turdy soul that seldom leaned and
never thought of clinging. She could laugh, a deep-throated chuckling
laugh, and sometimes, quite unexpectedly, she could go about the house
singing. And if now and then she rebelled with a sudden, furious
resentment against the long night that shut her in, that, as she said
herself, was just like a small black cloud passing swiftly across the
face of the sun.

Hollister began at the bottom of the chute, as he was beginning at the
bottom of his fortune, to build up again. Where it was broken he
repaired it. Where it had collapsed under the weight of snow or of
fallen trees he put in a new section. His hands grew calloused and the
muscles of his back and shoulders grew tough with swinging an axe,
lugging and lifting heavy poles. The sun burned the scar-tissue of his
face to a brown like that on the faces of his two men, who were piling
the cut cedar in long ricks among the green timber while he got the
chute ready to slide the red, pungent-smelling blocks downhill.

Sometimes, on a clear still day when he was at the house, he would
hear old Bill Hayes' voice far off in the woods, very faint in the
distance, shrilling the fallers' warning, "_Timb-r-r-r_." Close on
that he would hear a thud that sent tremors running through the earth,
and there would follow the echo of crashing boughs all along the
slope. Once he said lightly to Doris:

"Every time one of those big trees goes down like that it means a
hundred dollars' worth of timber on the ground."

And she laughed back:

"We make money when cedar goes up, and we make money when cedar comes
down. Very nice."

May passed and June came to an end; with it Hollister also came to the
end of his ready money. It had all gone into tools, food, wages, all
his available capital sunk in the venture. But the chute was ready to
run bolts. They poured down in a stream till the river surface within
the boom-sticks was a brick-colored jam that gave off a pleasant
aromatic smell.

Then Hollister and his two men cast off the boom, let the current
sweep it down to Carr's new shingle mill below the Big Bend. When the
bolts were tallied in, Hollister got a check. He sat with pad and
pencil figuring for half an hour after he came home, after his men had
each shouldered a fifty-pound pack of supplies and gone back up the
hill. He gave over figuring at last. The thing was profitable. More so
than he had reckoned. He got up and went into the kitchen wher