“How’s everything?” Mills asked.  “You’ve made quite a hole here since I left.  Can I go to work again?”

“Sure,” Hollister replied.  “This summer will just about clean up the cedar here.  You may as well help it along, if you want to work.”

“It isn’t a case of wanting to.  I’ve got to,” Mills said under his breath.  Already he was at his old trick of absent staring into space, while his fingers twisted tobacco and paper into a cigarette.  “I’d go crazy loafing.  I’ve been trying that.  I’ve been to Alaska and to Oregon, and blew most of the stake I made here in riotous living.”  He curled his lip disdainfully.  “It’s no good.  Might as well be here as anywhere.  So I came back—­like the cat.”

He fell silent again, looking through the trees out over the stone rim under which Bland’s house stood by the river.  He sat there beside Hollister until the bolt gang, moving out of the bunk house to work, saw and hailed him.  He answered briefly.  Then he rose without another word to Hollister and carried in his pack.  Hollister saw him go about selecting tools, shoulder them and walk away to work in the timber.

That night Hollister wakened out of a sound sleep to sniff the air that streamed in through his open windows.  It was heavy with the pungent odor of smoke.  He rose and looked out.  The silence of night lay on the valley, over the dense forest across the river, upon the fir-swathed southern slope.  No leaf stirred.  Nothing moved.  It was still as death.  And in this hushed blackness—­lightened only by a pale streak in the north and east that was the reflection of snowy mountain crests standing stark against the sky line—­this smoky wraith crept along the valley floor.  No red glow greeted Hollister’s sight.  There was nothing but the smell of burning wood, that acrid, warm, heavy odor of smoke, the invisible herald of fire.  It might be over the next ridge.  It might be in the mouth of the valley.  It might be thirty miles distant.  He went back to bed, to lie with that taint of smoke in his nostrils, thinking of Doris and the boy, of himself, of Charlie Mills, of Myra, of Archie Lawanne.  He saw ghosts in that dusky chamber, ghosts of other days, and trooping on the heels of these came apparitions of a muddled future,—­until he fell asleep again, to be awakened at last by a hammering on his door.

The light of a flash-lamp revealed a logger from the Carr settlement below.  The smoke was rolling in billows when Hollister stepped outside.  Down toward the Inlet’s head there was a red flare in the sky.

“We got to get everybody out to fight that,” the man said.  “She started in the mouth of the river last night.  If we don’t check it and the wind turns right, it’ll clean the whole valley.  We sent a man to pull your crew off the hill.”

In the growing dawn, Hollister and the logger went down through woods thick with smoke.  They routed Lawanne out of his cabin, and he joined them eagerly.  He had never seen a forest fire.  What bore upon the woodsmen chiefly as a malignant, destructive force affected Lawanne as something that promised adventure, as a spectacle which aroused his wonder, his curious interest in vast, elemental forces unleashed.  They stopped at Bland’s and pressed him into service.