But somehow to Bat the whole thing was unreal.  It meant nothing.  It could mean nothing.  He felt like a man walking towards a precipice he could not avoid.  He felt disaster, added disaster, was in the air and was closing in upon them.  He knew in his heart that this long, weary inspection, all the stuff they talked, all the future plans they were making for the mill was the merest excuse.  And he wondered when Standing would abandon it and reveal his actual purpose.  The man, he knew, was consumed by a voiceless grief.  His soul was tortured beyond endurance.  And there was that “yellow streak,” which Bat so feared.  When, when would it reveal itself?  How?

Now, at last, as they rested on the ledge overlooking the mill and the waters of the cove, he felt the moment of its revelation had arrived.  He was propped against the stump of a storm-thrown tamarack.  Standing was stretched prone upon the fallen trunk itself.  Neither had spoken for some minutes.  But the trend of thought was apparent in each.  Bat’s deep-set, troubled eyes were regarding the life and movement going on down at the mill, whose future was the greatest concern of his life.  Standing, too, was gazing out over the waters.  But his darkly brooding eyes were on the splendid house he had set up on the opposite hillside.  It was the home about which his every earthly hope had centred.  And even now, in his despair, it remained a magnet for his hopeless gaze.

Winter was already in the bite of the air and in the absence of the legions of flies and mosquitoes as well as in the chilly grey of the lapping waters below them.  It was doubtless, too, searching the heart of these men whose faces gave no indication of the sunlight of summer shining within.

“Bat!”

The lumberman turned sharply.  He spat out a stream of tobacco juice and waited.

“Bat, old friend, it’s no use.”  Standing had swung himself into a sitting posture.  He was leaning forward on the tree-trunk with his forearms folded across his knees.  “We’ve done a lot of talk, and we’ve searched these forests good.  And it’s all no use.  None at all.  There’s going to be no penstocks set up this side of the water next year—­as far as I’m concerned.  I’ve done.  Finished.  Plumb finished.  I’m quitting.  Quitting it all.”

The lumberman ejected a masticated chew and took a fresh one.

“You see, old friend, I’ll go crazy if I stop around,” Standing went on.  “I’ve been hit a pretty desperate punch, and I haven’t the guts to stand up to it.  When it came I set my teeth.  I wanted to keep sane.  I reminded myself of all I owed to the folks working for us.  I thought of you.  And I tried to bolster myself with the schemes we had for beating the Skandinavians out of this country’s pulp-wood trade.  Yes, I tried.  God, how I tried!  But my guts are weak, and I know what lies ahead.  For nearly six weeks I’ve been working things out, and for a week I’ve been wondering how I should tell you.  I brought you here to tell you.