Gentle airs shook the last rain drops from leaf and bough.
The old peace settled on the valley. There was little to mark the ten
days of effort and noise and destruction except a charred patch on the
valley floor and a mile-wide streak that ran like a bar sinister
across the green shield of the slope south of the Big Bend. Even that
desolate path seemed an insignificant strip in the vast stretch of the
forest.
Hollister and his men went, after the rain, up across that ravaged
place, and when they came to the hollow where the great cedars and
lesser fir had stood solemn and orderly in brown-trunked ranks, the
rudest of the loggers grew silent, a little awed by the melancholy of
the place, the bleakness, the utter ruin. Where the good green forest
had been, there was nothing but ashes and blackened stubs, stretches
of bare rock and gravelly soil, an odor of charred wood. There was no
green blade, no living thing, in all that wide space, nothing but a
few gaunt trunks stark in the open; blasted, sterile trunks standing
like stripped masts on a derelict.
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