Then _you_ may."
"Huh," he grunted derisively, "catch me. I know what I want and what
contents me. We'll beat the game handily; and we'll beat it together.
"Why, good Lord," he cried sharply, "what would be the good of all
this effort, only for you? Where would be the fun of working and
planning and anticipating things? Nearly every man, I believe," he
concluded thoughtfully, "keeps his gait because of some woman. There
is always the shadow of a woman over him, the picture of some
woman--past, present, or future, to egg him on to this or that."
"To keep him," Doris laughed, "in the condition a poet once described
as:
'This fevered flesh that goes on groping, wailing
Toward the gloom.'"
They both laughed. They felt no gloom. The very implication of gloom,
of fevered flesh, was remote from that which they had won together.
When Hollister went up to the works in the morning, he found Mills
humped on a box beside the fireplace in the old cabin, reading "The
Man Who Couldn't Die." At noon he was gone somewhere. Over the noon
meal in the split-cedar mess-house, the other bolt cutters spoke
derisively of the man who laid off work for half a day to read a book.
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