tched battles at Homestead, regular wholesale head-breaker
he was, held up the suckers for a few hundred million, and now he goes
around dribbling it back to them. Funny? I leave it to you."

He rolled a cigarette and watched her half curiously, half amusedly.
His replies and harsh generalizations of a harsh school were
disconcerting, and she came back to her earlier position.

"I can't argue with you, and you know that. No matter how right a
woman is, men have such a way about them well, what they say sounds
most convincing, and yet the woman is still certain they are wrong.
But there is one thing--the creative joy. Call it gambling if you
will, but just the same it seems to me more satisfying to create
something, make something, than just to roll dice out of a dice-box all
day long. Why, sometimes, for exercise, or when I've got to pay
fifteen dollars for coal, I curry Mab and give her a whole half hour's
brushing. And when I see her coat clean and shining and satiny, I feel
a satisfaction in what I've done. So it must be with the man who
builds a house or plants a tree. He can look at it. He made it. It's
his handiwork. Even if somebody like you comes along and takes his
tree away from him, still it is there, and still did he make it. You
can't rob him of that, Mr. Harnish, with all your millions. It's the
creative joy, and it's a higher joy than mere gambling. Haven't you
ever made things yourself--a log cabin up in the Yukon, or a canoe, or
raft, or something? And don't you remember how satisfied you were, how
good you felt, while you were doing it and after you had it done?"

While she spoke his memory was busy with the associations she recalled.
He saw the deserted flat on the river bank by the Klondike, and he saw
the log cabins and warehouses spring up, and all the log structures he
had built, and his sawmills working night and day on three shifts.

"Why, dog-gone it, Miss Mason, you're right--in a way. I've built
hundreds of houses up there, and I remember I was proud and glad to see
them go up. I'm proud now, when I remember them. And there was
Ophir--the most God-forsaken moose-pasture of a creek you ever laid
eyes on. I made that into the big Ophir. Why, I ran the water in there
from the Rinkabilly, eighty miles away. They all said I couldn't, but
I did it, and I did it by myself. The dam and the flume cost me four
million. But you should have seen that Ophir--power plants, electric
lig