As
literally as his hired woodsmen, he earned his bread in the sweat of
his brow, spurred on by a vision of what he sought to create,--a home
and so much comfort as he could grasp for himself and a woman.
The house arose as if by magic,--the simple magic of stout arms and
skilled hands working with axe and saw and iron wedges. One of
Hollister's men was a lean, saturnine logger, past fifty, whose life
had been spent in the woods of the Pacific Coast. There was no trick
of the axe Hayes had not mastered, and he could perform miracles of
shaping raw wood with neat joints and smooth surfaces.
Two weeks from the day Hayes struck his axe blade into the brown trunk
of a five-foot cedar and said laconically, "She'll do", that ancient
tree had been transformed into timbers, into boards that flaked off
smooth and straight under iron wedges, into neat shakes for a
rain-tight roof, and was assembled into a two-roomed cabin. This was
furnished with chairs and tables and shelves, hewn out of the raw
stuff of the forest. It stood in the middle of a patch of earth
cleared of fallen logs and thicket.
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