The sun burned the scar-tissue of his
face to a brown like that on the faces of his two men, who were piling
the cut cedar in long ricks among the green timber while he got the
chute ready to slide the red, pungent-smelling blocks downhill.
Sometimes, on a clear still day when he was at the house, he would
hear old Bill Hayes' voice far off in the woods, very faint in the
distance, shrilling the fallers' warning, "_Timb-r-r-r_." Close on
that he would hear a thud that sent tremors running through the earth,
and there would follow the echo of crashing boughs all along the
slope. Once he said lightly to Doris:
"Every time one of those big trees goes down like that it means a
hundred dollars' worth of timber on the ground."
And she laughed back:
"We make money when cedar goes up, and we make money when cedar comes
down. Very nice."
May passed and June came to an end; with it Hollister also came to the
end of his ready money. It had all gone into tools, food, wages, all
his available capital sunk in the venture. But the chute was ready to
run bolts.
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