r exploration among the tree tops, scolding and chattering as
they went. Gentle airs shook the last rain drops from leaf and bough.
The old peace settled on the valley. There was little to mark the ten
days of effort and noise and destruction except a charred patch on the
valley floor and a mile-wide streak that ran like a bar sinister
across the green shield of the slope south of the Big Bend. Even that
desolate path seemed an insignificant strip in the vast stretch of the
forest.

Hollister and his men went, after the rain, up across that ravaged
place, and when they came to the hollow where the great cedars and
lesser fir had stood solemn and orderly in brown-trunked ranks, the
rudest of the loggers grew silent, a little awed by the melancholy of
the place, the bleakness, the utter ruin. Where the good green forest
had been, there was nothing but ashes and blackened stubs, stretches
of bare rock and gravelly soil, an odor of charred wood. There was no
green blade, no living thing, in all that wide space, nothing but a
few gaunt trunks stark in the open; blasted, sterile trunks standing
like stripped masts on a derelict.

There was nothing left of the buildings except a pile of stone which
had been the fireplace in the log house, and a little to one side the
rusty, red skeleton of the mess-house stove. They looked about
curiously for a few minutes and went back to the valley.

At the house Hollister paid them off. They went their way down to the
steamer landing, eager for town after a long stretch in the woods. The
fire was only an exciting incident to them. There were other camps,
other jobs.

It was not even an exciting incident to Hollister. Except for a little
sadness at sight of that desolation where there had been so much
beauty, he had neither been uplifted nor cast down. He had been
unmoved by the spectacular phases of the fire and he was still
indifferent, even to the material loss it had inflicted on him. He was
not ruined. He had the means to acquire more timber if it should be
necessary. But even if he had been ruined, it is doubtful if that fact
would have weighed heavily upon him. He was too keenly aware of a
matter more vital to him than timber or money,--a matter in which
neither his money nor his timber counted one way or the other, and in
which the human equation was everything.

The steamer that took out his men brought in a letter from his wife,
which Lawanne sent up by his Chinese boy. He ha