift as that which came over the boy's face.