II

The week’s hard physical toil was unrelieved.  After Bob and Jack Pollock had driven the last staple in the last strand of barbed wire, they turned their horses into the new pasture.  The animals, overjoyed to get free of the picket ropes that had heretofore confined them, took long, satisfying rolls in the sandy corner, and then went eagerly to cropping at the green feed.  Bob, leaning on the gate, with the rope still in his hand, experienced a glow of personal achievement greater than any he remembered to have felt since, as a small boy, he had unaided reasoned out the problem of clear impression on his toy printing press.  He recognized this as illogical, for he had, in all modesty, achieved affairs of some importance.  Nevertheless, the sight of his own animal enjoying its liberty in an enclosure created by his own two hands pleased him to the core.  He grinned in appreciation of Elliott’s humorous parody on the sentimental slogan of the schools—­“to make two cedar posts grow where none grew before.”  There was, after all, a rather especial satisfaction in that principle.

It next became necessary, he found, that the roof over the new office at headquarters should receive a stain that would protect it against the weather.  He acquired a flat brush, a little seat with spikes in its supports, and a can of stain whose base seemed to be a very evil-smelling fish oil.  Here all day long he clung, daubing on the stain.  When one shingle was done, another awaited his attention, over and over, in unvarying monotony.  It was the sort of job he had always loathed, but he stuck to it cheerfully, driving his brush deep in the cracks in order that no crevice might remain for the entrance of the insidious principle of decay.  Casting about in his leisure there for the reason of his patience, he discovered it in just that; he was now at no task to be got through with, to be made way with; he was engaged in a job that was to be permanent.  Unless he did it right, it would not be permanent.

Below him the life of headquarters went on.  He saw it all, and heard it all, for every scrap of conversation rose to him from within the office.  He was amazed at the diversity of interests and the complexity of problems that came there for attention.

“Look here, Mr. Thorne,” said one of the rangers, “this Use Book says that a settler has a right to graze ten head of stock actually in use free of grazing charge.  Now there’s Brown up at the north end.  He runs a little dairy business, and has about a hundred head of cattle up.  He claims we ought not to charge him for ten head of them because they’re all ‘actually in use.’  How about it?”

Thorne explained that the exemption did not apply to commercial uses and that Brown must pay for all.  He qualified the statement by saying that this was the latest interpretation of which he had heard.