One day succeeded another in placid routine.
The work went on with clock-like precision. It had passed beyond a
one-man struggle for economic foothold; it no longer held for him the
feeling of a forlorn hope which he led against the forces of the
wilderness. It was like a ball which he had started rolling down hill.
It kept on, whether he tended it or not. If he chose to take his rifle
and go seeking venison, if he elected to sit by his fire reading a
book, the cedars fell, their brown trunks were sawn and split, the
bolts came sliding down the chute in reckonable, profitable
quantities, to the gain of himself and his men.
Mills remained, moody, working with that strange dynamic energy,
sparing of words except that now and then he would talk to Hollister
in brief jerky sentences, in a manner which implied much and revealed
nothing. Mills always seemed on the point of crying out some deep woe
that burned within him, of seeking relief in some outpouring of
speech,--but he never did. At the most he would fling out some cryptic
hint, bestow some malediction upon life in general.
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