work.
Inexorably he held himself to the task. He filled his mind full of
lumbering. The millions along the bank on section nine must be cut and
travoyed directly to the rollways. It was a shame that the necessity
should arise. From section nine Thorpe had hoped to lighten the expenses
when finally he should begin operations on the distant and inaccessible
headwaters of French Creek. Now there was no help for it. The instant
necessity was to get thirty millions of pine logs down the river before
Wallace Carpenter's notes came due. Every other consideration had to
yield before that. Fifteen millions more could be cut on seventeen,
nineteen, and eleven,--regions hitherto practically untouched,--by the
men in the four camps inland. Camp One and Camp Three could attend to
section nine.

These were details to which Thorpe applied his mind. As he pushed
through the sun-flecked forest, laying out his roads, placing his travoy
trails, spying the difficulties that might supervene to mar the fair
face of honest labor, he had always this thought before him,--that he
must apply his mind. By an effort, a tremendous effort, he succeeded in
doing so. The effort left him limp. He found himself often standing,
or moving gently, his eyes staring sightless, his mind cradled on vague
misty clouds of absolute inaction, his will chained so softly and yet so
firmly that he felt no strength and hardly the desire to break from the
dream that lulled him. Then he was conscious of the physical warmth
of the sun, the faint sweet woods smells, the soothing caress of the
breeze, the sleepy cicada-like note of the pine creeper. Through his
half-closed lashes the tangled sun-beams made soft-tinted rainbows. He
wanted nothing so much as to sit on the pine needles there in the
golden flood of radiance, and dream--dream on--vaguely, comfortably,
sweetly--dream of the summer--

Thorpe, with a mighty and impatient effort, snapped the silken cords
asunder.

"Lord, Lord!" he cried impatiently. "What's coming to me? I must be a
little off my feed!"

And he hurried rapidly to his duties. After an hour of the hardest
concentration he had ever been required to bestow on a trivial subject,
he again unconsciously sank by degrees into the old apathy.

"Glad it isn't the busy season!" he commented to himself. "Here, I must
quit this! Guess it's the warm weather. I'll get down to the mill for a
day or two."

There he found himself incapable of even the most pet