Barney hewed wood in the midst of this white tangle of trees and bushes and vines, which were like a wild, dumb multitude of death-things pressing ever against him, trying to crowd him away.  When he hit them as he passed, they swung back in his face with a semblance of life.  If a squirrel chattered and leaped between some white boughs, he started as if some dead thing had come to life, for it seemed like the voice and motion of death rather than of life.

Half a mile away at the right other wood-cutters were at work.  When the wind was the right way he could now and then hear the strokes of their axes and a shout.  Often as he worked alone, swinging his axe steadily with his breath in a white cloud before his face, he amused himself miserably—­as one might with a bitter sweetmeat—­with his old dreams.

He had no dreams in the present; they all belonged to the past, and he dreamed them over as one sings over old songs.  Sometimes it seemed quite possible that they still belonged to his life, and might still come true.

Then he would hear a hoarse shout through the still air from the other side of the swamp, and he would know suddenly that Charlotte would never wait in his home yonder, while he worked, and welcome him home at night.

The other wood-cutters had families.  They had to pass his lot on their way out to the open road.  Barney would either retreat farther among the snowy thickets, or else work with such fury that he could seem not to see them as they filed past.

Often he did not go home at noon, and ate nothing from morn until night.  He cut wood many days that winter when the other men thought the weather too severe and sat huddled over their fires in their homes, shoving their chairs this and that way at their wives’ commands, or else formed chewing and gossiping rings within the glowing radius of the red-hot store stove.

“See Barney Thayer goin’ cross lots with his axe as I come by,” one said to another, rolling the tobacco well back into his grizzled cheek.

“Works as if he was possessed,” was the reply, in a half-inarticulate, gruff murmur.

“Well, he can if he wants to,” said still another.  “I ain’t goin’ to work out-doors in any such weather as this for nobody, not if I know it, an’ I’ve got a wife an’ eight children, an’ he ain’t got nobody.”  And the man cast defiant eyes at the great store-windows, dim with thick blue sheaves of frost.

On a day like that Barney seemed to be hewing asunder not only the sturdy fibres of oak and hemlock, but the terrible sinews of frost and winter, and many a tree seemed to rear itself over him threatening stiffly like an old man of death.  Only by fierce contest, as it were, could he keep himself alive, but he had a certain delight in working in the swamp during those awful arctic days.  The sense that he could still fight and conquer something, were it only the simple destructive force of nature, aroused in him new self-respect.