He beckoned to the dog, threw a rope around Teddy’s neck and fastened it to the railing, thus making sure that he would not escape, and, followed by the dog, stepped over the plank to the ledge, from which he passed to the bottom of the canyon. The morning was sharp with frost, but the atmosphere was clear as crystal. It was like looking into a calm sea of blue, transparent glass to look up at the sky bending over the valley of the Columbia. The breath of the cedars was sweet to the nostrils of the boy, and the songs of the birds were pleasant things to hear.
“This beats Clark street!” Alex thought, moving about in the canyon in quest of a fallen cedar tree of a size suitable for canoe-making.
A green tree would take too long to fashion into a boat, and one too long on the ground would rot too soon, so he hunted for a long time before he came upon just what he sought.
An hour later, when Clay, missing the boy and the dog, followed the plank to the ledge and then a column of smoke to the interior of the canyon, he found Alex sitting on a log watching a serpent of flame running along the upper surface of a fallen cedar tree. The boy had made a trench along the top of the log and poured kerosene into it. Then he had set fire to the oil, and the tree trunk was gradually burning out in the middle. A pail of water sat on the ground near the boy, and as Clay watched he saw him arise and wet the edges of the trench, so that only the center of the log would burn. The flames, reinforced now by dry limbs gathered from the thicket, were already deep down into the heart of the long log. Clay’s approach was announced by the dog, and Alex looked up with a curious look of perplexity on his freckled face.
“What are you doing, kid?” Clay asked, looking about.
“Can’t you see,” replied the boy, shrugging his shoulders, “that I’m putting the roof on this new ten-story building? What do you think I’m doing? Even Captain Joe knows that, don’t you, doggie?”
The dog said he did, in his own way, and Clay sat down by the side of the log.
“Somehow,” he said, “it is perfectly natural for people to ask foolish questions. I knew that you were making a canoe, Indian fashion, yet I asked that question. Why didn’t you let me help you? You’ll have a long job if you wait for that whole log to bum out, and you’ll have a long canoe, too.”