red, sometimes with Ba'tiste singing lustily
beside him, sometimes alone. The task was a hard one; the snaking of
timber through the forest to the high-line roadway, there to be loaded
upon two-wheeled carts and dragged, by a slow, laborious, costly process,
to the mill. For every log that he sent to the saw in this wise, he knew
that Thayer was sending ten,--and at a tenth of the cost. But Houston
was fighting the last fight,--a fight that could not end until absolute,
utter failure stood stark before him at the end of the road.

September became October with its rains, and its last flash of brilliant
coloring from the lower hills, and then whiteness. November had arrived,
bringing with it the first snow and turning the whole, great, already
desolate country into a desert of white.

It was cold now; the cook took on a new duty of the maintenance of hot
pails of bran mash and salt water for the relief of frozen hands. Heavy
gum-shoes, worn over lighter footgear and reaching with felt-padded
thickness far toward the knee, encased the feet. Hands numbed, in spite
of thick mittens; each week saw a new snowfall, bringing with it the
consequent thaws and the hardening of the surface. The snowshoe rabbit
made its appearance, tracking the shadowy, silent woods with great,
outlandish marks. The coyotes howled o' nights; now and then Houston, as
he worked, saw the tracks of a bear, or the bloody imprints of a mountain
lion, its paws cut by the icy crust of the snow as it trailed the elk or
deer. The world was a quiet thing, a white thing, a cold, unrelenting
thing, to be fought only by thick garments and snowshoes. But with it
all, it gave Houston and Ba'tiste a new enthusiasm. They at least could
get their logs to the mill now swiftly and with comparative ease.

Short, awkward-appearing sleds creaked and sang along the icy,
hard-packed road of snow, to approach the piles of logs snaked out of the
timber, to be loaded high beyond all seeming regard for gravitation or
consideration for the broad-backed, patient horses, to be secured at one
end by heavy chains leading to a patent binder which cinched them to the
sled, and started down the precipitous road toward the mill. Once in a
while Houston rode the sleds, merely for the thrill of it; for the
singing and crunching of the logs against the snow, the grinding of bark
against bark, the quick surge as the horses struck a sharp decline and
galloped down it, the driver