, if this project
continues to achieve success, it might blaze the way for a national
undertaking. We said that a country that was worth living in was worth
fighting for. We are liars and cheats if we do not make it so for those
who did our fighting."

"I wouldn't mind taking a hand in this game," Thompson said. "But the
war is still on. If that were over--well, yes, Toba Valley looks good to
me."

"You aren't out of it for good, then?"

Thompson shook his head.

Carr put his hand on Thompson's shoulder. "Ah, well," he said. "It won't
be long now. You'll be back. You can put on an aerial mail service for
us, as your first undertaking."

He chuckled, and they left their log and strolled back toward the house.

* * * * *

"Come and I'll show you what the valley looks like, Wes," Sophie said to
him, when they had finished dinner, and Carr had his nose buried in mail
just that evening arrived.

She led him a hundred yards upstream to where a footbridge slung upon
steel cables spanned the Toba, crossed that and a little flat on the
north side, and climbed up the flank of a slide-scarred hill until she
came out on a little plateau.

"Look," she waved her hand, panting a little from the steepness of the
climb.

Five hundred feet below, the valley of the Toba spread its timbered
greenness, through which looped in sweeping curves the steel-gray of the
river. In a great bend immediately beneath them lay the houses of the
settlement, facing upon the stream. Farther along were isolated
homesteads which he had not seen. Back of these spread little gardens,
and the green square of cultivated fields, and beyond in greater expanse
the stump-dotted land that was still in the making.

The smoke of the donkey-engines was vanished, fires grown cold with the
end of the day's work. But upriver and down the spoil of axe and saw lay
in red booms along the bunk. He could mark the place where he had stood
that afternoon and watched a puffing yarder bunt a string of forty-foot
logs into the booming-ground. He could see figures about in the gardens,
and the shrill voices and laughter of children echoed up to them on the
hill.

"It is a great view, and there is more in it than meets the eye,"
Thompson said. "Eh, little woman? The greatest war of all, the biggest
struggle. One that never ends. Man struggling to subdue his environment
to his needs."

Sophie smiled understandingly. She looked over the v