lly.

"People do, you know. But I hardly think we shall. Not for a year or
two, anyway. Not till the house gets full of babies and the stale odor
of uneventful, routine, domestic life. Then _you_ may."

"Huh," he grunted derisively, "catch me. I know what I want and what
contents me. We'll beat the game handily; and we'll beat it together.

"Why, good Lord," he cried sharply, "what would be the good of all
this effort, only for you? Where would be the fun of working and
planning and anticipating things? Nearly every man, I believe," he
concluded thoughtfully, "keeps his gait because of some woman. There
is always the shadow of a woman over him, the picture of some
woman--past, present, or future, to egg him on to this or that."

"To keep him," Doris laughed, "in the condition a poet once described
as:

'This fevered flesh that goes on groping, wailing
Toward the gloom.'"

They both laughed. They felt no gloom. The very implication of gloom,
of fevered flesh, was remote from that which they had won together.

When Hollister went up to the works in the morning, he found Mills
humped on a box beside the fireplace in the old cabin, reading "The
Man Who Couldn't Die." At noon he was gone somewhere. Over the noon
meal in the split-cedar mess-house, the other bolt cutters spoke
derisively of the man who laid off work for half a day to read a book.
That was beyond their comprehension.

But Hollister thought he understood.

Later in the afternoon, as he came down the hill, he looked from the
vantage of height and saw Lawanne's winter quarters already taking
form on the river bank, midway between his own place and Bland's. It
grew to completion rapidly in the next few days, taking on at last a
shake roof of hand-dressed cedar to keep out the cold rains that now
began to beat down, the forerunner of that interminable downpour which
deluges the British Columbia coast from November to April, the
torrential weeping of the skies upon a porous soil which nourishes
vast forests of enormous trees, jungles of undergrowth tropical in its
density, in its variety of shrub and fern.

For a month after that a lull seemed to come upon the slow march of
events towards some unknown destiny,--of which Hollister nursed a
strange prescience that now rose strong in him and again grew so
tenuous that he would smile at it for a fancy. Yet in that month there
was no slack in the routine of affairs. The machinery of Carr's mill
r