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 the bolt camp except to come down to Hollister’s house.

Lawanne seemed to be a favored guest now, at Bland’s.  Lawanne worked upon his book, but by fits and starts, working when he did work with a feverish concentration.  He had a Chinese boy for house-servant.  He might be found at noon or at midnight sprawled in a chair beside a pot-bellied stove, scrawling in an ungainly hand across sheets of yellow paper.  He had no set hours for work.  When he did work, when he had the vision and the fit was on and words came easily, chance callers met with scant courtesy.  But he had great stores of time to spare, for all that.  Some of it he spent at Bland’s, waging an interminable contest at cribbage with Bland, coming up now and then with the Blands to spend an evening at Hollister’s.