'll be here long after we're gone. What a
helpless, crawling, puny insect man is, anyway. A squirrel on his
wheel in a cage."

It was a protesting acceptance of a stark philosophy, Hollister
thought, a cry against some weight that bore him down, the momentary
revealing of some conflict in which Mills foresaw defeat, or had
already suffered defeat. It was a statement wrung out of him,
requiring no comment, for he at once resumed the steady pull on the
six-foot, cross-cut saw.

"Why don't you take it easier?" Hollister said to him. "You work as if
the devil was driving you."

Mills smiled.

"The only devil that drives me," he said, "is the devil inside me.

"Besides," he continued, between strokes of the saw, "I want to make a
stake and get to hell out of here."

Hollister did not press him for reasons. Mills did work as if the
devil drove him, and in his quiescent moments an air of melancholy
clouded his dark face as if physical passivity left him a prey to some
inescapable inner gloom.

All about him, then, Hollister perceived strong undercurrents of life
flowing sometimes in the open, sometimes underground: Charlie Mills
and Myra Bland touched by that universal passion which has brought
happiness and pain, dizzy heights of ecstasy and deep abysses of
despair to men and women since the beginning of time; Lawanne
apparently succumbing to the same malady that touched Mills; Bland
moving in the foreground, impassive, stolidly secure in the possession
of this desired woman. And all of them bowed before and struggling
under economic forces which they did not understand, working and
planning, according to their lights, to fulfill the law of their
being, seeking through the means at hand to secure the means of
livelihood in obedience to the universal will to live, the human
desire to lay firm hold of life, liberty, such happiness as could be
grasped.

Hollister would sit in the evening on the low stoop before his cabin
and Doris would sit beside him with her hand on his knee. A spirit of
drowsy content would rest upon them. Hollister's eyes would see the
river, gray now with the glacial discharge, slipping quietly along
between the fringes of alder and maple, backed by the deeper green of
the fir and cedar and groves of enormous spruce. His wife's ears drank
in the whispering of the stream, the rumbling of distant waterfalls,
and her warm body would press against him with an infinite suggestion
of delight. At such