raiths across the shoulders of the
hills. From those high, cold levels, the warmth of day and the frosts
that gnawed in chill darkness started intermittent slides rumbling,
growling as they slipped swiftly down steep slopes, to end with a
crash at the bottom of the hill or in the depths of a gorge. But the
valley itself suffered no extremes of weather. The river did not
freeze. It fell to a low level, but not so low that Hollister ever
failed to shift his cedar bolts from chute mouth to mill. There was
seldom so much snow that his crew could not work. There was growing
an appreciable hole in the heart of his timber limit. In another year
there would be nothing left of those great cedars that were ancient
when the first white man crossed the Rockies, nothing but a few
hundred stumps.

With the coming of midwinter a somnolent period seemed also to occur
in Hollister's affairs. One day succeeded another in placid routine.
The work went on with clock-like precision. It had passed beyond a
one-man struggle for economic foothold; it no longer held for him the
feeling of a forlorn hope which he led against the forces of the
wilderness. It was like a ball which he had started rolling down hill.
It kept on, whether he tended it or not. If he chose to take his rifle
and go seeking venison, if he elected to sit by his fire reading a
book, the cedars fell, their brown trunks were sawn and split, the
bolts came sliding down the chute in reckonable, profitable
quantities, to the gain of himself and his men.

Mills remained, moody, working with that strange dynamic energy,
sparing of words except that now and then he would talk to Hollister
in brief jerky sentences, in a manner which implied much and revealed
nothing. Mills always seemed on the point of crying out some deep woe
that burned within him, of seeking relief in some outpouring of
speech,--but he never did. At the most he would fling out some cryptic
hint, bestow some malediction upon life in general. And he never
slackened the dizzy pace of his daily labor, except upon those few
occasions when from either Hollister or Lawanne he got a book that
held him. Then he would stop work and sit in the bunk house and read
till the last page was turned. But mostly he cut and piled cedar as if
he tried to drown out in the sweat of his body whatever fever burned
within.

Hollister observed that Mills no longer had much traffic with the
Blands. For weeks at a time he did not leave th